On Wednesday, US Soccer and Major League Soccer officially announced that all 27 US-based MLS teams will participate in the 2027 Lamar Hunt US Open Cup.
This will mark the first time all the American teams in MLS compete in the tournament since 2023, when MLS reduced its involvement to a select group of first teams, citing schedule congestion among other reasons for the change.
The story of all MLS teams returning to the tournament in 2027 was first reported by Ben Wright and Joseph Lowery of Backheeld on Tuesday morning.
Both local MLS teams have been regular Open Cup participants since the league lessened its involvement with the tournament. Since the change, New York City FC and Red Bull New York have competed in all but one edition, 2024, as in that year's tournament, both teams were represented by their respective MLS Next Pro reserve teams.
Back in business
The 2027 Open Cup will feature a grand total of 64 teams from the three top professional divisions of US Soccer, along with 32 amateur teams, for a grand total of 96 entrants.
The 112th edition of America's national soccer championship begins with the First Round in April and concludes with the Final, scheduled for December 15, 2027. First Round matchups will be announced in early 2027 with each pairing geographically matched with a team entering in the Round of 64. This means lower division teams are one win away from playing a Major League Soccer side, the shortest pathway since 2013 where MLS teams entered in Round 3.
The First Round will see 32 professional teams from the USL Championship (Division II), USL League One (Division III) and independent teams from MLS NEXT Pro (Division III) face off against 32 amateur teams (Open Division). All matches in this round will have a professional team playing an amateur one.
MLS teams will enter the 2027 Open Cup in July at the Round of 64 stage, along with five seeded clubs from the second-division USL Championship. US Soccer also announced that teams entering in this round will have hosting priority, meaning the idea of an MLS team playing a lower-division foe on the road has taken a big hit.
However, US Soccer has seemingly tried to make a concession. Should any lower-division team advance to the Round of 32, that team will have hosting priority.
For the second straight tournament, not all teams from the non-MLS professional leagues will take part. For a professional team to be eligible, they must have played in the most recent competition year of their league starting prior to Jan. 1, 2027. This is the reason why local expansion sides like Brooklyn FC, the Cosmos, and CT United FC were not eligible for the 2026 tournament.
Since the list of eligible Division II and Division III teams exceeds the number of available spots in the tournament, qualification criteria based on 2026 results will be applied to narrow the field. There are 45 teams — 25 from USL Championship, 17 from USL League One, and three independent clubs from MLS Next Pro — eligible to compete, but only 37 slots available for those teams to fill, so the tournament will need to trim eight names from its list of entrants.
How the field gets narrowed, and whether it depends solely on regular season results or accounts for the playoffs or other cup competitions, was not clarified at the time of this announcement.
Michael Battista
Tournament issues addressed
In early 2024, it was reported that US Soccer and MLS were at odds with one another about participation in the tournament. For years, MLS had issues with the tournament, not hesitating to make complaints publicly. In 2023, MLS commissioner Don Garber said the US Open Cup was "...a very poor reflection on what it is that we're trying to do with soccer at the highest level."
This all came to a head in late 2023 and early 2024, when the league officially attempted to withdraw teams from the competition.
In reporting for a previous website, it was discovered that owners from USL teams in the second and third divisions of the American soccer pyramid were reportedly offered a 60/40 revenue split for any match in which an MLS team traveled to face a lower-division opponent. This would be instead of the home team taking home the revenue, minus a percentage taken by US Soccer.
USL declined that proposal and, eventually, MLS only sent 16 teams into the competition, with a majority of the other sides represented by MLS Next Pro teams.
For 2027, US Soccer has tried to quash this sort of replacement by reserve team strategy with a "one club, one entry" policy. As today's announcement stated; "professional clubs will enter their highest-level professional team."
This, in turn, will end the possibility of MLS Next Pro reserve teams competing, though the three independent clubs in Next Pro — Carolina Core FC, Chattanooga FC, and Connecticut United FC — will be included in the field of competing professional teams.
When II teams from Next Pro were in the Open Cup, they experienced plenty of disappointments, with multiple losing to amateur teams in early rounds. One outlier in 2024, though, was NYCFC II, with the club making a Cinderella-like run to the Round of 16, winning some serious prize money along the way, and becoming the best-performing reserve team in the competition's history.
Since 2024, US Soccer has made efforts to improve the tournament's standing. In 2025, the total prize money was doubled to $1 million dollars, with the winners pocketing $600,000. The tournament and federation have also attracted new sponsors such as Marriott, Michelob Ultra, New York Life, and Nike.
The tournament's media rights, which had also long been a sore spot, have seen vast improvements. Following on the heels of an ESPN deal that suffered while the Covid-19 pandemic postponed the tournament, the Open Cup found some stability through Turner Sports and its broader multimedia partnership with US Soccer. However, the competition took an even bigger step when its rights were sold to CBS for both the 2025 and 2026 installments, with matches streamed on Paramount+ and aired on the CBS Sports Golazo Network.
The 2027 tournament's media deal, though, has not been announced at this time.
Calendar implications
The Open Cup is just one non-MLS tournament that teams from the top division of US Soccer take part in. There's also Concacaf Champions Cup, the Canadian Championship, and Leagues Cup to consider, and all are set to take place in 2027 while MLS flips its competitive calendar, introducing a new format and summer-to-spring schedule beginning next July.
These considerations had an impact of the Open Cup format for 2027. The tournament's final five rounds will all take place after Labor Day to accommodate the evolving professional soccer calendar. There's also now a three-month break between the tournament's First Round in April and the Round of 64 in early July.
The timing of matches throughout the tournament is different, too, with midweek games still the norm for most rounds, but with the Round of 64 in July — when the 27 MLS teams enter the competition — now set to be held on the weekend, with all Round of 64 matches set to be played between Thursday, July 8 and Sunday, July 11. The final will also be much later, now scheduled for mid-December, whereas in 2026, the trophy will be handed out on October 21.
According to reporting from Backheeled in their article about the tournament earlier this week, the new Open Cup format and schedule is mindful of Leagues Cup, and won't overlap with the annual MLS-Liga MX competition.
The future formats of these tournaments, and even the Open Cup, will be in the spotlight over the next few years as MLS adjusts to its new competitive calendar. Some tournaments, such as the Open Cup and Concacaf Champions Cup, formerly ran along fall-to-spring timelines in their histories, so as the league begins to follow a summer-to-spring schedule, more changes could be on the cards.
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