When the 2024 Leagues Cup semifinals are played on Wednesday, it will feature exclusively MLS teams. This follows an inaugural tournament in which only one Liga MX team – CF Monterrey – reached the last four, subsequently being knocked out by Nashville SC before losing the third-place match to Philadelphia.

These early trends in a tournament played exclusively in MLS markets stand in stark contrast to results in Concacaf competition, where Liga MX teams dominated in a format that features equal matches on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

And as tournament organizers consider the future of this tournament – which is aimed primarily at Mexican-American fans who may be loyal to both leagues – an important question is whether continued lopsided results like this year’s are inevitable as long as the entire tournament is played in MLS markets.

What follows is a look at the numbers that suggests that the results of this tournament so far should come as no surprise to anyone.

In football, the home advantage is very important

First of all, it is important to understand that home advantage has a significant impact on results in soccer around the world. The magnitude of this advantage varies slightly from year to year and league to league, but it is virtually impossible to find a competition with a large sample size where home teams do not have the advantage.

Here’s a look at how that’s played out over the past few years in Liga MX, MLS and Concacaf Champions League/Cup competitions and how that plays out in general. In the case of the current MLS season, the numbers below are accurate up until the start of the Leagues Cup break. In the case of Liga MX, they are the combined numbers from the 2023 Apertura and the 2024 Clausura, but not the first few games of the current 2024 Apertura.

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Home team results

• 2024 MLS: Win 45%, Draw 26%, Loss 29%
• Liga MX 2023-2024: Wins 46%, draws 26%, losses 28%
• Concacaf 2018-2024: Win 52%, Draw 22%, Loss 26%

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Then there’s the question of what contributes to home-field advantage. While there’s some evidence that fan support is a factor, it’s far from the only one. Travel burdens and general unfamiliarity with away stadiums also play a big role. Otherwise, we’d expect home-field advantage to be lower in Concacaf competitions than in MLS or Liga MX for the same reason the Leagues Cup was created in the first place: the United States is home to many fans of Liga MX teams (and other Central American clubs) who frequently attend Concacaf games in the U.S. feel like home games for the visiting teams.

What happens when Liga MX visits MLS?

However, to keep the Leagues Cup exciting for fans of both leagues, it depends on how the home games unfold when Liga MX teams play away against MLS teams. There is also evidence in recent history that Leagues Cup results are very predictable. Liga MX teams achieve almost identical results in MLS venues as Leagues Cup teams and Concacaf Champions League/Cup teams.

Below you can see how those numbers break down. Concacaf matches do not include the games played at neutral venues in 2020 due to the pandemic. Leagues Cup matches also do not include Club America’s two “home” matches in Southern California against St. Louis City and the Colorado Rapids.

Additionally, for this comparison, any Leagues Cup game played at the MLS team’s home stadium was counted as the MLS team’s home game, even if the Liga MX team was technically listed as the “home team” in the tournament literature.

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Results when MLS hosts Liga MX

• Concacaf 2018-2024: MLS wins 40%, draws 29%, Liga MX wins 31%
• League Cup 2023-2024: MLS wins 40%, draws 28%, Liga MX wins 32%

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You might think that MLS’s slight lead would result in more Liga MX teams competing in the later stages of the tournament. But MLS is also much larger: there are 29 teams competing this season, 30 next year, while Liga MX will have just 18. And more importantly, MLS’s slight lead is multiplied time and time again in a tournament with five knockout rounds.

Let’s assume that the games that end in a draw are equally likely to be won on penalties by both sides. Here’s how that would affect the chances of an average MLS team and a Liga MX team advancing in each round if they played a team from the other league in each knockout match, and how that would affect the chances of an average MLS team or a Liga MX team winning the entire tournament.

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Outlook on the knockout phase

• Chance of an MLS team advancing in each round: 54%
• Chance of a team from League X to advance in each round: 46%
• Chance of an MLS team winning the tournament: 4.6%
• Chance of a Liga MX team winning the tournament: 2.1%

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In this model, a difference of just 8% in any single game contributes to the average MLS team being more than twice as likely to win the title compared to the average Liga MX team. Of course, the bracket doesn’t work exactly like that, as more MLS teams advance than Liga MX teams and there are matchups of both the pure MLS and pure Liga MX variety. But it gives an idea of ​​how a small advantage in one game contributes to a much larger one over the course of a month.

It is also worth noting that the minor changes in the second year, which granted “hub privileges” to some higher-seeded Liga MX teams, may have been based on the assumption that the Liga MX teams performed poorly in the first year.

The opposite was actually true, with Mexican clubs posting a record of 18-12-16 when facing an MLS team in their home stadium in the 2023 competition. The drop came this season, when those same clubs posted just a record of 9-12-18, making the totals almost exactly in line with what we’ve seen in recent Concacaf play.

Discover another advantage for the MLS

Overall, the numbers for 90-minute competitions over two years are exactly what one might have expected based on previous trends in Concacaf. The hope that more major Liga MX clubs would be involved in the later stages of a tournament organized in this way was based on either magical thinking or basic ignorance, or some combination of both.

However, there is another competitive feature where MLS teams have demonstrated a perhaps surprising advantage: the penalty shootout itself.

In this tournament, any 90-minute tie is sent straight to penalties. In the group stage, the winner of the penalty shootout receives an extra point. In the knockout stage, the winner of the penalty shootout advances without having to go through 30 minutes of extra time.

Penalties are very rarely used in Concacaf matches, as series are usually decided on a home-and-away format by total goals, with away goals tiebreakers being used in most cases. And in the Leagues Cup, MLS teams had a slight advantage in penalty kicks.

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MLS vs. Liga MX in penalty shootout in Leagues Cup

• 2023: MLS 7, Liga MX 5
• 2024: MLS 9, Liga MX 6

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It’s a small sample size and it’s hard to say if there are any other explanations besides random variation. However, it’s worth noting that home field could potentially play a role here as well, as could familiarity with the penalty format. Penalties are used much more frequently in the MLS Cup Playoffs structure than in Liga MX, and MLS teams also see them regularly in the US Open Cup. Additionally, penalties are used in any MLS Next Pro game that ends in a 90-minute tie, giving players who move up to MLS from that lower league additional experience.