In most of the soccer world, cross-border club competitions are inherited rather than invented. The Copa Libertadores exists because South America shares a continent, a language, and a long memory of grudges. The Champions League exists because European clubs spent decades arguing about who was best and eventually built a bracket to settle it.
North America had no such inheritance. MLS and Liga MX grew up in different countries, on different calendars, with different economies, and — most importantly — inside separate pyramids. Nothing obliged a club from Guadalajara to play a club from Columbus in a match that actually counted for anything. So the two leagues built a mechanism themselves, and they called it the Leagues Cup.
A tournament assembled from scratch
The first version, in 2019, was modest: eight clubs, four from each league, played over a few days in the United States. Cruz Azul won it, beating Tigres in a final that was contested entirely between Mexican sides — a fitting result for an event that MLS clubs were still treating as an exhibition with better lighting.
Then came the pandemic, a couple of canceled editions, and a decision that changed the tournament's character entirely. In 2023, the Leagues Cup relaunched with every club from both leagues — 47 teams — crammed into a month-long window in the middle of the MLS season. Concacaf sanctioned it as an official regional competition, which mattered more than it sounds: the winner, runner-up, and third-place team earned places in the following year's Champions Cup. Suddenly these were matches with consequences attached.
From the outside, the tournament looks like a marketing exercise. It is partly that. It was designed for American television, scheduled in the dead of summer when European leagues are dormant and the domestic sports calendar is relatively quiet, and sold to a market that has been waiting a long time for meaningful club soccer involving Mexican teams. Almost every broadcast runs through MLS Season Pass, with Spanish-language coverage on TelevisaUnivision. The whole thing is engineered to be watched.
But the interesting part isn't the packaging. It's the question the tournament keeps asking and never quite answers.
What the results actually say
For years, the honest assessment of MLS versus Liga MX was that the gap was real but hard to measure. Friendlies don't count. The old SuperLiga faded out. The Champions Cup is played in the spring, when conditions for everyone are different. The Leagues Cup, whatever its commercial motives, at least produces a real scoreboard.
Since the expanded format arrived, that scoreboard has tilted in one direction. Inter Miami won the 2023 edition, beating Nashville on penalties in a final that ran to a 10–9 shootout and gave Lionel Messi his first trophy in Florida. The Columbus Crew won in 2024, beating LAFC 3–1. And when the field was trimmed to 36 clubs — 18 from each league — for 2025, the trophy stayed in MLS.
Three editions, three MLS winners. For a tournament that Liga MX supporters initially treated as a formality, that stings.
The caveats matter, though, and anyone who follows both leagues closely will list them quickly. Nearly every match is played in the United States or Canada, which means Mexican clubs travel into hostile, often sold-out NFL-sized stadiums and never get a home leg in return. MLS clubs arrive in the middle of their season, physically sharp and tactically settled, while Liga MX sides are only weeks into a new Apertura, still integrating signings and managing a roster that has just been rebuilt. And when the older, more grueling continental competition comes around in the spring, Liga MX clubs have generally still had the last word.
So the Leagues Cup isn't proof that MLS has caught up. It's proof that the comparison is now close enough to be worth arguing about — which is a different, and arguably more meaningful, development.
The cost of squeezing a month out of the calendar
Every tournament has to live somewhere, and this one lives in August. That's the part that has caused the most friction.
For MLS clubs that go deep, the expanded format meant as many as seven matches in roughly four weeks, sandwiched into a league season that was already compressed. Coaches complained openly about workload. Squads with thin depth got exposed. Supporters' Shield races — decided by regular-season consistency, not summer form — were disrupted by clubs playing different numbers of games. And for teams eliminated early, the whole thing produced an odd sensation: a month of watching rivals play competitive matches while their own season cooled.
The league and the tournament organizers heard the noise. Reducing the field to 36 clubs for 2025 was, in part, an acknowledgment that the original scale was unsustainable. Fewer teams, fewer matches, less strain.
There are also quirks baked into the format that have never fully satisfied anyone. Every match must produce a winner, so level games go straight to penalty shootouts — which produces drama, and also produces the nagging feeling that a coin-flip is deciding a competitive fixture. The event's identity has been split between two things that don't always coexist comfortably: a serious competition with continental qualification attached, and a summer festival designed for neutral fans and television.
Why it will keep being played
The awkwardness is real. The fix isn't obvious. And yet the Leagues Cup will almost certainly keep appearing on the calendar, because it solves a problem neither league could solve alone.
MLS needs the audience that Liga MX brings — a fan base that fills stadiums in the United States, watches in enormous numbers, and treats these matches as something closer to validation than entertainment. Liga MX clubs need access to that same market, plus the exposure that comes with playing in American venues. Concacaf gets a sanctioned property with real commercial weight. Broadcasters get a month of inventory in a quiet window.
That's a lot of mutual interest, and mutual interest tends to outlast criticism.
What's genuinely unresolved is whether the tournament can become something more than a summer ritual. For that to happen, it probably has to stop being a tournament that only MLS clubs can realistically win at home, and start looking like a competition where the two leagues take turns. It also needs to stop being something players view as a burden — which means the format will keep changing until the calendar burden and the competitive credibility land in the same place.
Whether that happens is an open question. But it's a better question than the one North American soccer spent thirty years asking, which was simply whether the two leagues could ever get on the field together at all. They can. Now the argument is about what happens when they do.