Arthur Mattson’s frustration mounted as the U.S. Open Cup slipped from his grasp and teetered on the brink of collapse.
It was early February; and for months, under pressure from MLS, the U.S. Soccer Federation had been charting a course for the future of the century-old tournament. Mattson chaired a U.S. Soccer committee overseeing the Open Cup. Naturally, he wanted all MLS teams to participate, as federation rules required.
But MLS had attempted to ditch the 2024 tournament; and U.S. Soccer leadership seemed willing to compromise. When Mattson, a longtime soccer administrator and former USSF board member, tried to negotiate a resolution, he says, higher-ups asked him to “stand down.”
So he resigned as Open Cup Committee chair in mid-February.
“I would never allow MLS to pick and choose the rules and policies that they follow while expecting other leagues to abide by the rules,” Mattson told Yahoo Sports.
But U.S. Soccer, led by CEO J.T. Batson, apparently felt it had to.
Batson and others brokered an agreement that U.S. Soccer announced Friday: MLS will send just eight of its 26 eligible teams to the 2024 Open Cup, the 109th edition of the country’s longest-running soccer competition. Eleven “MLS Next Pro” teams, nine of them MLS reserve teams, will also participate, alongside the tournament’s traditional smattering of lower-tier pro and amateur clubs.
The revamped-but-temporary format will keep the Open Cup alive, for now. But to sustain it, U.S. Soccer officials bent their Pro League Standards to accommodate one member’s dollar-driven desires.
They bent because they had no leverage, because the sport’s balance of power has shifted in recent years — toward the billionaires and commissioner who own and run Major League Soccer.
The existential question
The mid-December rebellion that rattled American soccer was something of an existential moment for the federation. MLS owners ratified a plan to send reserve teams to the 2024 Open Cup. U.S. Soccer had to respond and implicitly answer a provocative question, the “ultimate question,” as two experienced stakeholders framed it at the time — Who controls the sport: the billionaires or elected representatives?
Publicly, five days later, U.S. Soccer seemed to stand up to MLS. It released a statement that read, in part: “We have informed MLS that the U.S….