MLS and Liga MX Announce New Leagues Cup Tournament

In a major reorganization of football competitions in North America, the top men’s leagues in the United States and Mexico announced Tuesday the establishment of an annual World Cup-style tournament in which every team from both leagues will compete. The month-long tournament will take place in July and August, starting in 2023, and is expanding. cooperation Between Major League Soccer and Liga MX and adding more matches to an already crowded world soccer calendar.

“We need more global attention,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said in an interview. “It’s a global sport. We’re doing a good job of increasing interest in MLS domestically in our league here. The next step is how do we increase interest outside of our region?”

During the only time the football calendar is relatively quiet – between the end of international summer tournaments and the start of club games in the fall – a 47-team tournament with group and knockout stages (to be 48 when MLS expands to 30 teams) is the cornerstone of strategy.

The tournament will replace and be named after the much smaller Leagues Cup tournament. Organizers promised a huge prize pool (but didn’t say how big) to give it legitimacy and get teams to take it seriously. The top three teams will also qualify for the CONCACAF Champions League, the region’s best club competition.

The new Leagues Cup will require a significant reorganization of the MLS and Liga MX schedules. Rather than co-host the event with league competition, both leagues will take a break for the duration of the tournament. For MLS this means a one-month pause in the middle of the season, which typically starts in March, while for Liga MX this likely means a delay to the start of the season.

From clubs to leagues to confederations to FIFA itself, the entire football world is in a constant battle. on schedule, on new leagues and navigation national coronavirus laws. Organizers often seem to view football as a lucrative zero-sum game that uses increasingly depleted players to extract as much money from the sport as possible with little cooperation between organizations.

Aware of this tension, MLS and Liga MX say they have created the new tournament with the participation of CONCACAF, which governs football in North America, Central America and the Caribbean. And the Leagues Cup announcement coincided with another from CONCACAF on Tuesday saying that starting in 2024, the CONCACAF Champions League will expand from 16 to 27 clubs in 2021.

The Extended Champions League will begin with three regional tournaments, one each for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, before 16 teams join the qualifying rounds.

The Leagues Cup will see Mexican players spend even more time in the United States as the tournament will be held here. In 2023, the best Mexican players will compete for their national teams in the Gold Cup, the regional championship for national teams always held primarily in the United States in June and July. Many will then return to Mexican clubs preparing for the Leagues Cup in the United States.

Liga MX president Mikel Arriola isn’t worried that Mexican football fans won’t like to see their players playing north of the border nearly all summer, only to be able to watch it on TV without significant travel. “This tournament is a contribution and does not detract from Liga MX,” he said.

“It will be a mixed model because we will continue our traditional way in our local league,” Arriola said. Said. “However, we both innovate on this kind of summer splurge.”

Organizers hope the tournament will not only sell millions of tickets, but also create a television dollar bonanza, especially outside of North America. The rights to show MLS and Liga MX games outside their home country are not particularly valuable at the moment. For example, while MLS is shown in the UK, television and broadcast companies pay much more than MLS to show the Premier League or the Champions League. But an easy-to-understand tournament can be popular during a calendar recession.

MLS will control the television rights to the tournament in the United States and Canada, Liga MX will control the rights to Mexico, and the two will partner to sell them in the rest of the world. MLS is also talking to media companies about both local and national rights to show league games, currently hosted by ESPN, Fox and a number of local media companies, but due to expire next year.

Media rights to the Leagues Cup may be sold to the same company or companies along with these rights, or may be sold separately.

The success of the tournament will also be judged on whether it has improved North American clubs and players. Arriola said the tournament will provide vital competition to teams in the middle and under Liga MX that failed to qualify for the CONCACAF Champions League.

“Sometimes great teams grow alone,” he said. But if the Cup of Leagues creates the appropriate incentives, there will be more to what Arriola calls “horizontal growth” in the entire league.

Ultimately, the Leagues Cup and everything else between the two leagues points to 2026, when the United States will host the World Cup alongside Mexico and Canada. “We now have the rocket fuel that the World Cup can help take us to a higher level, and we are finally seen as aspire to be one of the best leagues in the world,” said Garber.