TUKWILA, Wash. – Seattle Sounders head coach Sigi Schmid has some ideas on how to improve the US Open Cup and he’s not afraid to share them.
Speaking with reporters after Seattle’s Friday training session last week at Starfire Sports Complex, Schmid gave a detailed tutorial on what he believes to be flaws within the current USOC format and the changes he thinks need to take place for those issues to be dealt with.
First and foremost, Schmid says, the tournament draw needs to less regionalized.
In the current setup, teams are paired based on geographical location to maximize convenience and minimize travel expenses, making it impossible for big regional rivalry matchups to materialize late in the tournament. The Sounders, for instance, were paired with the Portland Timbers for their Fourth Round game on June 16, meaning there can be no high-stakes Portland-Seattle showdown in the tournament’s later rounds.
“I’ll probably get in trouble with U.S. Soccer again, but the only thing that’s sad for me is one of the great things about [England’s] FA Cup, and some of the cups even in other countries, is you can end up with a derby as the final game,” Schmid said.
“Because of the regionalization of the draw in U.S. Soccer, you will never have a Portland-Seattle final. You will never have a New York City-Red Bulls final. You will never have a Dallas-Houston final. And I think that’s a little sad. It’s disappointing.”
The solution? As a start, Schmid advocated for a random draw after each round that would pair teams regardless of their location.
“I would like to see a round completed and then there’s a random draw, irrespective of where you’re from, just a random draw,” Schmid said.
“I know some coaches will disagree with me – even MLS coaches will disagree. But I’d like to see us take the event to another level and have a draw after each round.”
It’s a position that Schmid knows may not necessarily be popular with his fellow coaches and tournament organizers, who may be worried about how to handle the increased cost and travel demands of such a format. But he maintains that changing the regionalized system is the best long-term solution in order to increase the USOC’s exposure and intrigue.
“I know clubs don’t want to do that so there’s a lot of reasons for CEOs to say to me, ‘Hey, that’s stupid Sigi,’ and for coaches to say, ‘That’s stupid, Sigi,’” Schmid said. “But at the end of the day, I think over a four-, five-year period of doing that, I think the Cup will become more meaningful, will become a higher level of competition, you’ll get more people out to watch it and you’ll have more interest.”
Schmid acknowledged that his ideas don’t come without risks. But he also said that the best way to find out if it they can work would be to give them a try.
“I used to have an assistant coach who used to say, ‘You’ve got to dare to be brilliant. You can’t do something brilliant unless you dare to be brilliant,’” Schmid said. “Well you’re not going to have a US Open Cup that’s really meaningful unless you dare to make it meaningful.”
