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For the second year running, Major League Soccer will break with standard practice by sending only a portion of its teams to its federation’s domestic cup competition, the US Open Cup. But unlike last year, the move comes without significant uproar or repercussions from the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) which runs the tournament.
Tuesday’s Open Cup news was part of a larger announcement, detailing which MLS teams would be taking part in which tournaments outside the 2025 MLS regular season and playoffs. These tournaments include the US Open Cup, Concacaf Champions Cup (the confederation’s championship), Leagues Cup (MLS’s joint venture with Mexico’s Liga MX), and Canadian Championship (The Open Cup equivalent for Canada).
Historically, the Open Cup is not a tournament MLS teams have needed to qualify for. Until the 2024 season, every American MLS team was entered in the competition automatically, and by obligation. The USSF rulebook states that, for Division I leagues like MLS, “US-based teams must participate in all representative US Soccer [USSF] and CONCACAF competitions for which they are eligible.”
The Open Cup is one such tournament. To justify its non-participation, MLS changed the definition of “eligible” in its league and invented a form of qualification – which in truth is less qualification, more assignment.
For the past two seasons, the Leagues Cup has featured all 29 teams from MLS and every club from Mexico’s Liga MX, but in 2025 the number of MLS teams will drop to 18 to match the Liga MX total. To get to 18, MLS decreed that the top nine teams from each MLS conference in 2024 enter the 2025 Leagues Cup – though it seems like a flaw that the teams did not know about this method of qualification while they were playing in 2024.
A more accurate framing is that MLS is withdrawing 11 of its 27 eligible teams from the Open Cup.
The nine MLS teams not in either the Leagues Cup or the Champions Cup automatically “qualified” for the 2025 Open Cup along with seven more teams based on the 2024 Supporters’ Shield standings.
MLS stated that: “every MLS club has the opportunity to compete in at least one, but no more than two, North American competitions that run concurrently with the MLS league season.” This two-tournament limit means 2024 Open Cup champion Los Angeles FC will not be given the chance to defend its title as participation in the Leagues Cup seemingly takes precedence.
MLS touts in its release that it is sending 16 teams to the Open Cup. A more accurate framing is that MLS is withdrawing 11 of its 27 eligible teams from the Open Cup.
It also announced that it will do similar in 2026 before re-evaluating before the 2027 edition. As the Open Cup is linked to Champions Cup and potentially Club World Cup qualification, it raises the question of whether Concacaf or FIFA could step in.
Another issue is that Vancouver Whitecaps’ participation in the Canadian Championship as well as the Champions Cup meant it was already at the newly imposed two-tournament limit, and thus couldn’t take its place in the Leagues Cup despite finishing eighth in MLS’s Western Conference. Instead of their Leagues Cup place going to the next team in the standings, Austin FC, the spot was given seemingly at random to 2025 expansion side San Diego FC, which won’t be competing in the Open Cup.
Elsewhere, Atlanta United is in qualification limbo. It is excluded from the Open Cup due to being neither bad enough to miss out on the Leagues Cup nor good enough to qualify for the Open Cup via the Supporters’ Shield standings. It shows how convoluted and haphazard parts of this “qualification” procedure are, and reinforces the idea that it is more allocation than qualification.
This entire issue dates back to December 2023 when MLS announced it would not be entering any teams in the 2024 Open Cup. A half-hearted compromise was reached between MLS and the USSF whereby the league would enter eight teams along with nine MLS-affiliated MLS Next Pro teams.
There has since been plenty of spin attempting to justify and normalize MLS’s non-participation, not least the framing of this year’s involvement as an improvement of 8 teams to 16 teams rather than what it actually is.
MLS has criticised everything from the standard of facilities in the Open Cup to marketing, attendance, and schedule congestion (though this congestion happened because MLS created the Leagues Cup in 2019 and then massively expanded it in 2023).
Every now and then, the true reasons emerge.
“We financially have no involvement in it. We don’t control the brand,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said of the Open Cup while speaking to the Athletic in March 2024. MLS does, however, control the Leagues Cup. As usual, it boils down to MLS wanting to control soccer in the United States and the USSF allowing it to do so.
National cup competitions are an integral part of national soccer infrastructure for countries all over the world. They connect a country’s soccer landscape, its teams, and its supporters with one another in the reassurance that they are all part of it.
This is especially important in the US where it is easy for teams to feel detached from the wider soccer ecosystem as there is no opportunity to move between leagues via promotion and relegation. The 111-year-old Open Cup links the sport’s history to its existing legues, and those leagues to each other in an environment where such links are rare to nonexistent.
Wherever you look, the health of an open domestic cup and the issues it faces can reveal a lot about the state of a country’s soccer, and at the moment the US Open Cup reveals the unhealthy sway MLS has over the game in the United States.