MLS and Liga MX announce new Leagues Cup tournament

As part of a major reorganization of soccer competitions in North America, top men’s leagues in the United States and Mexico announced on Tuesday the creation of an annual World Cup-style tournament in which all teams from both will participate. leagues. The month-long tournament will take place in July and August, starting in 2023, expanding the collaboration between Major League Soccer and Liga MX and adding more matches to an already busy global football schedule.

“We need more global interest,” Don Garber, the MLS commissioner, said in an interview. “It’s a global sport. We are doing a good job with a growing interest in MLS in our league here at the national level. The next step is how to generate interest outside our region? “

A 47-team tournament (there will be 48 whenever MLS expands to 30 teams) with group stages and knockout stages during the only relatively quiet period of the football calendar – between the end of international tournaments in summer and the start of club games in the fall – is a pillar of the strategy.

The tournament will replace the much smaller Leagues Cup tournament and take its name. In order to give it legitimacy and make sure teams take it seriously, organizers have promised a big prize pool (but haven’t specified how much). The top three teams will also win places in the CONCACAF Champions League, the region’s top club competition.

The new Leagues Cup will require a substantial reorganization of MLS and Liga MX schedules. Rather than running the event alongside the league competition, both leagues will be taking a break for the duration of the tournament. For MLS, that means a month-long hiatus in the middle of their season, which usually starts in March, while for Liga MX, it likely means a delay at the start of their season.

The entire football world, from clubs to leagues, confederations and FIFA itself, is in a constant pitched battle over the calendar, over new leagues and over the navigation of national coronavirus laws. Promoters often seem to view football as a lucrative zero-sum game, using increasingly exhausted players to squeeze the most dollars out of the sport, with little cooperation between organizations.

Recognizing this tension, MLS and Liga MX say they created the new tournament with the participation of CONCACAF, which oversees football in North America, Central America and the Caribbean. And the League Cup announcement coincided with another Tuesday, from CONCACAF, which said from 2024 the CONCACAF Champions League would expand to 27 clubs, up from 16 in 2021.

The enlarged Champions League will begin with three regional tournaments, one for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, before 16 teams advance to the round of 16.

The Leagues Cup will see Mexican players spending even more time in the United States, as the tournament takes place here. In 2023, the best Mexican players will compete for their national team in the Gold Cup, the regional championship of national teams that has always been held mainly in the United States, in June and July. Many will then return to their Mexican clubs, which will already be in the United States to prepare for the League Cup.

Mikel Arriola, the president of La Liga MX, isn’t worried that Mexican football fans don’t like seeing their players spending most of the summer playing north of the border, only being able to watch TV without traveling. . This tournament is additive, he said, and does not take anything away from Liga MX.

“It will be a mixed model as we will continue our traditional way in our local league,” said Arriola. “However, we’re both breaking new ground in this kind of summer extravagance.”

Organizers hope the tournament, beyond selling millions of tickets, will create a windfall for television, especially outside of North America. The rights to broadcast MLS and Liga MX games outside their home country are currently not particularly valuable. While MLS is broadcast, for example, in England, TV and streaming companies pay a lot more to show the Premier League or the Champions League than they do for MLS. But an easy-to-understand tournament during a lull in the calendar could prove popular.

MLS will control the tournament’s TV rights in the US and Canada, Liga MX will control the rights for Mexico and the two will team up to sell them to the rest of the world. MLS is also in talks with media companies about local and national rights to broadcast its championship games, which are currently owned by ESPN, Fox and a number of local media companies, but expire next year.

The media rights to the Leagues Cup may be sold together with those rights to the same company (s), or may be sold separately.

The success of the tournament will also be judged on the improvement of North American clubs and players. Arriola said the tournament will provide vital competition for the Liga MX middle and bottom teams, who do not qualify for the CONCACAF Champions League.

“Sometimes great teams grow on their own,” he said. But if the Leagues Cup generates the right incentives, there will be more of what Arriola called “horizontal growth” throughout the league.

Ultimately, the League Cup, and everything in between the two leagues, is pointed towards 2026, when the United States will host the World Cup, alongside Mexico and Canada. “Now we have the rocket fuel for the World Cup that could help us take us to the next level,” Garber said, “and ultimately be seen as we aspire to be, one of the best leagues in the world. . “