MNUFC2 in the US Open Cup: I get what MLS is doing, but it's so unnecessary

It seems like there's a much better option for this.

I covered last night’s US Open Cup game at Allianz Field. Minnesota United 2, the Doubloons*, lost 2-0 in extra time to the indy-league Michigan Stars.

*The team refers to itself as the “Twosies”; I will not do this for any team above U9 level. There have to be a half-dozen better nicknames, including the one above.

In the record books, it’ll go down as a third-division team losing to another third-division team; as far as US Soccer is concerned, both MLS NEXT Pro (the MLS reserve league) and NISA (the only sanctioned non-USL, non-MLS men’s professional league in the country) count as third-division teams. (And as anyone with a passing familiarity with American soccer knows, the divisions themselves are a fanciful construct anyway, since there’s no system of promotion and relegation between them.)

But there was so much more going on this year, after MLS fought to exclude its teams from playing in the Open Cup. Commissioner Don Garber called the competition a “poor reflection on what we’re trying to do” in 2023, and in December, the league announced that they were pulling all of their teams from the 2024 edition, and playing MLS NEXT Pro teams instead.

After predictable backlash, MLS and US Soccer reached a compromise. Eight MLS teams are in the tournament, along with 11 MLS NEXT Pro sides - and so MNUFC’s only entry was not their first team, but MNUFC2.

Having been at the game last night, I guess I get why MLS didn’t want to be there. But I also know that taking first teams out of the competition just seems completely unnecessary.

The announced attendance for last night’s match was 814, which - on a cold, windy night - was about twice as many as I expected. It was a small crowd for a US Open Cup game at Allianz Field, but not completely out of character; most of MNUFC’s cup games have drawn small-ish crowds as well, even the ones against MLS teams.

It was a sharp contrast to, for example, last year’s Leagues Cup game against Puebla. Attendance that night was announced at 19,609, and the evening had a festive feel to it - the kind of feeling that a cup match is supposed to have.

Meanwhile, I remember what it was like watching MNUFC lose to third-division Union Omaha at home, in 2022. There weren’t many people there, and when the Loons lost 2-1, the main vibe in the building was just a deep sense of embarrassment. Everyone who was interviewed after the game looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.

What I’m saying is that I get why MLS doesn’t want to be involved in the US Open Cup. Fans don’t show up, there’s a huge potential for embarrassment, and the league has invented a cup competition that they like a whole lot better.

At the same time, I was outside Michigan’s locker room last night, interviewing the Stars head coach. The team had just finished taking a picture on the field in front of the final scoreboard, and I heard them in their locker room, whooping it up as if they’d just pulled a huge upset - even though the win was ostensibly just one third-division team beating another.

That’s what the cup does. When Minnesota was in the second division, I used to look forward to the US Open Cup even more than the league - because it was a big deal, of course, but also because it was a chance to put a surprise beating on an MLS team. From talking to the players, I know they felt the same way, that they loved those games because they felt like they had something to prove.

I get why MLS doesn’t think the US Open Cup is good for them. But I do think that the USOC is good for American soccer as a whole, as long as you have a perspective on American soccer that’s wider than “is MLS as good as Liga MX yet.”

Ultimately, though, it seems to me that MLS trying to pull its teams from the US Open Cup is just completely unnecessary. Replacing MLS teams with MLS NEXT Pro teams changes the jersey that the teams are wearing - but it’s not obvious to me that it would have to change the players wearing the jerseys.

Last night, the MNUFC2 starting eleven included seven players who are on the first-team roster, three guys who are signed to MNUFC2, and one player from the club’s academy. The bench included a further three MNUFC2 players, plus four academy players, all of who got into the game except for backup goalkeeper Alec Smir.

There are fairly restrictive roster rules for MLS and MLS NEXT Pro, presumably to keep teams from stockpiling players. (This was never so obvious when MNUFC, having signed Emmanuel Iwe to an MNUFC2 contract in 2022 and watched him develop, were so impressed that they… used a draft pick on him to start 2023, so that they could get his MLS rights, which they didn’t have, even though he’d been in the building for a season.)

I can’t really think of a good reason why those rules couldn’t be waived, or modified, for the US Open Cup. If an MLS team feels like the US Open Cup isn’t something they want to compete for, they could throw out any roster they chose. This is pretty common in the soccer world; Arsenal was well known for years for treating the League Cup like an academy tournament, and Liverpool just won the League Cup playing its kids. And when Arsenal lost to Sheffield Wednesday, or Bradford City, it wasn’t seen as a stain on the club or the Premier League; everyone knew, and accepted, that when you don’t play your first team, sometimes you get beat.

While I get MLS’s reasoning, I don’t see why the US Open Cup has to be the league’s battleground. Trying to yank teams from the competition just makes the league look petty and afraid. Leave it up to the teams. Let them choose whether they want to play their starters, or their kids, or something in between. And let the Cup go back to simply being what it is - the one thing that brings all of American soccer together.