U.S. Open Cup Soccer Explained: Format and History
The U.S. Open Cup in soccer explained: how U.S. Soccer's national knockout cup lets amateur clubs face MLS sides, how ties are drawn, and who has won it most.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished MLS21 min read
- First final
- 1914
- Organized by
- U.S. Soccer
- Lamar Hunt name added
- 1999
- Editions lost to the pandemic
- 2020 and 2021
In September 1999, in front of a crowd in Columbus, Ohio, the Rochester Raging Rhinos beat the Colorado Rapids 2-0 to win the U.S. Open Cup. Rochester played in the A-League, a level below Major League Soccer, and had knocked out several MLS clubs on the way. More than a quarter-century later, no club from outside MLS has won the competition again.
That result explains what the tournament is. The Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup is American soccer's national knockout cup, run by U.S. Soccer and open to both professional and amateur clubs. Amateur sides from local qualifying and national amateur leagues enter first. Lower-division professional clubs join next, and MLS clubs come in at the later rounds. Every tie is a single game; a level score goes to extra time and then penalties, with no replays. The winner lifts the trophy, collects prize money and earns a place in the CONCACAF Champions Cup. First played in 1913-14 as the National Challenge Cup, it is the oldest continuing national soccer competition in the United States.
The rest of this page covers the mechanics, the history and the recent fight between MLS and the federation over how much the cup matters.
How the U.S. Open Cup soccer tournament is organized
The cup is a U.S. Soccer competition, not an MLS one. That distinction drives almost everything about it.
MLS runs its own league, its playoffs and, with Liga MX, the Leagues Cup. U.S. Soccer, the national federation, runs the Open Cup under its own competition rules and admits clubs from every level of the American pyramid. The federation decides who enters, when each level joins, how the draw is made and how the tournament fits into the calendar. MLS clubs take part because the federation's professional league standards require participation from sanctioned leagues and because the winner qualifies for continental competition, not because the league controls the event.
The tournament runs through most of the American season, with qualifying the previous year and the first proper rounds in the spring. The final has usually been played in late summer or early fall, though the date has moved around. The structure is straightforward enough to describe in a sentence and complicated enough in practice to cause a decade of arguments: every eligible club in the country can start at the bottom, the stronger clubs start higher up, and from the first round to the final every tie is win or go home.
- Local qualifyingAmateur clubs from across the country play qualifying rounds the year before, run under U.S. Soccer's Open Division.
- National amateur leaguesQualifiers from USL League Two, the National Premier Soccer League and other amateur leagues join in the opening rounds.
- Lower professional divisionsClubs from USL League One, the USL Championship and independent professional teams enter in the early proper rounds.
- MLS clubs joinMLS first teams enter in a later round, with the number of entrants and the entry point set by the federation each year.
- Knockout to the finalSingle games through to the final, with extra time and penalties for any tie still level after 90 minutes.
The general path through the tournament under U.S. Soccer's competition rules. The round in which each level enters, and the number of clubs from each league, have changed between editions.
Who enters the Open Cup, and at which round
The tournament's appeal is its open door. Its awkwardness is that the door opens at different heights for different clubs.
Amateur qualifying
At the bottom are the amateur clubs. Local adult amateur teams, many of them from ethnic and community leagues in the big cities, enter a qualifying competition run by U.S. Soccer, usually referred to as the Open Division. Qualifying rounds are played the year before the tournament proper, and the survivors earn a place in the first round.
National amateur leagues provide a second set of entrants. USL League Two and the National Premier Soccer League, both amateur competitions with college players and former professionals on their rosters, send their qualifiers based on league performance. These are the clubs that most often produce the early-round surprises: well-organized, fit and quite capable of beating a professional side on a bad night.
The professional divisions
Professional clubs from the lower divisions join next. The USL Championship and USL League One, the second and third tiers of the American pyramid, send most or all of their eligible clubs, along with independent professional teams that meet the federation's criteria. The way those leagues fit beneath MLS is set out in our guide to the U.S. soccer pyramid, and the second-tier league that supplies most of the Open Cup's strongest non-MLS entrants has its own explainer on the USL Championship.
MLS clubs
MLS first teams enter last, in a later round, which gives them fewer games to win and means the amateur and lower-division clubs have to survive several rounds before they meet one. The number of MLS clubs taking part, and the round they enter, have both changed in recent years, and that change is the subject of its own section below.
Second teams owned by MLS clubs, such as those playing in MLS Next Pro, have at times been excluded from entering in their own right, on the reasoning that an MLS club should not field two teams in the same cup. The federation's position on this has shifted along with the rest of the MLS entry question.
| Level | Typical entrants | How they qualify | Where they enter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local amateur | Community and adult amateur clubs | Open Division qualifying the previous year | First round |
| National amateur | USL League Two and NPSL clubs | League performance or league allocation | First round |
| Third tier | USL League One clubs | League membership | Early rounds |
| Second tier | USL Championship clubs | League membership | Early rounds |
| Independent professional | MLS Next Pro clubs not owned by an MLS club, others meeting the criteria | Federation approval | Early rounds |
| First tier | MLS clubs | Federation and league agreement for that year | Later rounds |
How ties are made: regional draws, hosts and no replays
The Open Cup is a national competition played in a country 2,800 miles wide, and a nationwide open draw would send amateur clubs on flights they cannot afford. The early rounds are therefore drawn regionally. Clubs are grouped by geography, and opponents are drawn from within the same region so that travel stays short and costs stay manageable. The regional logic loosens as the tournament goes on, and by the later rounds clubs can be drawn against any other club in the country.
Who hosts
Hosting has been decided in different ways over the years. For a long stretch U.S. Soccer awarded home games through a bidding process, in which clubs offered to host and the federation chose. In 2013 the federation changed the policy, and home teams throughout the tournament have since been decided by random selection. The detail, including what happens when a drawn host cannot meet the stadium requirements, is published in the competition rules for each year.
The practical effect for a lower-division club is significant. A home game against an MLS opponent fills a small stadium, generates gate receipts the club rarely sees, and gives its players the best chance of an upset: a familiar field, often a smaller one, and a home crowd.
Level games
Every tie is a single game. If the score is level after 90 minutes, the teams play 30 minutes of extra time, two halves of 15. If they are still level, the tie is decided by kicks from the penalty mark under the Laws of the Game. The site's explainer on extra time in soccer covers how the additional periods work.
There are no replays. Early editions of the competition sometimes needed replays and multi-game finals to settle level ties, as most cup competitions did in that era, but the modern cup is decided on the day.
What the winner gets: the trophy, the money and a continental place
The winner of the Open Cup takes home three things.
The first is the trophy. The competition's original trophy, the Dewar Challenge Trophy, dates to the early years of the cup and was donated by the Scottish whisky distiller Sir Thomas Dewar. It is one of the oldest objects in American soccer and a link between the modern tournament and its industrial-era beginnings.
The second is prize money. U.S. Soccer pays prize money to the champion, the runner-up and clubs that reach the later rounds, with additional payments to the lower-division and amateur clubs that advance furthest. The amounts have changed over time and are not given here, since a figure from one year would be wrong for the next. The scale matters less to an MLS club than to an amateur one, for which a deep run can cover a season's expenses.
The third is the one MLS clubs care about most: a place in the CONCACAF Champions Cup. The continental competition for North and Central America and the Caribbean takes the Open Cup winner as one of the American entrants. If the winner has already qualified another way, the berth is reallocated to another club under the qualification rules rather than going unused. How the continental tournament is structured, and the other routes American clubs take into it, are explained in our guide to the CONCACAF Champions Cup.
The berth is not reserved for MLS clubs. In principle a USL Championship side, or an amateur club, that won the Open Cup would take the place in the Champions Cup like any other champion, subject to the confederation's stadium and licensing requirements. Rochester's 1999 title came before the modern continental format, and no lower-division club has won since, so the scenario has not been tested in the current competition. It is one more reason the tournament's later rounds carry weight for clubs below MLS: a single run could put a second-tier club in the continent's top competition.
That continental place is the reason MLS clubs field strong teams in the later rounds, even in seasons when they rotate in the early ones. A club that wins the Open Cup gets a guaranteed path to continental competition that does not depend on finishing high in the MLS standings or winning the playoffs.
MLS and the Open Cup: the 2024 dispute and what followed
In December 2023, MLS announced that it planned to withdraw its first teams from the 2024 Open Cup and send teams from MLS Next Pro, its developmental league, instead. The league's argument was about the calendar. MLS clubs were playing a regular season, the expanded Leagues Cup, the CONCACAF Champions Cup and in some cases other competitions. Adding the Open Cup's midweek games, the league said, overloaded the schedule and risked player welfare.
U.S. Soccer did not accept the plan. The federation's professional league standards, which set the conditions under which a league is sanctioned at a particular division, require participation in the Open Cup by the clubs of sanctioned professional leagues. The federation's board declined MLS's request and treated the Open Cup as a competition MLS clubs were obliged to enter with first teams.
The compromise
The two sides reached a compromise for 2024. A reduced number of MLS first teams, eight by most accounts, took part, entering in the round of 32, while clubs involved in the Champions Cup and some others were excused. A number of MLS Next Pro teams entered in place of the remaining MLS clubs. The arrangement allowed the 2024 tournament to go ahead, and the final, played in September 2024, was won by LAFC against Sporting Kansas City.
For 2025, the federation and the league agreed a larger MLS entry than in 2024, sixteen first teams, but still not the full field, with Champions Cup participants again excused. The 2026 edition followed the same pattern, with sixteen MLS clubs entering in the round of 32. The question of how many MLS clubs should play, and at what stage, was left open for future editions.
What the rest of the pyramid made of it
The reaction outside MLS was close to unanimous. USL clubs, amateur clubs and many supporters' groups argued that the Open Cup's value to them depended on the chance of hosting an MLS first team, and that MLS Next Pro sides, made up largely of young reserves, were not the same draw. A lower-division club that had budgeted around a big home game against an MLS opponent stood to lose its best gate of the year.
Player welfare was the league's strongest argument, and it was not frivolous. Congested calendars are a recognized injury risk, and MLS clubs in the Champions Cup were already playing more games in the spring than the league's schedule had been built around. But the federation's position was that the solution lay in scheduling and rotation, not in removing first teams from a competition that the rest of the pyramid relied on.
Why the league and the federation disagree
The disagreement is structural. MLS wants a calendar it controls, with competitions that serve its commercial goals: the regular season, the playoffs, the Leagues Cup. The Open Cup is not one of those. Its revenue goes largely to the federation and to the lower-division clubs that host big games. Its scheduling is set by U.S. Soccer. For an MLS club with a crowded summer, an away game at a USL Championship club on a Wednesday night is a cost.
U.S. Soccer sees the Open Cup as part of the federation's role. It is the one competition in which every level of American soccer can meet, and it is the closest thing the United States has to the open national cups that most soccer countries treat as essential. The federation also has an interest in the cup's health: if MLS treats it as optional, the lower-division clubs lose their biggest home games, and the tournament loses the reason anyone outside the core audience pays attention.
Neither side is wrong about its own priorities. The dispute will recur as long as the calendar stays as full as it is, and the details of future MLS participation are best read in the federation's announcements for each year rather than assumed from this page.
Cupsets: the lower-division and amateur clubs that beat MLS sides
"Cupset" is the American soccer term for an upset in the Open Cup, and the competition has produced more of them than its profile would suggest.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who knows the English FA Cup. An MLS club rotates its lineup for a midweek away game at a smaller stadium. The home side is motivated, organized and playing in front of its biggest crowd of the year. The MLS club concedes early or fails to score, and the game is lost.
Rochester, 1999
The most important upset is the one that won the tournament. In 1999 the Rochester Raging Rhinos, an A-League club, beat several MLS teams on the way to the final and then beat the Colorado Rapids 2-0 in Columbus. Rochester's run remains the last time a club from outside MLS has won the Open Cup.
Charleston, 2008
The Charleston Battery, then in the USL First Division, reached the final in 2008, beating MLS clubs on the way, and lost to D.C. United. Charleston's run is still cited as the clearest example of a lower-division club taking the competition seriously while its MLS opponents did not.
Miami FC, 2017
Miami FC, then in the North American Soccer League, beat Atlanta United and Orlando City in 2017 before going out in the quarterfinals. Atlanta, in its first season, had already established itself as one of MLS's best attacking teams.
Sacramento, 2022
Sacramento Republic, a USL Championship club, reached the 2022 final after beating MLS opponents in the earlier rounds. It lost the final 3-0 to Orlando City in Orlando. The run was the deepest by a lower-division club in more than a decade.
| Year | Club | League at the time | How far it went |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Rochester Raging Rhinos | A-League | Won the final against the Colorado Rapids |
| 2008 | Charleston Battery | USL First Division | Lost the final to D.C. United |
| 2017 | Miami FC | North American Soccer League | Beat Atlanta United and Orlando City, out in the quarterfinals |
| 2022 | Sacramento Republic | USL Championship | Lost the final to Orlando City |
Why the upsets keep happening
The causes are mostly mechanical, and they repeat.
Rotation comes first. An MLS coach facing a league game at the weekend will often send out a lineup built around reserves and young players for a Tuesday or Wednesday cup tie, especially in the early rounds. Those players are talented, but they have not played together much, and they are facing a lower-division side that has trained as a unit all season and treats the game as its most important of the year.
The field comes second. Many lower-division stadiums are smaller than MLS venues, some have narrower fields, and a number of them use artificial turf. An MLS team used to a wide grass field and a slower build-up can find the space it relies on simply is not there.
Travel is third. The regional draw keeps early-round trips short for amateur clubs, but by the time an MLS club enters, it may be flying to a city it rarely visits, often on short notice, in the middle of a league schedule.
The last cause is the crowd. A USL club's home game against an MLS opponent is usually its biggest of the season, and the atmosphere in a full small stadium is closer to the players than anything an MLS reserve will have experienced. A single early goal for the home side changes the game's whole shape.
No single factor guarantees an upset. Over enough games, they guarantee that some happen every year.
The Rochester, Charleston and Sacramento runs would not have been possible in a closed competition. That is the strongest argument for the open format, and it is the argument U.S. Soccer makes whenever MLS asks to limit its participation.
The record holders: Bethlehem Steel, Maccabee and the MLS clubs behind them
Two clubs share the record for most Open Cup titles, with five each.
Bethlehem Steel, the company team of the Pennsylvania steel producer, won five titles between 1915 and 1926. It was one of the strongest clubs in the American Soccer League, the professional league that flourished in the 1920s, and it drew on British and other European players working for the company.
Maccabee Los Angeles, an amateur club from the Jewish community in Los Angeles, won five titles between 1973 and 1981, at a time when the professional clubs of the North American Soccer League did not enter the competition. Maccabee's record is the last great run by an amateur club, and one that the modern format, with MLS clubs entering in the later rounds, makes almost impossible to repeat.
Among MLS clubs, the Chicago Fire, the Seattle Sounders and Sporting Kansas City each had four titles through the 2025 edition. Chicago won in 1998, 2000, 2003 and 2006. Seattle won three in a row from 2009 to 2011 and a fourth in 2014. Sporting won in 2004, as the Kansas City Wizards, and in 2012, 2015 and 2017. Any of the three would tie the record with one more title, so these totals move with every final.
The MLS era's finals
The list of recent finals shows how thoroughly MLS clubs have dominated the later rounds since 2000. Only two lower-division clubs have reached a final in that time, Charleston in 2008 and Sacramento in 2022, and both lost. A fuller record of MLS's own championship is in our list of every MLS Cup winner, and the two lists overlap less than one might expect: several of the cup's winners have never won MLS Cup.
| Year | Winner | Runner-up |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | FC Dallas | New England Revolution |
| 2017 | Sporting Kansas City | New York Red Bulls |
| 2018 | Houston Dynamo | Philadelphia Union |
| 2019 | Atlanta United | Minnesota United |
| 2022 | Orlando City | Sacramento Republic |
| 2023 | Houston Dynamo | Inter Miami |
| 2024 | LAFC | Sporting Kansas City |
| 2025 | Nashville SC | Austin FC |
From 1914 to now: the National Challenge Cup and the clubs that built it
The competition began in the 1913-14 season as the National Challenge Cup, organized by the newly formed United States Football Association, the body now known as U.S. Soccer. Brooklyn Field Club beat Brooklyn Celtic in the first final in 1914.
For its first several decades the cup belonged to the clubs that formed the backbone of American soccer before the professional leagues of the late 20th century. Many were company teams, sponsored by mills, shipyards and steel plants that recruited workers who played. Bethlehem Steel was the most successful of these. Others were ethnic clubs, rooted in immigrant communities from Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Hungary and elsewhere. The cup's winners and finalists traced the industrial geography of the Northeast and the Midwest: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Missouri.
The long middle period
For much of the mid-20th century, American soccer existed largely outside national attention, and the Challenge Cup with it. The competition kept going, played by semi-professional and amateur clubs, with St. Louis, New York and Los Angeles prominent. The North American Soccer League, which ran from 1968 to 1984, did not take part, and the cup's champions in that era were mostly amateur and semi-professional clubs such as Maccabee. Our guide to the NASL's rise and collapse covers the professional league that existed alongside the cup without ever really joining it.
The modern era
The competition was carrying the name U.S. Open Cup by the 1990s, and MLS clubs entered from the league's first season in 1996. D.C. United won that year. Since then the cup has been an MLS competition in all but name at the final stage, with the exceptions noted above.
The pandemic gap
The 2020 tournament was canceled during the COVID-19 pandemic after its opening rounds had been organized, and the 2021 edition was also canceled. They are the only years since 1914 in which the competition was not completed. The cup returned in 2022.
- 1914First final
- 1999Lamar Hunt name added
- 2Pandemic cancellations
- 1999Last winner from outside MLS
Fixed dates from the competition's history. The last non-MLS winner is correct through the 2025 edition and would change if a lower-division club won.
Why the cup carries Lamar Hunt's name
Lamar Hunt is better known to most American sports fans as the founder of the American Football League and the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. The name of the Super Bowl is often credited to him. His importance in soccer was nearly as large, and less recognized.
Hunt invested in professional soccer in the 1960s, when he owned the Dallas Tornado of the NASL, and stayed with the sport through its collapse in the 1980s. When MLS launched in 1996, he was one of its founding investor-operators, and at different points he operated three clubs: the Columbus Crew, the Kansas City Wizards and FC Dallas. He built what was then Columbus Crew Stadium, which opened in 1999 as the first stadium built specifically for an MLS club, a model that the rest of the league eventually followed.
U.S. Soccer added his name to the Open Cup in 1999, while he was still alive, in recognition of that commitment. The competition has been the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup ever since. Hunt died in December 2006. His family remained involved in MLS through FC Dallas, and the cup's name is a reminder that the national competition and the professional league were, for a time, held together by the same handful of people.
How the U.S. Open Cup compares with England's FA Cup
The English FA Cup is the obvious comparison and the one most often made, usually to the Open Cup's disadvantage.
The principle is identical. Both cups are national knockout competitions open to professional and amateur clubs, organized by the national federation rather than by a league. Both start with qualifying rounds for the smallest clubs and bring the top-division clubs in later. Both are decided in single games. Both have produced upsets that their supporters remember for decades. The site's guide to the FA Cup format sets out how the English version runs.
Where they diverge
The differences are in scale, status and history. The FA Cup, first played in 1871-72, is older by four decades and has hundreds of entrants, a long-established place in the English calendar and a final at Wembley Stadium that has been one of the country's main sporting events for a century. Its attendances in the later rounds are large and its broadcast coverage is national.
The Open Cup has had none of that for most of its history. Early-round crowds are modest. Broadcast coverage has varied from national television in some years to online-only coverage in others, and finals have been played in MLS stadiums of varying size, often hosted by one of the finalists rather than at a fixed national venue.
Why the American cup struggles for attention
Several reasons work together. American sports culture is built around leagues and playoffs, not open cups, and the idea of a national knockout across divisions has no real equivalent in the NFL, NBA or MLB. MLS clubs have at times treated the cup as a secondary priority, which reduces the stakes for their fans. The calendar overlaps with the MLS season, the Leagues Cup and the Champions Cup, so the Open Cup competes for attention with competitions that have more marketing behind them.
None of that makes the format worse, only less visible. The Open Cup's defenders point out, fairly, that the cupsets of the last 25 years would be national stories in England, and that the competition's history is longer than any American professional league. American soccer has spent most of a century building leagues and only occasionally remembered that a national cup is what holds every level of the game together. More on the rest of soccer in the United States and abroad is collected on the site's soccer hub, and the summer tournament MLS now prioritizes is explained in our guide to the Leagues Cup format.