2025 Leagues Cup: Your Cheat Sheet For The MLS And Liga MX Showcase

Forbes

5 days ago

Atlanta United midfielder Pedro Amador, left, battles with Club Santos Laguna forward Antony Lozano ... More during a 2024 Leagues Cup match.
The 2025 Leagues Cup gets underway on Tuesday night.
Like its name suggests, the competition involves multiple leagues. The format is slightly tweaked in its third year, with 18 teams from MLS competing against all 18 Liga MX teams.
Here's everything you need to know about the event.
The format
The competition has been adjusted from a World Cup-style event to a new format that somewhat mirrors the new UEFA Champions League competitive structure.
There are two phases, with 36 teams playing in the intial league phase (similar to the UCL's League Phase) followed by eight teams contesting the knockout phase.
Each MLS team will play three matches against a Liga MX team and vice versa After all 36 teams have played three intraleague fixtures, the top four teams from each league on total points earned will advance to the quarterfinals.
All matches that finish level after 90 minutes will go straight to penalties. Each team will earn three points for a win in normal time, two for win in a shootout win, one for a shootout loss and none for a regulation loss.
Both the 18 MLS teams and 18 Liga MX teams have been divided into six, six-team groups, with three from each league in each group. Every match contested will feature an MLS and Liga MX teams from the same group, at the MLS team's home venue.
Advancement to the knockout phase will be determined by a single 18-team table each for MLS and Liga MX clubs, without accounting for group alignment.
The top four MLS teams and top four Liga MX sides will advance to the quarterfinal fixtures arranged as follows:
MLS teams will host all four quarterfinals. Semifinals, the finals and the third-place match will also be played in MLS markets, with the higher seeded MLS team having host priority if the game is between two MLS foes, and a neutral venue announced if the game is between two Liga MX sides.
All games not decided after 90 minutes will go straight to penalties, rather than playing 30 minutes of extra time seen in other knockout competitions.
The Schedule
The group phase will be played in its entirety between Tuesday, July 29 and Thursday, Aug. 7 while both Liga MX and MLS halt domestic play.
Both leagues will resume their domestic schedules on the weekend of Aug. 9-10, with the knockout phase to be played on midweek dates as follows:
What's at stake
There are both financial and competitive motivations for teams participating in Leagues Cup, in addition to the intracontinental bragging rights of lifting a major trophy.
Three berths in the 2026 Concacaf Champions Cup will be awarded to the competition's top three finishers. The winner will be placed automatically in the round of 16. The second- and third-place finishers will be placed as two of 22 teams competing in the first round.
This makes the event similar to two other club events in Concacaf, the Caribbean Cup and the Central American Cup, which each also place three teams in the Champions Cup each year.
The amount of prize money at stake for the 2025 competitors isn't available, but we can make some guesses based on previous figures. In 2023, reports suggested the overall purse was around $40 million spread across 47 competing teams, including around $2 million for eventual winners Inter Miami.
How to watch
Every match of the 2025 Leagues Cup is available with a subscription to Apple TV's MLS Season Pass service, but if you're not a subscriber there are other ways to keep pace with some of the action.
According to World Soccer Talk, 12 games will be shown in English on FS1 during the league phase, and seven more will be shown in Spanish on UniMas and TUDN. Additional knockout phase matches will be shown on both platforms.