Cuban team announced for Volleyball Nations League

The Cuban National Team that will attend the VI Volleyball Nations League 2024 was announced this Thursday at a press conference held at the Cerro Pelado High Performance Athlete Training School.

Star Robertlandy Simon leads the 24-man team to the FIVB's most important annual event, whose preliminary round – from May 21 to June 23 – will close the Olympic qualification by the universal ranking.

Simón is joined by centre-backs Javier Concepción, José Israel Massó, Roamy Alonso and Alexis Wilson. The corner players chosen are Miguel Angel Lopez, Marlon Yant, Osniel Mergarejo, Julio Cesar Cardenas, Bryan Camino and Yusniel Gonzalez.

In the role of opposites were included Jesus Herrera, Michael Sanchez, Miguel David Gutierrez, Alejandro Miguel Gonzalez, Jose Miguel Gutierrez, Jose Carlos Romero and Carlos Charles.

Christian Thondike, Lyván Taboada, Adrián Goide and Julio Alberto Gómez are the nominated passers, and Yonder García and Alain Gorguet appear as liberos.

Technical director Jesús Cruz will be assisted by coaches Mario Izquierdo and Manuel de Jesús Espinosa. The group is completed by doctor Lenin Hernández, physiotherapist Eladio Vives and national volleyball commissioner Jorge Sosa, who will serve as head of the delegation.

Cuba only has options to attend the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in one team sport, volleyball. La Liga represents the last option to conquer one of the five places that remain to be determined.

Tokyo 2020 Olympic champions France are assured of their place as hosts. In addition, Germany and Brazil, one-two in the pre-Olympic tournament in Rio de Janeiro; Japan and the United States in a similar battle held in Japan; and Poland and Canada, which was hosted by China.

Cuba will debut in the League in Rio de Janeiro, from May 21 to 26, against Japan, Germany, Brazil and Iran, in that order. At the second venue, Ottawa, from 4 to 9 June, they will face Canada, Italy (world titleholder), France and the Netherlands. It will conclude in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, from 18 to 23 June, when they will face Bulgaria, Serbia, the home team, and Poland.

The Volleyball Nations League will expand to 18 teams per gender as of 2025 and the participants will no longer be divided into core and challenger teams.

No team will be relegated at the end of the VNL 2024 season, while the winners of the 2024 Volleyball Challenger Cup and the highest-placed teams in the FIVB Men’s and Women’s Volleyball World Ranking not yet qualified will join the VNL 2025 action.

As of the 2025 edition, the core and challenger team statuses will be abolished and the bottom-placed team in the competition’s final standings in each gender will be relegated, to be replaced by the respective highest-ranked team in the world for the following VNL season.

With the expanded number of participating teams, there will be a new structure of the Preliminary Phase schedule. What will remain the same as now is that each participating team will play 12 matches spread across three competition weeks. However, there will be three pools per week played at three different venues with six teams each. The number of competition days will be reduced from six to five per week. Russia won the first two editions and then Brazil, France and Poland were crowned, respectively.