For four summers now, MLS and Liga MX have paused their domestic seasons so that all their clubs can play each other in a single, Concacaf-sanctioned tournament that didn’t exist in anything like this form a decade ago. Leagues Cup was billed as a chance to sell cross-border rivalries, showcase Liga MX’s bigger brands to American audiences, and give MLS a marquee summer product that could finally outshine the long-languishing US Open Cup. 

In some ways it has delivered on that promise, and a record crowd of more than 69,000 fans packed Lumen Field for the 2025 final between Seattle Sounders and Inter Miami, a number that would be the envy of almost any single-club match in North America. But in other, quieter ways it hasn’t delivered nearly as well, and plenty of the 2024 and 2025 knockout-round matches, games like Revolution versus NYCFC or Philadelphia against Columbus, ended up drawing crowds somewhere in the 7,000 to 15,000 range inside stadiums built to hold 20,000 or more, numbers that fell well short of what those same clubs pull in for an ordinary MLS regular-season match.

Now the competition is heading into its most consequential stretch yet, and the timing could hardly be more complicated. MLS is essentially blowing up its traditional schedule, shifting in 2027 to a July-to-May season aligned with Europe’s top leagues, complete with a winter break that North American soccer has never really had before, and Leagues Cup somehow has to find a place for itself inside a completely restructured soccer year. All of that makes this a moment to step back and ask what the tournament is actually for in the first place, and whether it can realistically survive a reshuffle this large.

The most common complaint from supporters is that the whole thing feels redundant. The Concacaf Champions Cup already exists as the region’s true continental club championship, and it feeds directly into the FIFA Club World Cup, giving it real, historic stakes that go well beyond bragging rights. Leagues Cup, by comparison, is essentially a scheduled tournament between two leagues’, closed off to others in the region, and something that can be enormously entertaining in theory but still feels structurally closer to a glorified exhibition than a trophy anyone will remember in 20 years. Critics argue that MLS never really needed to invent a second cross-border competition when Concacaf was already running one, though running it poorly some may say, and that the league mostly just needed a reliable way to get more Liga MX games onto American television screens, with Leagues Cup functioning as that vehicle.

The attendance numbers over the tournament’s history tend to back up that skepticism more than they undercut it. More than 10 Leagues Cup matches have been played in front of fewer than 15,000 fans, and when the Philadelphia Union took on the Columbus Crew in a 2024 semifinal, the match drew just over 12,000 people despite being a win-or-go-home game in a tournament MLS has promoted heavily. A Round of 32 match at Gillette Stadium in 2024, a venue that seats 65,000 and where the Revolution typically average around 24,000 on a normal matchday, was officially attended by only a little more than 7,000 fans, leaving much of the building visibly empty on television. 

Soccer writer Caleb Adams did not shy away from pointing out the negatives of the ticketing policies surrounding the tournament. “Tournament was designed to sell tickets to Liga MX fans living in the States,” he said on X. “Tickets aren’t included in MLS season ticket holder packages, just a dumb competition all around. The sooner it we remove Leagues Cup from existence, the better.”

Even LAFC, a club whose stadium had averaged impressive crowds since it opened in 2018, drew smaller-than-usual numbers for the two Leagues Cup games it actually bothered to report attendance for, and it simply declined to release figures for three other matches that summer, which fans reasonably read as a bad sign. The overall pattern has stayed pretty consistent across every edition so far, and outside of games that involve a true Liga MX giant like Club América or Chivas, or Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami, casual fans generally haven’t been showing up in the numbers MLS was hoping for, and the awkward midweek knockout kickoffs have only made that problem worse.

There’s collateral damage tied up in all of this too, and it isn’t only about empty seats. As MLS leaned harder into Leagues Cup year after year, it also quietly scaled back its own commitment to the US Open Cup, sending only a small handful of senior teams and filling out the rest of the bracket with reserve-level MLS Next Pro sides instead. That decision was seen by a lot of supporters’ groups, along with much of the USL community, as MLS effectively putting one of the oldest and most historic competitions in American soccer out to pasture.

To be fair to the league, MLS would push back and argue the overall trajectory here is upward rather than downward. The league likes to point to those 69,000 fans at the 2025 final in Seattle as proof that attendance and fan engagement have grown with each new edition of the tournament, and 2026 pushed the format even further by sending select matches to Mexico for the very first time, with Club América hosting a game at Estadio Azteca and Toluca hosting twice at its own stadium, a genuine attempt to make the event feel like a two-way exchange instead of Liga MX stars simply visiting American cities. 

The tournament is also now formally Concacaf-sanctioned and feeds three qualifying clubs directly into the 2027 Concacaf Champions Cup, which at least gives it some real sporting stakes beyond a trophy and negligible prize money, and there’s a pathway that could eventually see the Champions Cup winner reach the next edition of FIFA Club World Cup as well.

Commercially, the argument for keeping it around is fairly simple even if plenty of fans remain unconvinced by it. Guaranteed matchups between MLS and Liga MX clubs, broadcast nationally with no blackouts anywhere, are worth real money to Apple TV and to the league’s Mexican broadcast partners, and this remains one of the very few MLS products that Liga MX’s much larger fanbase will actually tune in to watch. That single fact, that Leagues Cup gives MLS one of its rare points of leverage over a considerably more popular league next door, is probably the real reason the tournament isn’t going anywhere, regardless of how many empty seats keep showing up in places like Foxborough or Columbus.

The 2027 calendar change adds a genuinely awkward wrinkle to all of this that MLS hasn’t fully addressed yet. The league is framing its move to a July-to-May season as broadly good news for cross-border competition, since clubs will now benefit from schedules that more closely resemble those of their international opponents, and Liga MX already runs on a similar Apertura and Clausura cycle that lines up reasonably well with that shift. But underneath that optimistic framing sits a real scheduling problem that nobody has fully solved. Leagues Cup has always lived inside the natural mid-summer gap in MLS’s calendar, and that gap is precisely what the league is now eliminating, since the new season is designed to run continuously from July all the way through the following May with nothing but a short winter break in the middle.

So does Leagues Cup actually have a future? Almost certainly yes, though probably not quite the future MLS originally imagined when it relaunched the tournament back in 2023. Concacaf sanctioning, the Apple broadcast deal, and the ongoing value of guaranteed access to Liga MX’s much bigger audience all make outright cancellation seem pretty unlikely at this point. But the tournament probably isn’t going to keep expanding in its current shape either, and the more realistic path forward looks like quiet contraction and retooling rather than continued growth. 

That likely means fewer forced midweek fixtures between MLS teams that have no natural rivalry with each other in the first place, more marquee neutral-site and Mexico-hosted matches built around the handful of clubs that actually move tickets, and a scaled-down group phase once the competition has to be squeezed into a calendar that no longer has a clean summer window set aside for it. 

The core tension MLS has never really resolved, a competition that depends heavily on star power like Messi, América, or Chivas just to draw a decent crowd, sitting right on top of a continental championship that already exists and already does that job, doesn’t simply disappear because the calendar happens to move around it. If anything, 2027 finally forces MLS to answer the question fans have been asking since the tournament’s relaunch in 2023: is Leagues Cup a real, meaningful competition in its own right, or is it mostly a clever scheduling trick built to sell get US-based Liga MX fans into American stadiums?

The calendar change alone won’t kill the tournament, but it does take away the one excuse MLS has always been able to lean on, which is that there simply wasn’t anywhere else in the calendar to put it.