Copa Merconorte

The Copa Merconorte (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkopa meɾkoˈnoɾte]) was an international football competition organized by CONMEBOL from 1998 to 2001 by clubs from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela and starting in 2000 clubs from the CONCACAF confederation were invited including Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States. The competition ran alongside the Copa Mercosur, which was based on the actual Mercosur economic bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, but the competition also included clubs from Chile.

Teams did not directly qualify for this competition. Instead, the aim was to generate profits through the television contracts by inviting the most marketable clubs from each country. Therefore, participation was based on invitation of individual clubs.

All four editions were won by Colombian clubs. Atlético Nacional won it on two occasions (1998 and 2000). All the finalists in the first three editions were Colombian. In the fourth edition, Emelec became the first and only non-Colombian club to reach the finals of the Copa Merconorte.

Both the Copa Merconorte and the Copa Mercosur were discontinued after the 2001 edition. A football competition to be called the Copa Pan-Americana would have replaced these two competitions for the 2002 season featuring clubs from both CONMEBOL and CONCACAF. That competition was first postponed, with plans to be played in 2003, then eventually cancelled. The Copa Pan-Americana would ultimately not come to fruition and that left the Copa Sudamericana as the successor of the Copa Merconorte and the Copa Mercosur. Instead, a CONMEBOL competition called the Copa Sudamericana was created and had its first edition in 2002, and that competition is still played to this day.