U.S. Soccer will launch the Arthur M. Blank Crest Cup, a first-of-its-kind women's competition in the country that will see clubs across different leagues compete with each other for a prize pool of $1.5 million.
There is currently no start date for the Crest Cup, but U.S. Soccer intends to have the competition up and running by the 2031 Women's World Cup, which will likely be hosted jointly by the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica. Teams from the NWSL and the Gainbridge Super League will take part in the inaugural edition of the event, though other clubs could join the fold at some point.
"It'll for sure be the NWSL teams and the GSL teams and we're looking at the option for lower division professional teams being able to join, as well as amateur women's teams being able to join and what that could and should look like but we're also not of the thought that the tournament can't evolve," U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone told select members of the media this week. "Maybe we start with the NWSL and GSL, and then evolve and engage the other teams, right?"
The tournament will resemble the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, the century-old men's club competition, and other similar cup competitions around the world such as the FA Cup. Parlow Cone admitted she had a longtime interest in launching a women's equivalent in the U.S. and has finally been able to follow through with the idea because of the increasingly robust nature of women's club soccer at the professional and amateur levels nationwide.
"I have wanted to launch this competition for quite some time," Parlow Cone said. "Historically, we haven't had a robust women's amateur league and competition and a number of teams in order to do it and we only had the one Division One professional league, so it didn't seem like the right time then and now GSL has come in as another Division One league and as they get the first couple of years under their belt, I feel like now we're going to also help grow amateur women's soccer in our country so it felt like the right time. Also, as we gear up for the World Cup in 2031, I think this is great timing in order to create another competition."
As with the Open Cup, the Crest Cup winner will be able to qualify for the Concacaf W Champions Cup, broadening experiences for players and staff alike.
"Most of the players and the coaches and the teams in our ecosystem, they only get that international exposure if they make their national teams or if they're lucky, one or two teams, to be able to play in the Concacaf tournament but this is another way to get more players interleague competition that could then lead to international competition in really meaningful games, right?" she said. "Because single elimination, you got to perform on the given day or you're eliminated and then hopefully around the corner, this leads to being able to play in the Women's Club World Cup."
It is likely that Crest Cup games will take place midweek, in between the weekend games that usually take up the calendar in the NWSL and the GSL, but Parlow Cone said it was too early to say definitively. Finding spots on the schedule to play Crest Cup games will be among U.S. Soccer's biggest challenges since player load is changing at the highest levels of the game. In the last two years alone, the inaugural editions of the Concacaf W Champions Cup and the FIFA Women's Champions Cup have been staged, while FIFA also intends to introduce a Women's Club World Cup. The latter competition is reportedly slated to take place in the U.S. in the winter of 2028, according to the Guardian, only adding to the new types of games players might face.
On the flip side, players outside the NWSL run the risk of playing too few games - the 2026 GSL season, for example, runs from August to November and will only feature 14 regular-season matches. Parlow Cone said she is working in collaboration with both the NWSL and the GSL to find the right spots on the calendar while taking player load into consideration.
"I'm a former player so this is always top of mind for me specifically," she said. "I've said it several times. We could not be working more closely with NWSL and GSL and their sporting leaders to create models for the schedules for the exact reason that you mentioned and we want to make sure that we're not overloading the players, not underloading and allowing enough recovery between their league matches and the Crest Cup matches so like I said before, I would imagine that this would be mostly midweek matches but I'm not gonna declaratively say that right now. We're not announcing a launch date, I'm definitely not telling you what day of the week we're gonna play the matches quite yet."
