ºüÀêÊÓƵ City SC went into its 2024 season with concerns about a crowded schedule, with games in the CONCACAF Champions Cup and U.S. Open Cup to be played, along with games in the MLS regular season and the Leagues Cup.
In the span of a few days, those concerns were eliminated.
On Tuesday night, City SC was eliminated from the Champions Cup with a 1-0 loss to Houston, which tied their total-goal series and sent the Dynamo through on the away goals tiebreaker. And then on Friday, U.S. Soccer announced a revised plan for this year’s Open Cup in which some MLS teams, including City SC, would not participate.
The new plan is in effect for only this year, as negotiations continue about how the tournament will be set up going forward.
Under the plan, the American MLS teams, such as City SC, that took part in the CONCACAF Champions Cup will not take part in the Open Cup, with the exception of Houston, which is the defending Open Cup champion. The next seven MLS teams in the Supporters Shield standings from last season will play in the Open Cup, along with the best nine teams from MLS Next Pro that aren’t otherwise represented (plus two independent Next Pro teams). That means every American MLS club except D.C. United, which doesn’t have a Next Pro team, will take part in either the Champions Cup or the Open Cup, with either its first or second team. MLS first teams will always play lower-division clubs until it cannot be avoided.
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For City SC, that means that it will play its 34-game MLS schedule and at least two games in the Leagues Cup. Should City SC advance out of group play in Leagues Cup, it would add at least one game, but the schedule is built to accommodate those games.
City SC president and general manager Diego Gigliani said his club wanted to play in the Open Cup, but ultimately it wasn’t their decision.
“Our perspective is we understand the decision made by the MLS and U.S. Soccer,†Gigliani said. “At the same point, our preference would have been to be able to play in this competition. ºüÀêÊÓƵ as a city has a really rich history in the competition. The competition already had its own rich history and ºüÀêÊÓƵ and teams from ºüÀêÊÓƵ have a rich history within that competition ranging all the way back to the beginning of the century and more recent with the USL team that was here. So we would have like to play in that competition, that has been our consistent position with the MLS throughout this negotiation period.
“We also know the only reason we’re not competing is because we qualified for Champions Cup. That is obviously a slight silver lining in all that, putting aside Tuesday’s result.â€
ºüÀêÊÓƵ has a long history with the Open Cup, dating back to the days when the tournament’s winners were viewed as the best club in the nation. Clubs from ºüÀêÊÓƵ have won the Open Cup 11 times. Last season, City SC hosted one Open Cup game, against third division Union Omaha which drew a sellout crowd of 22,423, the largest ever for a third-round Open Cup game and the 10th largest for any round. That was City SC’s shining Open Cup moment last year; it lost to the Chicago Fire on the road in the next round.
Gigliani pointed to that history, among other reasons, that the team would have preferred to play in the Open Cup.
“One is our fans, and when thinking about our fans, we think about the importance they assign to this competition, and therefore the history matters,†he said. “But we also value the opportunity to play another game in CityPark. It’s not guaranteed that we would have played at CityPark but it would have been possible, and having another game here allows us to get more people into CityPark, which there’s a lot of interest in and if you look at what the team did with the match against Omaha last year, we were able to offer very attractive pricing to get a new audience in the stadium. From the fan perspective, for both of those reasons, we wanted to compete in this competition.
“I would also say from players’ perspective, we think that this competition gave us the opportunity to give more competitive minutes to players at the top of the Next Pro team and the bottom half of our first team roster to play matches against USL teams at first and then hopefully as you would have progressed, against other teams. For all those reasons, we wanted to be in.â€
So ends the saga, for now, of the Open Cup, one of the longest running tournaments of its kind. MLS had announced in December that its clubs would send its third-division Next Pro teams to the Open Cup instead of its first teams, but U.S. Soccer quickly said that wouldn’t work under terms of the league’s sanctioning as a Division I league, which requires them to compete in all approved competitions.
MLS was looking for a way to relieve some schedule congestion created in part by the establishment of the Leagues Cup, a tournament featuring all teams from MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX that figures to be a big moneymaker for the league. But that created large numbers of games for teams that went far in the Champions Cup or the Open Cup or, in some cases, both.
Gigliani worked with teams around the world before coming to City SC, and he’s seen this situation elsewhere.
“Some of the challenges seen with competition aren’t dissimilar in other countries and other markets,†he said, “because when it comes to player health, fixture congestion, I think those are things that are often cited as challenges in all soccer markets around the world and you do have often new competitions appear, where there is higher quality competition, that then makes some of those more traditional cups be questioned. So it’s not a trend that we only see in the U.S. but has seen over many years in other markets.â€
