U.S. Open Cup is mostly a bore with no easy remedy in sight.

By Robert Wagman
SoccerTimes

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Friday, July 27, 2001) -- Though it was long ago, I can still remember in the early 1960s, when I was a Saint Louis University student. We used to go down to Heine Miene Field in South St. Louis to watch U.S. Open Cup matches between Kutis, the local club sponsored by a funeral home, and the hated rivals from Chicago -- the Kickers or the German Americans or whatever name they were going by that year. It was basically the SLU college players versus the semipros from the Windy City led by Willy Roy, who went on to become a star in the North American Soccer League.

Entrance to the field was through a bar, a buck paid at the front door before winding through the place and out the back door onto the field. There fans would find a nice place to watch along the sidelines, or, for the earlybirds, there might be a seat in the tiny bleachers.

I was reminded of this last night as I watched two Major League Soccer elite teams go at one another in this year’s Open Cup quarterfinals from the University of San Francisco’s cozy Negoesco Stadium. Whenever either team had a corner kick, the player taking the kick had to walk among the fans lining the sidelines and say "excuse me" to get them to back up. The announced crowd was 1,881. It was almost exactly as I remember that field in South St. Louis 40 years ago.

This says about all that needs to be said about the current state of the Open Cup. It is being widely ignored, not just by the general public where soccer is ignored by many, but by the soccer community as well.

On Tuesday night, four Open Cup quarterfinal matches were played. Fewer than 17,000 fans actually showed up to see all four matches, two between MLS rivals and two attractive matchups between MLS clubs and the top two teams from the second-division A-League. The Los Angeles Galaxy visit to the San Jose Earthquakes was considered so unimportant -- and expected to draw so few -- management didn’t want to risk damage to the freshly-sodded Spartan Stadium field with MLS All-Star festivities just three days away. So the match was moved to the small field on the University of San Francisco campus. The same was true for the Pittsburgh Riverhounds trip to the Chicago Fire which was held at a local soccer field in Wheaton, Ill. with a capacity of less than 2,500.

The New England Revolution played at its Foxboro Stadium and D.C. United was at its RFK Stadium home, but both drew their smallest crowds of the year, not covering the cost of opening 50,000-plus-seat stadiums.

So nothing much has changed with the Open Cup over the past four decades, from when the matches were played between supposedly amateur teams and before the start of the high-profile professional leagues here. Something has to be done, but I’m not sure what.

Let me make a confession, I don’t much like Cup competitions. I’m not just talking the U.S. Open Cup. I’ve seen Cup matches in one form or another in England, Scotland, France, the Netherlands and Italy. Essentially, they are much the same. The top division teams always seem to take these competitions less than seriously, usually fielding reserve-heavy teams, and when a lower-division team is matched against an upper-division opponent, it almost always packs in the defense, hoping for a lucky break while sitting back and waiting for the better team to break it down. Not exactly the beautiful game.

In Europe, however, there can be very attractive Cup matches. In most top European divisions, rivals meet only twice per season, so a Cup meeting can result in a rubber match between traditional opponents. Then too, with the promotion-relegation system, a Cup match can be the only time during the season two hated rivals will meet.

But in the U.S. Open Cup, the MLS teams -- when they are meeting opponents from the lower echelons -- almost always treat the matches as some kind of great burden, and usually employ reserves or even call up lower-division players from farm clubs to fill in. All too often they lose -- this year four MLS clubs were knocked out in their first match, one to a fourth-division amateur side. Lower-level opponents show they can defend with 10 men, and can prevail on a lucky goal. When two MLS clubs do meet in the later rounds, it is usually treated as just a nuisance compared to a league game, a great burden since the teams could meet as many as five times during a season, noy counting the playoffs.

The only MLS teams that seem to take the competition very seriously are those having awful years. They seem to see the Cup as some measure of redemption, thus it is no surprise that two of the four remaining teams are United and the Revolution, two teams that would not make the playoffs if the season ended today.

As I said, I am really not sure what can be done. Certainly one solution would be to increase the prize money and guarantee it goes directly to the players, and not to the clubs or MLS. The top prize currently is $100,000, but usually most or all of it goes to the club. If it is an MLS side, it must split prize money with the league office. Start offering $25,000 each to each player on the Cup winner and $10,000 to each member of the losers, and tournament matches might suddenly become more spirited.

Obviously that is not a practical solution, and won’t happen any time soon. So what’s left? One help might be to condense the competition. Currently, there’s a month between the quarterfinals and the semifinals, and then another nine-or-so weeks until the championship game. By that time, the final is mostly forgotten by everyone except the most avid soccer nuts.

One suggestion has been to start the competition in the fall at the lowest levels, and bring in the MLS and top A-League clubs during their preseason, making the matches of more value to the teams. Another is to go in the absolutely opposite direction, and open the competition only to amateur and semi-amateur clubs.

Neither of these suggestions leaves me very excited. And there doesn’t seem to be a practical solution. All I know is that, as presently constituted, the Cup is not worth the time, the money or the energy expended on it. To see MLS clubs playing in front of minuscule crowds in supposedly important matches only serves as an embarrassment to soccer in this country.

The Open Cup is clearly broken, but I'm the first to admit I have no real idea how to fix it.

Senior correspondent Robert Wagman's "It Seems To Me . . . " appears regularly on SoccerTimes. He can be e-mailed at bobwagman@soccertimes.com..