Analysis: Minnesota United enters Leagues Cup amid what has become a tournament tug-of-war

MINNESOTA UNITED | ANALYSIS

Friday night, Minnesota United kicks off the Leagues Cup by going on the road against the Seattle Sounders. It’s a team the Loons played a month ago, in a city they have already visited this season, in a game that doesn’t count in the MLS standings.

In a related story, when you try to explain the Leagues Cup to an uninitiated fan, one question always seems to follow: Why?

MLS and Liga MX debuted the current version of the Leagues Cup last season. For the first time, it included every team in both MLS and the Mexican top division, dividing them into three-team groups that feed into an unwieldy 32-team knockout round.

This year, Minnesota is in a group with Seattle and Liga MX’s Necaxa — which suffers by having to play all their games on the road, as the tournament is entirely played in the United States and Canada. The top two from all 15 groups in the group stage advance, plus Columbus and Club América, the MLS and Mexican champions.

From Liga MX’s perspective, the “why” of this tournament is a little simpler. By some reckonings, as many as half of Liga MX’s fans live in the United States. Last year, even Puebla — not known for having a huge fanbase — drew a surprising number of fans to Allianz Field for their game against the Loons.

MLS’s reasoning for the tournament is a little more complicated, and contentious. The league has sought to deepen ties with Liga MX, in part as a measuring stick for the league to test itself against its more storied and successful counterpart. The Leagues Cup is also something interesting that the league can hand to Apple, its TV broadcaster.

Beyond the overt reasoning, though, there’s an undercurrent of conflict in U.S. soccer — one that’s come to a head this week. At the same time MLS is pushing the expansion of Leagues Cup, it’s also been heavily critical of the U.S. Open Cup, a century-old tournament that includes all of American soccer, from MLS on down to the grassroots.

Longtime Loons fans will be familiar with the Open Cup, which used to be a highlight of the team’s season when they were in the second division. If Minnesota could get through a few opening-round formalities, they’d earn a game against an MLS team, and a chance to take one of the big boys down a peg.

MLS, though, has been vocally unhappy about the tournament in the past few years, thanks to small crowds and underproduced lower-division broadcasts. Last year, Commissioner Don Garber called the U.S. Open Cup “a very poor reflection on what it is that we’re trying to do with soccer at the highest level.”

MLS even tried to pull all its teams out of the Open Cup this year, a drastic move that ended in a compromise that satisfied no one: eight MLS teams played in the tournament this season, while many of the rest — including Minnesota — sent their MLS NEXT Pro affiliates.

That MLS is pushing Leagues Cup, while trying to behead the U.S. Open Cup, makes for an obvious contrast, and there are plenty of fans that are unhappy about it. A number of MLS supporters’ groups — including the Dark Clouds, Minnesota’s oldest fan group, and at least one other in Minnesota — have vowed to boycott the Leagues Cup for as long as their teams aren’t also playing in the U.S. Open Cup.

It’s not just fans that miss the USOC. Loons defender Zarek Valentin, one of the league’s longest-tenured players, lamented that Minnesota wasn’t in the tournament this year.

“It was one of the competitions I very much looked forward to,” he said. “Those games are always a little bit more chaotic. They’re fun … different environments than we’re normally used to. It was a real bummer not to be able to play, and I hope that they can figure that situation out, because I know a lot of fan bases — and a lot of players like myself — really value and enjoy that competition.”

It’s an understandable position, especially for Loons fans that remember, for example, Minnesota’s underdog joyride to the USOC semifinals in 2005. Garber and MLS, though, would simply point to the attendance, with fewer than 5,000 fans watching most of this year’s games.

At least last season, the Leagues Cup didn’t suffer from similar attendance problems, and Valentin admitted the tournament was more fun than a lot of players expected — especially the chance to play a few teams Minnesota doesn’t normally see.

Obviously, Seattle doesn’t fall into that category, but Necaxa will. The Leagues Cup, then, is perhaps mostly notable as something as a change of pace — a new format, some new teams, and a break from the usual midsummer monotony. MLS just has to find a way to make this work with all the other demands on the schedule to help bring some excitement to the middle of the season — something the league needs.