Sep 02 2009
D.C. United REALLY Wants You to Give a Damn About the U.S. Open Cup
Pssst. C’mere, kid. I’ve got a secret to tell you.
You’re a soccer fan, right? You ever heard of the FA Cup? That big soccer competition in England? Yeah, guess what? We’ve got a competition just like that here in the U.S.! It’s called the U.S. Open Cup. And the final is tonight!
What? You’ve never heard of it? Guess you haven’t been to D.C. lately. D.C. United has been pimping this game like crazy — full-page ads in the papers, big web site, TV spots, even a pub crawl. See, the D.C. United people got all pissed that the Seattle Sounders boss called shenanigans on D.C. and the U.S. Soccer Federation for awarding the final to D.C. instead of Seattle, ’cause the Sounders promised a sellout, and D.C. only got a little over 8,200 for last year’s Open Cup final.
So that got D.C. United pulling out the stops to get fannies in the seats — the ad blitz, slashed ticket prices, $2 beers, you name it. They’re actually promoting the Open Cup. And guess what? The winner goes to the CONCACAF Champions League. That’s how D.C. got into CCL this year, even though they missed the MLS Cup playoffs last year.
What’s that? You still don’t care? Who are you, Don Garber’s kid? Nothing matters but the league to you? Yeah, I know, D.C.U. only got 8,834 for their last CCL match. You don’t care about the CCL? Not so interested in seeing the winner get a shot at the Copa Libertadores winner, or even the European champs? This Open Cup is a stepping stone to that, y’know.
Just want to win MLS Cup, eh? Ah, well, your loss, kid. There’s more to soccer in this country than MLS, y’know.
(More info about tonight’s U.S. Open Cup final can be found at TheCup.us. It used to be at USOpenCup.com, but the USSF would rather promote 2Girls1Cup than the Open Cup…)
3 Responses to “D.C. United REALLY Wants You to Give a Damn About the U.S. Open Cup”
As a DCU supporter I don’t think we fans care as long as trophies keep ending up in the trophy case. The problem is that the team simply isn’t deep enough to compete in the US Open Cup, the CCL, and the MLS regular season the way British teams can. Last year we punted on the MLS regular season and won the Open Cup. We had to make that decision.
I mean, there are 38 people on Man U’s roster. They have three world-class strikers and at least six top-shelf fullbacks. They can rotate players in and out with little loss of skill. DCU has a mere 26 players (as does Seattle), and that’s nowhere near enough to deal with the fixture congestion we run into with all those competitions… you can only start Ben Olsen or Fredy Montero so much.
In short – if we want people to care about the US Open Cup or CCL, we need to allow MLS teams to expand their rosters and raise the salary cap so teams can get more players that they can rotate.
It’s a chicken-and-eggs kind of problem: MLS is afraid to increase rosters and raise the salary cap because MLS doesn’t bring in enough money to pay for more and better players. And there’s still not enough evidence that raising the quality of play would bring in more revenue. MLS will spend the next ten years inching their way towards the solution of bigger and better rosters, for better or worse. MLS isn’t going to take any leaps of faith.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and eventually it won’t. Eventually it would be nice if MLS, USL, USSF, and even CSA worked together more on these sorts of things, especially for things like the US Open Cup and international tournaments.
For instance I have an idea to kill two birds with one stone: ie promoting the US Open Cup more, and also providing a summer break for MLS so players can play for their national teams without gutting their MLS side and forcing MLS to put substandard teams on the field during regular MLS season play.
So here’s an idea: have MLS season take a break in June and July (for various international tournaments: World Cup, Confederations Cup, Gold Cup, Copa America, U-20 World Cup, etc.) to allow for national team players to have time off to play for their national teams.
While MLS regular season is on hold, divide the US MLS teams up into groups for US Open Cup play (the Canadian teams would at the same time play in their own CSA tournament), say into groups of four (and if there aren’t enough to form groups of four, add teams from USL until you have enough for groups of four), probably divided geographically to hold down travel costs.
Then have each team in the group play home and away every other team in the group. For a group of four, that’s six scheduled games during the MLS summer break in June and July. The winner (or possibly the winner and runner up) of each group would then go into the remainder of the US Open Cup play against surviving non-MLS teams in the Fall, ie, continue knock-out tournament play with the US Open Cup winner being determined in September or November as done currently.
The idea is that MLS still could write up a solid schedule over the Winter so that MLS teams could give to their season ticket holders a rationally planned schedule for the whole year: say roughly 15 games in the Spring, then a Summer break while the national team players play for their national teams, while the remaining MLS players play for their MLS teams in six scheduled games in US Open Cup group play, then MLS regular season resumes in August for the remaining 15 games.
The advantage to this system is that MLS could make the Summer US Open Cup games part of their season ticket holder’s ticket package. This is something they really can’t do with the existing US Open Cup system, since apart from the first match they don’t know if they will be playing, or where, or against whom. This makes it very difficult for MLS teams to market US Open Cup matches to their season ticket holders and other fans.
Of course for this to happen, at the very least you need greater cooperation between MLS and USSF, and you’ll need all teams in their own SSS (or equivalent) so that they are free to schedule games to match this plan.