What the expanded Jägermeister Cup means for the Legion

The USL announced last week that the Jägermeister Cup, which was introduced this past season as an additional competition for League One clubs, will be expanded in 2025 to include all USL Championship clubs. This had more or less been an open secret but is now official. Obviously, a lot will have to change in the competition format and possibly also for the Championship schedule as a whole.

The 2024 edition of the Jäger Cup (also known as the USL Cup) was not without some controversy. The eventual winners were the Northern Colorado Hailstorm, who beat Forward Madison in a penalty shootout. The Hailstorm went on to claim in court that they had not been paid the promised $100,000 prize money along with several other allegations, mostly in response to the USL terminating the club’s franchise agreement.

The Hailstorm were not the only League One team to bite the dust in 2024; Central Valley Fuego is now also history. That brought the number of League One clubs down to just 10. Lexington SC are moving up to the Championship this season. That makes 9 teams remaining. The good news is that 5 new League One clubs are debuting in 2025: AV Alta FC (Lancaster, CA), FC Naples (FL), Portland Hearts of Pine (ME), Texoma FC (Sherman, TX) and Westchester SC (Mount Vernon, NY). So 14 teams in all this season, with more to come in the next few years.

With the 23 surviving Championship teams, plus the self-promoting Lexington, there will thus be 38 clubs in all competing in the Cup this year. The plan is for the initial rounds to be on a group basis, followed by knockout playoffs, much like the World Cup and pretty much all US pro sports. The problem here is that 38 does not conveniently divide into small groups. What the USL has done is to set 6 largely geographic groups, of which 4 will have 6 teams and 2 will have 7 teams. Since League One is the provider of the 2 extra teams, those teams will be distributed across the 6 groups such that 4 groups will have 2 League One teams and 2 will have 3. Except that the 24 Championship teams (which divide neatly into 6 groups of 4) are in fact not evenly distributed either, with two groups having 5 teams and two groups having just 3.

Here’s how the groups will look:

If that looks familiar to some of you, yeah, I pulled the background from Wikipedia. Obviously, a perfect geographic breakdown was not possible, although the way it was done is a bit unfortunate in some ways. Notably, FC Tulsa and Texoma FC would seem like a good rivalry but that would have made some bigger grouping headaches. Extra games in the Louisville-Indy rivalry (the LIPAFC) were probably a good decision to avoid, though. The two westernmost groups are clearly the most spread out, and Spokane Velocity (like their sister team the Zephyr in the Super League) are stuck way out on their own up in the northwest.

The good news here is that the two groups with 3 League One teams are 3 and 6. Moreover, those are also the two groups with only 3 Championship teams. The Legion is in Group 3. The two Championship opponents are Indy Eleven and FC Tulsa. Not overly taxing. As for the 3 League One teams, Forward Madison, as noted above were runners-up in the 2024 Jäger Cup and finished in the league regular season, making it to the semi-finals of the playoffs. One Knoxville were 5th, losing to Greenville SC in the first round of the playoffs. They were also the best of the teams not qualifying for the Cup knockout stage. Chattanooga Red Wolves aren’t good – they were 11th in league play and last in the Cup group. A mixed bag then.

Group play will be just 4 games per team, however, so no club will play all the others in its group. 2 games each will be at home. The pairings will be assigned by random draw. The following knockout stage will consist of 8 teams, those being the 6 group winners and 2 wild cards. How the wild cards will be determined has not been announced; there could be quite some overlap. It’s also not clear how tiebreakers will work in group play. The Byzantine tiebreak system used in league play can’t work here; my guess is they will go with goal difference like the rest of the world does.

The big beneficiaries of this will clearly be the League One clubs, who will have an opportunity to match up with Championship teams in meaningful games. That has only previously been possible in the Open Cup, of course and that only by draw; here they are all guaranteed at least 2 games against Championship teams and most of them are guaranteed 3. Should be good for home attendances as well.

As for the Championship sides, this may or may not mean extra games on the schedule. Rumors surfaced last week that the Championship will be broken down into 3 groups of 8 teams and that the league season will be 30 games (14 games in-group and 16 out of group). That would offset the extra 4 games in Jäger Cup group play, with a maximum of 8 teams playing up to 3 additional games in the knockout stage. That strikes me as a better solution than what most had been expecting, namely that either Lexington or Birmingham would move to the Western Conference to keep them balanced. It would also mean not jamming in more midweek games.

However it turns out, this new competition will be an extra chance to gain some hardware (which is a rather boring plate and not a cup, it appears) and could be fairly entertaining. We shall see.