The five U.S. Open Cup round one matches worth watching

The first ever professional soccer game in Maine! The Tulsa Derby! Nostalgia strikes the Midwest! The U.S. Open Cup is back!

via US Soccer

The Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup is the oldest soccer tournament in the United States, and the one that most epitomizes the unique combination of ramshackle do-it-yourself spirit and administrative bickering that is at the core of the American game.  

The 110th edition of the tournament formally begins this week, with 32 matches pitting 32 professional sides against the 32 amateur qualifiers. Those amateur teams range from professionalized but not quite fully professional divisions like USL League Two to hyper-local ones like Seattle Recreational Adult Team Soccer or San Francisco Soccer Football League. 

The administrative nonsense this time around involves Major League Soccer weaving a little bit of semantic magic to decide that only 16 of its 27 US-based teams were officially eligible for the cup, with a further 10 clubs entering their MLS Next Pro affiliates rather than the senior squads.1The whole thing is very confusing, and involves some weird back-dated qualification rules to determine which teams would participate in the Leagues Cup against Liga MX and which teams would compete in the Open Cup based on 2024 season results. It makes almost no sense, but this Guardian article does an admirable job laying out how everything seems to be working. 
 

After much haggling, MLS will participate in a tournament with the following slightly Byzantine structure: The 32 winners from this week’s games will play each other in the Second Round at the start of next month. In turn, the 16 winners of those games will play the 16 best USL Championship teams in the Third Round, which starts April 15. Only then will the MLS teams enter, with the 16 representatives of the top league drawn against the 16 Third Round winners to form a blessedly straightforward 32-team bracket.

While that structure is needlessly complicated, and it is deeply silly that all the teams in America’s highest-level professional soccer league are not participating in America’s cup competition, it does mean there are a lot of fun early round matchups spotlighting the lower-level professional leagues in addition to the web of amateur clubs all around the nation. 

With 32 games kicking off Tuesday or Wednesday night, it is hard to know which matches are worth watching. Here are five suggestions for your 2025 US Open Cup opening round viewing pleasure. Matches are listed in order of kickoff, and since they are all being live streamed via US Soccer’s YouTube, those streams are also embedded.

FC Tulsa vs. Tulsa Athletic (March 18, 8:30 p.m. ET) 

There’s nothing quite like an opening round derby, and the first matchday of this year’s Open Cup pits two teams from Oklahoma’s second-biggest city against each other.

In the Tulsa soccer scene, FC Tulsa are the bigger side. For one, they are a fully professional soccer team. They compete in the USL Championship and play home games in a 7,000 seat baseball stadium. For another, they technically have a direct connection to a half-century of Oklahoma soccer lore. They were founded in 2015 as the rebirth of the Tulsa Roughnecks, a team from the old North American Soccer League in the late 1970s and still the only Oklahoma-based sports team to win a professional championship.2This ultimately reflects at least a little poorly on FC Tulsa, however, because it does mean that when they rebranded in 2018, they cast aside a historic name and a quintessentially silly American soccer logo to become yet another American “football club.”

Tulsa Athletic, on the other hand, are lovable upstarts out of the haphazard Wild West of the below-USL amateur divisions. Founded in 2013, Athletic played in the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL) for most of their existence until 2024 when, despite being reigning champions,3Despite being reigning champions! they were suspended from the league due to an apparent dispute over whether their new ground met league requirements.

Now playing in the United Premier Soccer League (UPSL), Tulsa Athletic will host their crosstown rivals at the controversial field in question, a perfectly American soccer community field featuring a press box made from converted shipping containers.

It is a little hard to gauge precisely how good Athletic are: Outside of a pair of heavy away defeats, they were comfortably better than most of the competition in the UPSL Oklahoma/Arkansas division in 2024, and breezed through the first three rounds of Open Cup qualification before needing penalties to get past Chicago House in December. 

However, there is a significant gap between “better than most amateur teams in Arkansas and Oklahoma” and “able to beat a team from the second-highest division in the United States.”

But if you are looking for reasons this game could be competitive, Tulsa FC finished 10th out of 12 teams in the USL Championship Western Conference in 2024, so they are not currently an elite USL team. Throw in the uniquely intimate atmosphere and the conditions are set for an entertaining rivalry game, if not an upset, in Oklahoma.

El Farolito vs. Real Monarchs (March 18, 9:30 p.m ET)

El Farolito were the darlings of last year’s US Open Cup. Founded by the owner of a beloved local chain of burrito joints in the San Francisco area — and, more importantly, named after that chain — El Farolito have long been mainstays of California amateur soccer. The team gained national prominence in 2024 when they knocked off the Portland Timbers II and then USL’s Central Valley Fuego in last year’s tournament.

The Burrito Boys are back in the 2025 edition of the Open Cup, looking for another MLS-ish upset in the opening round. This time they are drawn against Real Monarchs, the Real Salt Lake academy team. 

More so than the Tulsa derby, this is a matchup where the pro/amateur boundary is a little blurry. The amateurs in this case are quite good, coming off of a NPSL national championship in 2024 and returning 19 players from last year’s Third Round run. 

Meanwhile, Real Monarchs are a professional team, but they are also mostly very young. The roster on the club’s website lists just one player who was born before 2002. The most notable of these talented children out of Utah is Aiden Hezarkhani, a recent call-up to the under-20 United States national team who notched a goal and two assists in a season-opening victory against Portland Timbers II last weekend. The Monarchs attack will also likely feature Zavier Gozo, who like Hezarkhani, is a 17-year-old who is good enough to have both signed a pro contract with Salt Lake and to have worked his way into the US under-20 setup. 

El Farolito might be able to leverage experience and physicality to beat a relatively untested roster. Or, Real Monarchs will be able to use their talent advantage and the fact that El Farolito will have to travel to Utah for the game to kill this year’s Cinderella run before it even happens.

Des Moines Menace vs. Sporting KC II (March 19, 7:25 p.m. ET)

I wrote last year about the Des Moines Menace taking a distinctly “Remember Some Guys” approach to the opening round of the US Open Cup, signing Sacha Kljestan and a number of another dudes from early 2010s MLS to relive their glory days.

Well, this year they are running it back. In fact, they are doubling down.

Joining Kljestan in what is fast becoming American soccer’s most beloved high school reunion are former MLS greats like Benny Feilhaber, Bradley Wright-Phillips, Dax McCarty, Matt Hedges, Ozzie Alonso and AJ DeLaGarza, among others. And to fully lean into the nostalgia of it all, the Menace even announced each new player with a Backyard Soccer style graphic.

A roster featuring two of the great attacking midfielders in MLS history in Kljestan and Feilhaber, the league’s sixth highest goal scorer of all time in Wright-Phillips and two of the most notoriously scrappy midfielders in McCarty and Alonso is hypothetically pretty good. On the other hand, several of those guys are past their 40th birthday and qualify to play for an amateur team because their full-time job is soccer broadcaster rather than soccer player.

Hilariously, they are squaring off against Sporting Kansas City II, which as an MLS Next Pro team is mostly composed of teenagers. While those of us who followed their careers might think that throwing a bunch of kids into the midfield viper pit with Dax McCarty and Ozzy Alonso is at least a mild form of hazing, Sporting are more than likely going to much better prepared for the match, being a full-time roster of people who live near each other and train together.

Whichever way it turns out, this game is the highest-level version of the last soccer practice of the season where the most competitive dads would join for a kickaround, and should be a good time.

CD Faialense vs. Portland Hearts of Pine (March 20, 6:30 p.m. ET)

The first match worth watching on Thursday evening  presents a snapshot of the past and future of soccer in New England.

The big draw for this match is that it is the first competitive match that Maine’s first professional soccer team will ever play in Maine. Portland Hearts of Pine, the state’s first pro team, won’t kick off their inaugural USL League One season until March 29, meaning their opening round Open Cup game will be the first time Mainers get to watch a professional team play a game in their state. 

Portland, who will apparently go by Hearts, for short, went American-soccer-viral4Which is to say, something slightly less than actually viral
for an exceptional kit launch this fall, showcasing people doing Maine stuff like chopping wood or being on a boat wearing a beautifully pine-forest inspired jersey that — of course — includes L.L. Bean as a shirt sponsor.

via Portland Hearts of Pine

Between the merch and lots of community-oriented outreach and messaging, Hearts are well on their way to joining Vermont Green and Forward Madison as America’s Next Coolest Lower Division Soccer Club.5More on them in a minute 

Their opponents meanwhile are a beautiful remnant of 20th century soccer in the United States, when the sport was mostly carried by immigrant teams in urban enclaves all around the country. 

Clube Desportivo Faialense are the reigning champions of Massachussets’s Bay State Soccer League, and a remnant of  the days when Cambridge was full of Portuguese immigrants, in the words of club vice-president Luis Correia, “out from Inman Square all the way through East Cambridge.”

Having survived decades of neighborhood change and gentrification, Faialense have had a recent resurgence to become one of the top amateur teams in New England, mostly drawing on semi-recent graduates from top college soccer programs around Massachusetts who have ended up in Boston for one reason or another. 

It is hard to know exactly how good Portland will be, as they haven’t actually played a professional game yet. Their inaugural roster is composed of USL journeymen and recent college grads, although as with the previous matches it is easy to assume that the career professionals are likely better than the very good amateurs. 

But for a soccer game that serves as a snapshot of 50 years of regional soccer history in America, you can’t do better than Thursday night in Lewistown, Maine.

Duluth FC vs. Forward Madison FC (March 20, 7 p.m ET)

Forward Madison FC are the original official team of the American Soccer Internet. 

A founding member of USL League One in 2018, the Flamingos leveraged flamboyant jerseys and a fun social media presence to quickly accrue a dedicated cult following. They are fond of saying that they are the “The World’s Second Favorite Team.”

One could argue that Madison are probably the most important club in setting the template for a certain type of lower league American soccer club, particularly in the USL: great merch, positive vibes on the internet, heavy emphasis on local community engagement. At the risk of mixing metaphors here, the Flamingos walked — or I guess did that weird one-legged standing thing that flamingos do — so that the Hearts of Pine could run.

More importantly for viewing purposes, Forward Madison games are a good time. Per Transfermarkt’s attendance numbers, they’re one of the best-attended teams in USL League One, consistently coming close to selling out their 5,000-seat stadium. They were also pretty good last year, finishing third in the regular season standings. Thursday night will also be their first home match of the season, meaning fans will be ready to go — and with Wisconsin basketball playing an NCAA tournament game earlier in the afternoon, a decent number of those fans will likely have been building up to the Open Cup game for a full afternoon. This match is the odds-on favorite to have the best atmosphere of the opening round.

Duluth, meanwhile, enter the tournament on the back of winning the NPSL Midwest Championship last year. They are also owned by a local Romanian-American Orthodox Christian priest, which is neither here nor there really, but is the sort of local color you only get in the US Open Cup.  According to the club’s website, they are “ruled by decency,” which is seems like a fine principle by which to rule a soccer team.6In Europe, for example, many soccer teams are ruled by the sovereign wealth of autocratic monarchies, which seems worse. 

The gap between a very good USL League One team and a very good NPSL team is definitely significant, but not insurmountable. With Madison just starting its season and potentially not quite in peak form, this match could be competitive — but it will almost certainly be a loud, raucous watch.