MLS Returns to U.S. Open Cup with First Teams

MLS is heading back to the U.S. Open Cup – and this time, it’s doing it on its own terms.

After sitting out the 2023 edition and taking heavy fire from its own supporters, the league will re-enter the historic competition with its first teams, starting from the round of 64 in mid-July. All MLS clubs will enjoy home advantage at that stage, turning their stadiums into stages for lower-division and amateur sides chasing an upset under the lights.

For fans, it’s a reversal that has been a long time coming.

MLS returns, on the front foot

When MLS pulled out of the tournament in 2023, it blamed fixture congestion. The calendar had tightened, especially with the expanded Leagues Cup dropping a block of extra games into the summer — right when U.S. Open Cup ties would normally be played.

MLS tried to offer a compromise: send MLS Next Pro teams, essentially reserve sides, into the competition instead of the first teams. That idea was rejected, and the message from many supporters was blunt. They didn’t want a watered-down version. They wanted the real thing.

The backlash was sharpest in some of the league’s most established markets. Seattle Sounders fans, in particular, bristled at the move. Some boycotted Leagues Cup fixtures, arguing that the U.S. Open Cup — a century-old domestic trophy — had been pushed aside in favor of a newer, more lucrative tournament that better suited MLS’s commercial aims.

Now, with MLS clubs back in and hosting from the round of 64, the league has handed those same supporters something tangible: meaningful knockout games on home soil, with everything on the line for the visitors.

A lifeline and a spotlight for the lower tiers

The decision doesn’t just reshape MLS’s summer. It reverberates through the rest of the American pyramid.

USL, which has built its own identity and ambitions outside MLS’s orbit, stands to gain from the renewed presence of top-flight clubs in the competition. The league is on the brink of a major transformation of its own, planning to become a Division I league in 2028 and to introduce promotion and relegation that same year — a structure MLS has never adopted.

That looming shift gives the U.S. Open Cup an extra layer of intrigue. USL clubs and MLS sides won’t just be meeting in a cup tie; they’ll be sharing a stage at a time when the hierarchy of American soccer is under more scrutiny than ever.

Then there are the amateurs. Thirty-two amateur teams enter the U.S. Open Cup every year, and the new format all but guarantees that many of them will walk into MLS stadiums in the round of 64. For those clubs, it’s a windfall and a dream rolled into one: a trip to a top-tier venue, a chance to test themselves, and the possibility — however slim — of writing their name into cup folklore.

A competition that refuses to fade

For all the noise of the past few years, the U.S. Open Cup itself has endured. The 2026 edition is moving toward its climax with familiar power at the top: all four semifinalists are MLS clubs, each chasing a place in the final on September 14.

That in itself underlines why MLS’s relationship with the tournament matters. The league’s teams dominate the latter stages, the trophies, the headlines. When they walk away, the competition feels diminished. When they come back, the whole structure of the American game feels more connected.

The U.S. Open Cup has been contested in one form or another since 1914. It has survived wars, league failures, and decades when the sport barely registered on the national radar.

Now it faces a new era — MLS back in the fold, USL pushing toward Division I status, promotion and relegation on the horizon, and amateur clubs still clinging to their one, precious shot at a giant-killing.

If this is what the landscape looks like now, what will the oldest tournament in American soccer look like by the time USL’s revolution arrives in 2028?