On Friday, Major League Soccer announced its plan to replace its teams in the U.S. Open Cup with its developmental MLS Next Pro sides. Five days later, those intentions were met with rejection by U.S. Soccer.
U.S. Soccer’s denial has given MLS something of a Super League moment, as a governing body’s stance on the back of widespread backlash from fans and the media alike has — for now — stopped the league from prioritizing profit over the sport’s history.
How did we get here, and what could come next? Read on.
What is the U.S. Open Cup?
First played in 1914, The Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup is the oldest ongoing competition in American soccer. In its current form, the tournament pits about 100 professional and amateur teams from across the country against each other in a single-elimination tournament. Like the FA Cup in England — and the NCAA tournament in college basketball — the Open Cup’s primary appeal is the potential for a massive upset. In recent years, teams from this country’s lower leagues, most often the USL, have regularly beaten Major League Soccer teams in Open Cup play. These matchups are especially notable because U.S. soccer does not employ promotion and relegation for its club teams; the Open Cup is the only context in which an MLS team will meet a lower-league team in a competitive match.
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MLS teams have largely dominated the competition’s later rounds since the league joined the Open Cup in 1996. No lower-division team has won the tournament since the Rochester Raging Rhinos lifted the Cup in 1999, with only two non-MLS teams making the final this millennium: the 2008 Charleston Battery and the 2022 Sacramento Republic.
The tournament is an important revenue stream for amateur and lower-division clubs in the United States; Open Cup matches against MLS sides are frequently a massive draw for these clubs and crowds for these matches can significantly outnumber those present at everyday games. Still, the tournament has struggled to gain traction amongst MLS fans, many of whom don’t place the same significance on Open Cup fixtures as they do on league matches. MLS teams frequently host Open Cup matches at smaller venues and in front of far smaller crowds.
What is MLS Next Pro?
Founded in 2021 and starting play in 2022, MLS Next Pro is Major League Soccer’s development league akin to other countries’ Under-23 leagues, the NBA’s G-League, or minor-league baseball.
Prior to its existence, feeder teams for MLS clubs were participants in the USL Championship, the country’s de facto second division. Sitting in the third tier of the American soccer pyramid, MLS Next Pro is largely a developmental league focused on fostering youth talent.
Every MLS team except D.C. United owns a club in MLS Next Pro (D.C. United largely sold its share in Loudoun United, its feeder club, last year but has plans to start a Next Pro team soon). The league is also open to independent clubs; Rochester FC played a single season in MLSNP in 2022, Chattanooga FC and Carolina Core will join in 2024, and two other teams have stated their intention to join the league in the coming years.
In its infancy, the league has struggled to gain any real traction with fans. Games are often played in front of small crowds and heavily feature young reserve players. There are intriguing aspects of it, though. MLSNP serves as a test bed of sorts for rules and regulations that might make their way up to MLS itself someday; regular season ties are decided by shootouts, for example, and the league successfully implemented a pair of measures this year to combat time-wasting, something that’s endemic in global football. The latter of those role adjustments will be used in MLS starting in 2024.
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Why did MLS try to pull its teams from the Open Cup?
An MLS spokesperson said last week that the league decided to pull its teams from the U.S. Open Cup in part to aid with fixture congestion – exacerbated in 2023 by the addition of an expanded Leagues Cup, a month-long tournament created by MLS between its teams and those of Liga MX.
There are an array of other factors as well. As a competition administered by the U.S. Soccer Federation, MLS is not in control of many aspects of the Open Cup, including broadcast rights, marketing, and competition standards. U.S. Soccer also collects a varying portion of ticket revenue from every Open Cup match – rising to as much as 50% for the semifinal and final.
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In a May meeting of the U.S. Soccer board of directors, MLS Commissioner Don Garber said the Open Cup was “a very poor reflection on what it is we’re trying to do with soccer at the highest level.”
Notably, for 17 years Soccer United Marketing (SUM), the marketing arm of MLS, had a deal with the U.S. Soccer Federation to negotiate its commercial and media rights deals, which included the Open Cup. That relationship ended in 2021 when U.S. Soccer brought its commercial operation in-house, but SUM most certainly would have had a hand in any decline in the commercialization and marketing of the Open Cup over the last decade.
MLS also made clear this was an attempted move done, in part, to prop up MLS Next Pro. The nascent league needs more games with real pressure to win, something that is lacking in its seasonal play, where it’s mostly young, developmental reserve players pitted against young, developmental reserve players. If MLS Next Pro teams were to participate in the Open Cup instead of MLS teams, those teams would get knockout games against USL teams and a chance to play for a trophy.
Pulling MLS teams out of the Open Cup thus would have addressed two problems for MLS owners, schedule congestion and boosting MLS Next Pro, though not without hurting the quality, relevance and marketability of the U.S. Open Cup.
What was the reaction to MLS’s announcement?
MLS would have anticipated that diehard MLS and American soccer fans would not take kindly to its decision to pull out of the Open Cup. What it may not have anticipated, however, is that the decision hit a more mainstream audience. The backlash was swift.
MLS was criticized on outlets like The Dan Patrick Show and in publications around the country, pulling in a wider audience that may not have been familiar with the Open Cup, but were suddenly hearing about MLS opting to withdraw from a 110-year-old tournament that closely resembles famous competitions like England’s FA Cup. The Athletic was one of several outlets to publish opinion pieces questioning the sporting merit of MLS’s plan.
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MLS already has a reputation for bucking global soccer norms like promotion and relegation, and the Open Cup decision grew that reputation.
It was also clear that other stakeholders were not as on board with MLS’s decision as the league might have hoped. The USL and USSF both put out statements that expressed surprise with MLS’s decision and, on Wednesday, both organizations issued statements in support of the tournament.
USL Statement Regarding the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. pic.twitter.com/qBtyCo5LW8
— United Soccer League (@USL_HQ) December 20, 2023
On Friday, an MLS spokesperson told The Athletic that the league did not survey fans about its teams’ participation in the Open Cup. On Wednesday the league clarified that it had conducted a survey of “league soccer watchers” in October that found respondents, especially those who were not fans of an MLS team, lacked familiarity with the Open Cup. A source with knowledge of the league’s plans claimed on Wednesday that the league expected some level of backlash from diehard fans.
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Why did U.S. Soccer say no?
U.S. Soccer did not elaborate as to its reasons for denying MLS’s request in its statement on Wednesday. However, the move would seem to violate the organization’s Professional League Standards (PLS), a USSF document that guides the sanctioning and structure of leagues within the U.S. soccer pyramid. Under the guidelines for a first-division men’s outdoor soccer league, one of the first points for sanctioning is that all “U.S.‐based teams must participate in all representative U.S. Soccer and CONCACAF competitions for which they are eligible.”
MLS’s attempt to get a waiver from those Pro League Standards potentially held bigger stakes than just the first-division teams’ participation in the U.S. Open Cup. U.S. Soccer and MLS are currently defendants in a lawsuit filed by the now-defunct North American Soccer League (NASL) specifically regarding the PLS and U.S. Soccer selectively applying the standards to favor MLS. The federation has spent millions of dollars defending itself in the lawsuit. A decision to waive the PLS and allow MLS to opt out of the Open Cup most certainly would have been relevant to that case.
Beyond that, just two years after breaking off the relationship between the USSF and SUM, the appearance that the organizations remain too cozy would be a costly step backward for the federation.
U.S. Soccer’s denial is also a reminder that this wasn’t a decision for MLS to make in a vacuum. The 2023 edition of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup involved 97 matches from the first round through the final. Of those, 73 involved at least one USL team (75.2% of the tournament) while MLS had a team in 48 (49.5%) — a comparison that drives home just broad the stakes were for the teams below the first division of the pyramid.
While MLS teams may look at some Open Cup games as a drain on its first teams and a negative on its books, USL teams often sell out stadiums when hosting games against MLS teams. The performance of lower-division teams in front of big crowds in the Open Cup have exposed those markets to American soccer, and even lifted markets into contention for MLS expansion slots, with recent examples in Orlando, which won the Open Cup as an MLS team in 2022; Cincinnati, which won the MLS Supporters Shield in 2023; and Sacramento, which was awarded the rights to become MLS’s 29th franchise before Ron Burkle divested in 2021.
Playing MLS Next Pro teams in place of MLS teams wouldn’t be just a branding problem, it would be inherently different for the tournament in numerous ways, from selling tickets to games for lower-league teams to the quality of play on the field. Among the players on the field for the U.S. Open Cup final in 2023 were two of MLS’s most marketable players, Hector Herrera and Sergio Busquets, as well as a U.S. men’s national team World Cup veteran in DeAndre Yedlin and a former MLS MVP in Josef Martinez. Those names bring relevance. That simply wouldn’t be the case if MLS Next Pro teams took the place of MLS teams in the tournament.
Even with a clear need for further investment, the Open Cup undoubtedly still plays a role in growing the game in markets across the country.
Why not encourage MLS teams to play reserve players in the Open Cup?
This has long been many MLS teams’ approach in the early rounds of the tournament at minimum, even for the more ambitious sides entering the field. Of the eleven players who started for the eventual champion Houston Dynamo in the final, only four were also in the lineup for their first match at the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Houston’s winning goal in that one came from Brooklyn Raines, an 18-year-old homegrown midfielder who played just 202 minutes in the entire regular season.
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The reality is that for many MLS sporting operations, using Next Pro teams wouldn’t change much of their initial approach to the tournament. So why was a wholesale swap prioritized in the first place? As explained above, MLS wanted to ease schedule congestion on its first teams. By pulling them out of the Open Cup, it opened up multiple midweek windows in which it could schedule league games. Even playing majority-reserve sides, it would be difficult for MLS to play an Open Cup game on a Tuesday and a league game on a Wednesday.
That’s especially true because the late stages of the Open Cup have always been treated with more weight by MLS teams. When a trophy and CONCACAF Champions Cup berth is on the line, MLS teams put their best teams on the field.
Sources briefed on the discussions around MLS’s decision say the league has looked into alternative solutions, including expanded rosters for the Open Cup that would allow for more MLS Next Pro players to take part in games. That could be part of continued talks between MLS, U.S. Soccer and other stakeholders.
What comes next?
On Wednesday, a source with direct knowledge of the league’s plans said that MLS would make a decision on its participation in the 2024 edition of the tournament in the coming weeks. “My expectation is that MLS will participate,” that source said, though it remains unclear what that looks like.
Regardless of that, the reality is that MLS’s announcement last week has already done damage to its reputation in the broader national soccer landscape. MLS’s public prioritization of its own interests over that of the sport as a whole will forever change how its future broad-scale decisions are perceived.
After the Columbus Crew won MLS Cup on Dec. 9, commissioner Don Garber was greeted with a stadium full of booing fans. That backlash was a response to the league’s attempt to relocate the franchise to Austin until new ownership took over in Jan. 2019.
After attempting to treat the U.S. Open Cup solely as a developmental tool, the rest of the pyramid was made well aware of its standing in MLS’s eyes. There may not be similar moments for public backlash like a trophy presentation, but the damage to the perception of MLS may well have already been done.
(Photo: Roy K. Miller/ISI Photos/Getty Images)