The United States will play host to the CONCACAF qualifying tournament for the 2016 Olympic Games later this year from Oct. 1-13, it was announced Thursday by CONCACAF.
The 2015 Olympic Qualifying Championship – an under-23 competition – will send two teams directly to the Olympic Football Tournament Rio 2016, with a third nation earning the right to face South American Olympic qualifying runner-up Colombia in a playoff for one additional spot to Rio.
This year's tournament will feature eight nations divided into two groups of four, with the top two finishers in each group after round-robin play advancing to the semifinals. Host venues and ticketing information for the competition will be announced in the near future.
The 2015 CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Championship will include host USA, as well as North American automatic qualifiers Canada and defending Olympic champions Mexico. Those three countries will be joined by three nations from the Central American region and two from the Caribbean, with qualifiers in those regions to be disputed in the coming months.
The CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Championship USA 2015 kicks off on Oct. 1, with group play continuing through Oct. 7. The final matchday for both groups, as well as the semifinal date, third-place match and the final, all fall within the FIFA match date window scheduled for Oct. 5-13, meaning all nations will be able to call on their top under-23 players worldwide for the decisive phase of the championship, should they choose to do so.
The final tournament schedule and kick-off times will be set following the qualifying tournaments in Central America and the Caribbean. The United States also hosted the previous CONCACAF Olympic Qualifying Championship, in 2012, when matches were hosted in Kansas City, Los Angeles and Nashville.
The US and Canada both failed to qualify from that tournament as Mexico and Honduras advanced to London 2012.
