Club Leon Concacaf Triumph Over LAFC Exactly What Leagues Cup Needed

Consider what has transpired in Concacaf since the beginning of 2021.

The United States men’s national team won not one but two competitive finals over the Mexico national team, one in the Concacaf Nations League and one only a month or so later in the Concacaf Gold Cup.

After that, the United States and Canada earned four points out of six against Mexico in the final round of Concacaf World Cup qualifying.

Then last spring, the Seattle Sounders broke through Liga MX’s near supernatural hold on continental superiority by winning the 2022 Concacaf Champions League final over Pumas UNAM.

Finally, at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the United States had a memorable and respectable performance, including a heavily watched draw against England, while Mexico had its worst World Cup performance since 1982.

Even with the embarassing saga that followed involving manager Gregg Berhalter and midfielder Giovanni Reyna, it was fair to wonder whether American fans were still as captivated by their historic rivalry with Mexico as in the past. Most of the American post-World Cup discussion centered around how the nation could get closer to the ranks of the European and South American powerhouses, and took little notice of El Tri manager Tata Martino’s exit and general Mexican hand-wringing over their own lackluster showing.

In that context, Club Leon’s convincing and deserved Concacaf Champions League final victory over LAFC, completed in Sunday night’s 1-0 win in the second leg that secured a 3-1 triumph on total goals, might be exactly the jump-start Concacaf’s biggest border feud needs. And that’s especially true with the Leagues Cup set to kick off its first true competition this summer.

The competition was always guaranteed to be a draw for Liga MX fans living in the United States. For those supporters, the rivalry with MLS clubs is secondary to the opportunity to see their own teams up close and in person. In terms of TV viewership, Liga MX remains arguably the most popular league in the United States, ahead even of the vaunted English Premier League. The second leg of the 2023 Liga MX Clausura final drew more than 3 million viewers on Telemundo a week ago.

Yet unlike the Mexico national team, which plays in the United States in the biennial Concacaf Gold Cup, most Liga MX club fans rarely get to see their team in person in the States in meaningful competition. The Concacaf Champions League is the lone chance, and it’s typically dominated by a handful of elite Mexican sides. So the ability to offer Mexican American fans a chance to see all 18 Liga MX teams without crossing the border holds unique and obvious value.

However, it was becoming less and less clear why fans of MLS clubs should care about the new tournament. Their clubs were starting to do much better against Mexico in the other continental competitions that already existed. And because there are 29 MLS teams and 18 in Liga MX, most MLS teams are guaranteed only one game against a Liga MX foe and one against a domestic opponent.

Even the format itself — with 15 three-team groups — looks worse than it did two years ago. After high drama on the final days of group play in the 2022 World Cup, FIFA changed course and did away with its proposed three-team groups at the 2026 World Cup in a decision that came down in March. That was a blow for the Leagues Cup, which originally billed itself as a “World Cup style tournament.”

Leon’s comprehensive win over won’t fix some of the tournament’s logistical issues. But it will restore a bit of the edge that birthed the border rivalry in the first place: the insistence that the established Mexicans had the superior soccer nation, and the refusal of upstart Americans to accept that hierarchy.

With Leon’s win, you can again argue that Liga MX’s best still always beat MLS’s best. You could argue that the 2022 Sounders won not so much because of their own quality, but because they came up against a mediocre opponent in a Pumas UNAM club that barely qualified for the 2022 Clausura playoffs. You could point to Toronto’s performance in the 2018 final — the best MLS showing in a CCL final before Seattle’s win — and focus on a similarly pedestrian opponent in Chivas of Guadalajara.

That big brother-little brother, old world-new world dynamic is what the Mexico-USA rivalry has always been about. The moment the United States conclusively becomes the big brother, American fans who grow up in a culture of their nation being best at nearly everything will begin focusing more on trying to compete with England, Argentina or France, and less on how they stack up against El Tri. That might never happen. But that possibility never felt closer than in the last two years.

Against that backdrop, Leon’s victory strikes a blow of retaliation for the old continental order. And in the short term, the Leagues Cup will be better for it.