With less than two weeks until the Gold Cup kicks off, CONCACAF announced Monday night that Nicaragua had been kicked out of the tournament for fielding an ineligible player.
The confederation said the unnamed player participated in eight matches for Nicaragua, including matches in the 2022-23 Nations League.
Nicaragua was replaced by Trinidad and Tobago in Group A, with the Caribbean nation earning the right by being the highest second-place team overall from League B groups in the 2022-23 Nations League.
Trinidad and Tobago will join the United States, Jamaica and the winner of a playoff in Group A.
Additionally, Nicaragua has been relegated from League A of the 2023-24 Nations League, and will also be replaced by Trinidad and Tobago in that competition.
Though CONCACAF did not name the ineligible player who featured for Nicaragua, multiple reports have identified the player in question as Richard Rodríguez.
Rodríguez was born in Uruguay and moved to Nicaragua in 2018 when he signed for Real Estelí. He acquired Nicaraguan citizenship just a year later in 2019 and would begin playing for the national team shortly thereafter.
The forward played in World Cup qualifiers as well as Nations League games, but FIFA regulations state that an over-18 player who moves to a new country must live there for five consecutive years before they are eligible to play for their new national team.
That would only make Rodríguez eligible this year if he had lived in Nicaragua since 2018, but he even left Estelí in 2019 for a stint playing in Paraguay before returning to the Nicaragua side in 2020.
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