The new commissioner of Major League Soccer, Larry Berg, isn’t keen on the idea of promotion and relegation, but he is a fan of jeopardy. When asked the obligatory pro/rel question in his introductory press conference, Berg responded, “I don’t think it’s appropriate for our league, but I think there are other ways to create jeopardy during the regular season, [and] again in the playoffs.” He referred to this summer’s World Cup, which was co-hosted by the US, and the excitement it provided, adding, “Millions of people across North America experienced that passion firsthand. They fell in love with the drama, the atmosphere, the supporter culture and the emotion that makes soccer unlike anything else.
In the World Cup, we all enjoyed knockout games after the group stage. I call those games of consequence or games of jeopardy.” What if the US already had something similar in its domestic game? A cup competition open to amateur and professional teams across the country, older than the World Cup itself, offering underdog drama, a platform for diverse supporter cultures, and the emotion and jeopardy of knockout soccer.
Established in 1913, the US Open Cup has stuck around while professional leagues have come and gone. Today, it endures as US soccer’s most prestigious cup competition, equivalent to famous competitions such as England’s FA Cup, Germany’s DFB Pokal, and the Copa do Brasil. Given that US professional sports leagues operate closed, franchise-based divisions, it is a rare professional tournament that is open to teams from various leagues at all levels across the country.
In recent years, though, it has reached a crisis point. As the two main men’s professional leagues, MLS and USL, move to expand their own operations, seemingly in competition with each other, there has been a danger the Open Cup could get left behind. MLS has already tried to leave it altogether.
By 2023, the Open Cup had reached a sound state in which all eligible professional teams were entering, a record 71 that year. The Open Cup’s stories, such as El Farolito (born out of a San Francisco burrito bar) being the best-performing amateur team in two of the last three editions, and second-tier team Sacramento Republic making it all the way to the final in 2022, are unusual in US sport and were starting to attract mainstream nationwide coverage as a result. In 2023, US Soccer took control of the marketing of the tournament from MLS’s marketing arm, Soccer United Marketing (SUM), and Lionel Messi was about to grace the competition.
There was a positive platform from which to build. Then – coinciding with Messi’s arrival, the expansion of the SUM-marketed Leagues Cup, and the end of SUM’s involvement in the Open Cup – MLS announced at the end of 2023 that it would no longer enter its teams into the tournament. The backlash eventually led to a compromise in which a handful of MLS teams entered the Open Cup, but it has not been the same since.
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