Backpass: Leagues Cup isn't a thing. Yet.
In a young league, it's hard to make sense of the relative importance of ancillary cuppity-cup matches.
Having survived my most epic work day of the year - a 25 hour fast plus 9 hours of standing, singing, and sermonizing - you’ll forgive me if today’s dispatch is shorter and more stream of consciousness than normal. To be honest, I’m entirely thrilled to be vertical and coherent right now.
While listening to another soccer podcast on my drive down from Erie, the news was relayed that Philadelphia Union had crashed out of CCL against Club America, while Seattle Sounders had booked their ticket to the Leagues Cup final against Club León. And I had to think - what does this mean?
The weird thing about cups and tournaments - from the youth level all the way up to the World Cup - is that they are confusingly hard to assess on a ‘degree of importance - degree of difficulty’ level of comprehension. In theory, the FIFA Club World Cup should be the most prestigious trophy in the world, but it really isn’t, because the timing is so weird, and so few people actually seem to care or pay attention. That would likely be the UEFA Champions League trophy - although one might be able to make an argument that winning the EPL, Liga MX, or Copa Libertadores is equally good.
Domestically, we have an equal problem. The most prestigious cup in North America is certainly the Concacaf Champions League trophy. However, because that trophy has overwhelming gone to Mexican teams, and because the cup’s timing has often favored Mexican teams (the first matches are played when Liga MX teams have already competed for a full four months, but MLS teams have just begun preseason), it’s hard to see that trophy in fair light. It is almost very nearly a perfect parallel o the mythic Holy Grail - an achievement that is part of quest that exists in movies1, storybooks, and fairy tales, but as far as I know, is not actually a real thing one can take possession of.
So instead we now have this strange League Cup thing, a tournament for which I’m not entirely sure how you get an invitation, and is played between MLS and Liga MX teams, but held entirely in the US. This most recent edition made sense - invitations were extended to MLS and Liga MX teams that did not qualify for CCL. But the first edition, in 2019, was composed of four random MLS teams and four popular Liga MX teams. So we think that maybe Leagues Cup might become the Europa League of North American soccer. Maybe.
But then we stop to ask the question ‘why does this even exist?’ And unfortunately, the answer that comes immediately is: money. Obviously the turnout and the TV audiences in the US for anything involving a Mexican team is huge, so there’s that. But also - the main beneficiary of CCL is going to be Concacaf, who own the TV rights and make a significant chunk of the profit. Leagues Cup was simply MLS and Liga MX saying ‘why should Concacaf get all the money? We’re the ones putting up the teams.’ And thus, Leagues Cup was born.
To be less crass, League Cup is sort of a good idea. Liga MX and MLS don’t look likely to merge anytime soon - the structural differences between the leagues and the cultural differences between the fan bases pose challenges - but Leagues Cup does accomplish some of the goals a full-on merger might other accomplish. Other than making money, the Leagues Cup is an opportunity to expose Liga MX fans in both Mexico and the US to MLS teams. Maybe a kid watch León-Seattle sees Raúl Ruidiaz in a flash of brilliance and falls in love with the rave green. Or maybe a Houston-based El Tri family tunes in see a Leagues Cup match next season, and then thinks ‘Huh. MLS.’ And they buy a ticket to a Dynamo game some where down the line. The thinking is good. MLS knows that tastes change, and that Latinx Americans are a mostly yet-untapped gold mine of interest for the domestic league.
What does that mean for the prestige of the League Cup? I dunno. Mostly nothing. The challenge is that MLS has always wanted to push certain narratives of what the fans should value - MLS Cup, CCL, League Cup - and the fans have either pushed another priority, like the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, or actually invented a separate competition altogether in the instance of Supporters Shield2.
I think I’d like think that, if Leagues Cup sticks around for a few more years that it’ll help the league while also growing in the fans imagination. Like rebranding your team, the invention of new competitions is slow to grow on established fans, but for those with little to no sense of the history of the league, it’s exciting and unmoored from any past connotations. The challenge, of course, is finding that balance between the two. Inventing a new North American Superliga or Campeones Cup every few years, only to be distracted by another shiny thing shortly thereafter, is bad and we shouldn’t do that. But us oldsters always are skeptical of new things. We’re sad about the Columbus Crew rebrand and the new CF Montreal rebrand, but that’s because we aren’t the intended target of the rebrand. They’ve got us already.
I will watch this final between Seattle and Leon.3 I will be confused about what the win means for whomever wins it.4 But I think I will be at peace with the idea that all competitions in MLS, a league that is only 26 years old, are fungible. We’re still in the baby steps of the sport - we’ve only just emerged from the period when this league was definitely not the USFL, XFL, or NASL - great ideas that didn’t persist. So I’ll just enjoy the football for now, and contemplate the ultimate meaning of it all later.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Da Vinci Code, and The Fisher King. The Fisher King is a great film, and I think under appreciated or perhaps lost down the the memory hole of pop culture. Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, and Mercedes Ruhl! Robin Williams, when asked to play insane, is always a treat. Character actor Michael Jeter is also wonderful in this film.
Fans also created the Wooden Spoon. But you don’t want the Wooden Spoon.
I will likely spend the first 45 minutes agonizing over whether or not I should root for Seattle, whose insufferable fans most certainly did not invent soccer.