MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. (AP) — Juan Nicolas wants this time to be different.
The Bogotá, Colombia, native saw the scary scene two years ago during the Copa America final as thousands of ticketless fans breached the security gates at Hard Rock Stadium to watch Colombia face Argentina.
Colombia's soccer team will play Portugal on Saturday in a World Cup group stage match, returning to the stadium for the first time since that incident — this time with heightened security and multiple checkpoints.
“Now that we’re here, I feel a little pressure just to show myself better and like to show a better country to the world," said Nicolas, who said he was not at the match in 2024. "Colombia is new now. Colombia has new stuff to give to the world. We’re a different country, so now we have to show that.”
The crowd trouble began hours before the July 2024 match. Supporters — many of them wearing Colombia’s yellow and red colors — rushed the gates at the home stadium of the NFL's Miami Dolphins, leaving fans terrified and bloodied as security struggled to contain the rush.
Screams could be heard in the background of many videos circling social media, and posts showed some fans trying to climb through air vents to gain entry.
Questions were sparked on how to handle two more years of major soccer tournaments in the United States — the Club World Cup last year and this year's World Cup.
There was increased security last summer at the Club World Cup matches held in Miami, which served as a preview of the ticket-screening measures to expect on Saturday.
Fans must pass through three separate checkpoints that enclose the entire campus before getting close to the stadium, and parking passes are checked well before entry. Steel fencing is also set up around the perimeter.
“It’s been a layered approach that people have to go through,” said Andrew Giuliani, executive director of President Donald Trump’s World Cup task force, which is overseeing the tournament's multiagency security effort.
“We’re going to make sure that everybody is on their guard ready to go that day in particular,” Giuliani added, “just making sure that there are no issues. ... We’re leaning in on the 27th to make sure we can talk about the action that happened (on the pitch)."
Giuliani said there will be a “strong federal presence” both around the stadium and city on Saturday, declining to answer if that includes more than a typical match day. There have been three World Cup group matches in Miami so far. Each has seen a heavy police presence.
“I think we like showing up for our team, and some people take it a little bit too far," said Lucas Gaviria, a native of Manizales, Colombia, who attends Florida Atlantic University. “That has to do with our culture. We care about it too much, we have a ‘any means necessary’ type of thinking. ‘I need to see this game, even though I know I don’t have the money for it.’”
Saturday's match has been in high demand, both because of South Florida's large Colombian community and the draw of Portugal star Cristiano Ronaldo. Tickets on the resale site StubHub were listed from around $3,000 to more than $5,000.
“If you don’t have tickets, you shouldn’t be on site here,” Giuliani said in January, when he and other members of the task force visited the stadium during the College Football Playoff national championship. “It’s not like an American football game where there’s tailgating. This is very different. We want to make sure the security resources are here for those ticketed fans. If you’re not ticketed, you have fan festivals. You have other events in the Miami area where you can go and enjoy and be safe.”
Hard Rock Stadium — Miami Stadium is its name during the World Cup because of FIFA’s policies about sponsorship — has not commented because of its ongoing involvement in multiple lawsuits related to the Copa America final.
Those lawsuits, which list multiple defendants, claim — among other things — that the stadium and soccer officials didn’t have enough security present to handle such a crowd, lacked proper numbers of Spanish-speaking personnel working at the event and didn’t protect legitimate ticket holders “from foreseeable criminal activity.”
Ahead of Saturday's match, Colombia supporters said they hope that moment doesn't define them.
"There are a lot of great things that Colombia stands for," said Nadia Rodriguez, a Bogota, Colombia, native living in Miami. “Great coffee, beautiful landscapes, amazing songs, the soccer team. The darkness is in the past.”
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AP Sports Writer Tim Reynolds contributed to this report.
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Zach Pascuzzi is a student in the University of Georgia’s Carmical Sports Media Institute.
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