by Timothy Belin
Birmingham Legion FC will make their debut in the USL Jägermeister Cup Sunday when they host USL League One’s Chattanooga Red Wolves.
Ahead of the historic day for the Three Sparks, here’s everything you need to know about this unique cup competition.
What is the USL Jägermeister Cup?
The USL Jägermeister Cup was launched by the United Soccer League last year as an inter-league cup competition for its 14 League One teams. After a successful inaugural season, the competition has been expanded to include all 24 USL Championship sides for 2025. The competition now pits all 38 professional USL teams against each other in one big tournament.
The competition’s second season kicks off Friday — Sunday for the Legion — and will end with a final on the weekend of October 4, with all games set to be streamed live on ESPN+.
The reigning champions are the Northern Colorado Hailstorms, but they will not have a chance to defend their title after financial troubles forced them out of League One.
What is the format?
The Jägermeister Cup functions as a World Cup-style tournament. The USL’s 38 professional teams are divided into six groups of either six or seven teams based on regional proximity. Each team will play four of their group opponents, two home games and two away trips, with home assignments randomly drawn.
After the group stage concludes the weekend of July 26, the top team in each group, as well as two wildcards, will advance to the knockout phase. Those eight teams will be randomly drawn against each other for single-elimination knockout rounds, with only two predetermined rules. Both wildcard teams will be drawn as away sides, and neither one can face their group winner.
The winners of all four quarterfinals will once again be drawn randomly, this time with no restrictions, for the semifinals. The two final teams will face off for the trophy in October, with one team randomly drawn as the host.
What makes the Jägermeister Cup unique?
In addition to the unique World Cup format and being the “first time a U.S. soccer league has established its own interleague cup between two professional divisions,” the Jägermeister Cup will implement a few key rules to maximize fan enjoyment.
Though the competition starts with a group stage phase, no match can end in a draw. Any game tied after 90 minutes will head straight to a penalty shootout. The winner on penalties will get an extra point in addition to the one for the draw, while the losing side will still get one point for tying the match through normal time.
The Jägermeister Cup also wants to encourage attacking play, and has therefore made goals scored the number one tiebreaker in group standings, ahead of both goal difference and head-to-head.
While no official announcement has been made regarding criteria for the two wildcard spots, last year’s edition rewarded the highest scoring team not to top their group with a playoff spot. We can thus expect goals to have a similar importance to that decision as well.
[Update: Since publishing this article, the USL have confirmed the wildcard criteria. The two wildcard teams will be the two teams with the highest points tally not to top their group. If several teams finish with the same points tally, goals scored is the second differential.]
What does it look like for Birmingham Legion?
There’s some good news and some bad news for Birmingham Legion.
The good news is that the Three Sparks are in Group 3 along with fellow USL Championship sides Indy Eleven and FC Tulsa, as well as League One teams Chattanooga Red Wolves, Forward Madison FC and One Knoxville SC. Split evenly at three Championship teams and three League One teams, Group 3 is one of only two groups with such a small number of Championship outfits.
In contrast, Groups 1 and 2 — the two seven-team groups — both have five USL Championship sides, while Groups 4 and 5 have four. Group 6 is the other group with only three.
Image credit: @bhmlegion on Instagram
The bad news is that the home assignment draw was less kind to the Legion. Though the Three Sparks face just two other USL Championship outfits, both of them will be on the road.
Birmingham begin their cup campaign Sunday by hosting Chattanooga Red Wolves. They will then head on the road for rounds two and three, facing FC Tulsa on May 31 and Indy Eleven June 28. The Black and Gold round out their group stage by returning home July 26 to host Forward Madison FC, last season’s Jägermeister Cup runner-up.
The one team in Legion’s group that they will not face is One Knoxville SC.
What should Legion fans expect?
With a tough start to 2025, there are two ways to look at this competition.
Either you want to focus on climbing back up the USL Championship Eastern Conference standings and punt on the Jägermeister Cup, or you view it as a great opportunity to boost confidence and team morale by making a cup run, especially after going out of the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup at such an early stage.
What Legion choose to do may well come down to Sunday’s result against the Red Wolves.
Like Birmingham, Chattanooga are a team that has struggled so far in 2025. The Red Wolves picked up their first league win at the fifth attempt in their last outing, and though they are still alive in the Open Cup, they have done so through three consecutive penalty shootout wins.
As the higher division team, Birmingham Legion should be the favorites on paper, regardless of their preseason loss to the Chattanooga outfit. And the Red Wolves might have their focus elsewhere given they have a different cup run to contend with in addition to their poor league form. If the Three Sparks want to make anything of their inaugural Jägermeister campaign, they need to take advantage and get a result.
With back-to-back away trips to the group’s other USL Championship sides to come, a loss at home to a lower-division team would be a calamitous setback. Though a group stage means one loss isn’t the end of the world, the fact that only the top team gets a guaranteed spot to the knockout rounds would immediately put the Three Sparks in a hole with their two toughest encounters still ahead of them.
Indy Eleven and FC Tulsa both begin their Jägermeister campaigns on the road Saturday, to Forward Madison and One Knoxville, respectively. If either one loses, things could suddenly look good for the Legion before they even get the ball rolling.
Legion have one of the easier groups, so it would be a shame to waste it. The club is still looking for its first piece of silverware since beginning play in 2019, and the 2025 USL Jägermeister Cup might be an excellent chance to find it. Following their disappointing first round exit in the Open Cup, the Legion know all too well how unpredictable single-elimination knockouts can be. Get out of the group and into the final eight, and the Three Sparks should have just as much hope as anybody else to win it all.
Birmingham Legion begins its first-ever USL Jägermeister Cup campaign at 4 p.m. Sunday at Protective Stadium, where they will host the Chattanooga Red Wolves.
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