Gold Cup

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CONCACAF Gold Cup

The CONCACAF Gold Cup (Spanish: Copa de Oro de la CONCACAF) (French: Coupe D'or du CONCACAF) is the main association football competition of the men's national football teams governed by CONCACAF, determining the regional champion of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean.

The Gold Cup is held every two years. Prior to 2015, when the Gold Cup did not fall on the same year as the FIFA Confederations Cup, the winner, or highest placed team that is a member of both CONCACAF and FIFA, qualified for the next staging of that tournament. Beginning in 2015, the winners of two successive Gold Cups (the 2013 and 2015 editions in the first instance) will face each other in a playoff to determine the CONCACAF entrant to the next Confederations Cup. If the same team has won the Gold Cup on both relevant occasions, there will be no playoff and that team will automatically qualify for the Confederations Cup.

History

Championships prior to CONCACAF

2017 CONCACAF Gold Cup

The 2017 CONCACAF Gold Cup will be the 14th edition of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the biennial international men's football championship of the North, Central American and Caribbean region organised by CONCACAF. According to the FIFA International Match Calendar, the tournament is scheduled to be played between 9–30 July 2017. The hosts are yet to be confirmed.

The winner of this tournament will play against the winner of the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup in the 2019 CONCACAF Cup, a one-match play-off to determine CONCACAF's qualifier for the 2021 FIFA Confederations Cup. If the same team wins both the 2017 and 2019 Gold Cups, it automatically qualifiers for the Confederations Cup.

Teams

Assuming the same number of teams and qualifying format as 2015, a total of 12 teams will qualify for the tournament. Three berths are allocated to North America (Canada, Mexico and the United States), four to Central America (top four of the 2016 Copa Centroamericana), and four to the Caribbean (top four of the 2017 Caribbean Cup), and one to the winner of the play-off between the two fifth-placed teams of the Caribbean zone and the Central American zone.

United States

Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100

The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major territories and various possessions. The 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., are in central North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwestern part of North America and the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. At 3.8 million square miles (9.842 million km²) and with over 320 million people, the country is the world's third or fourth-largest by total area and the third most populous. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The geography and climate of the United States are also extremely diverse, and the country is home to a wide variety of wildlife.

Gold

Gold is a chemical element with symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79. In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements, and is solid under standard conditions. The metal therefore occurs often in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).

Gold's atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally in the universe. It is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis from the collision of two neutron stars and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed. Because the Earth was molten when it was just formed, almost all of the gold present in the early Earth probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore, most of the gold that is present today in the Earth's crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.