The 2024 Leagues Cup, a North American club soccer tournament involving teams from Major League Soccer and the Mexican top division, Liga MX
This year's edition has just entered its knockout stages, which potentially sets up more intriguing and meaningful games, and there are also Champions Cup qualification places to be played for.
But many supporters groups have already made their feelings known, and the feeling among them is that the tournament, this year especially, is potentially causing more damage to the game in the United States than it is benefiting it.
Leagues Cup Background
The Leagues Cup in its current guise kicked off in 2023. Tentative versions of the tournament in 2019 and 2021, and a "Leagues Cup showcase" in 2022, involved just a handful of teams from MLS and Liga MX, but last year it expanded to a World Cup-style tournament involving every team from the two leagues. It has continued in that format in 2024.
A considerable window of time is needed to play all of these games, so a month-long break was added in the middle of the MLS season to create space for the Leagues Cup.
Messi Muddle
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When this expanded tournament happened for the first time, in 2023, it coincided with the arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami.
At this time, Inter Miami was one of the worst teams in MLS, but the Leagues Cup— tournament for which it didn’t have to qualify on merit—was a clean slate. One that Miami went on to win, and also offered CONCACAF Champions Cup qualification and potentially FIFA Club World Cup qualification on the back of that.
Despite MLS doing its best to promote Messi’s arrival around the Leagues Cup, inviting many overseas journalists and those from high-profile publications to cover the game (in some cases at the expense of regular, US-based and local reporters), the watching world didn’t quite know what this was.
USA Today, GQ, Sky News, Sportsnet, Sportico, The Associated Press, Bleacher Report, and many others referred to it as his MLS debut, despite it being against Mexican opposition, Cruz Azul.
SUM Similarities
But in many ways, MLS and the Leagues Cup are one and the same.
The Leagues Cup is promoted by MLS’s marketing arm, Soccer United Marketing (SUM). Its digital presence uses similar templates, all games are played in the USA or Canada, and it is shown on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV. They have also hired external PR companies to carry out extra promotion of the tournament, aimed at media outlets and journalists.
For almost two decades, SUM also ran the marketing for U.S. Soccer, which included responsibility for promoting the United States domestic cup competition, the U.S. Open Cup. This ended in 2021 when US Soccer took its marketing in-house.
The U.S. Open Cup was hardly thriving following SUM’s long tenure in charge of its promotion. If MLS doesn’t think the U.S. Open Cup meets certain standards, MLS and SUM are themselves partly to blame.
It also seems more than coincidental that MLS’s attempts to withdraw its teams from the U.S. Open Cup came shortly after its loss of control of the tournament’s marketing, which also coincided with the arrival of Messi. MLS/SUM don’t seem to want to share the Messi-mania with U.S. Soccer, other teams in the U.S. Open Cup, or the rest of the sport in the U.S.
This was evident at the end of 2023 when Apple TV quickly put together a documentary on Messi’s first steps in US Soccer. His appearance in a memorable U.S. Open Cup semifinal against FC Cincinnati—one of the highlights of his first few months in American soccer—was not included.
This is MLS in its Marketing League Soccer guise. If it can’t control it and if it can’t make money from it, it can give the impression it wants nothing to do with it.
Open Cup Exit
Messi’s Inter Miami is one of the teams MLS withdrew from the Open Cup in 2024.
It originally planned to withdraw all of them, but the backlash eventually led to a compromise where eight MLS clubs entered the tournament in 2024.
One of the excuses MLS used for not wanting to play in the Open Cup was schedule congestion.
How can a league that created a brand new World Cup-style, month-long tournament in the middle of the season, then complain about schedule congestion, and use it as an excuse to withdraw from a 110-year-old domestic cup?
This move has been seen as MLS/SUM abandoning a historic, more open part of U.S. Soccer (one which involves teams from amateurs to pros) in favour of a cash-grab tournament no one really asked for.
The CONCACAF Champions Cup, formerly the Champions League, already provides the continental challenges and Mexico versus USA matchups, with Mexican side Pachuca ending a spirited run from Columbus Crew in the final of the 2024 tournament.
The Leagues Cup witnesses the occasional impressive sell-out crowd where the Mexican teams are a big draw, not dissimilar to those seen in pre-season friendlies involving teams from Europe.
The general idea of the Leagues Cup isn’t a bad one, but when it encroaches on the schedule at the expense of a historic, open and inclusive tournament such as the Open Cup, the spectacle of the occasional entertaining game between an MLS and Liga MX side is outweighed by the potential damage done by the Division I league’s refusal to participate in a tournament that is important to the wider US soccer ecosystem.
And though additional continental club competition will always provide some interest, this already exists with the CONCACAF Champions Cup—again in a more open, diverse, and inclusive fashion.
Supporter Response
Supporters’ groups, passionate in their support for their team but also aware of the bigger picture of the game as a whole, realised what was happening, and it didn’t sit right.
However they voiced their disapproval and however large or small the effect on the Leagues Cup tournament, what was notable was that they did so.
Some fans of Liga MX teams who also dislike this tournament for various reasons, not least the fact none of their teams play any of these games at home, were pleasantly surprised at the action taken by supporters’ groups in MLS.
It showed there is a supporter movement in the U.S. that has the traditions of the game at its heart, even if some of the teams they support are only a few years old.
It is a supporter movement that won’t be taken advantage of, or taken for granted, showing that fans are not just a number in the matchday income column, and starting to reflect similar resistance to over-commercialized soccer seen elsewhere in the world.
A list of fan protests, boycotts, statements, and shows of support for the U.S. Open Cup can be found here, via the Hudson River Blue website.
