The Crew comes up just short in electrifying U.S. Open Cup final

A trophy? For the Crew? In 2026?

It almost happened. Wednesday night at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, Columbus came excruciatingly close to winning the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. In the final of America’s oldest domestic soccer tournament, the Crew played St. Louis City SC to a dead heat for 120 minutes. It was one of the most electric 0-0 soccer games you’ll ever see, a match so tense it felt like the stadium might explode if someone lit a flame (and certainly if anyone scored). But after regulation and extra time passed without a goal, St. Louis prevailed 5-3 in a penalty shootout, delighting hundreds of their supporters who made the trip to Columbus.

On its face, the prospect of this year’s Columbus side winning any kind of championship felt unlikely. The glory days of 2023 and 2024, when the Crew followed its third MLS Cup victory with a Leagues Cup triumph and a run to the CONCACAF Champions League final, are long gone. So is much of the roster that achieved it. Cucho Hernandez, Christian Ramirez, Aidan Morris, Darlington Nagbe, Diego Rossi, and Max Arfsten have all moved on, as has Wilfried Nancy, the coach whose joyous, free-flowing style yielded some of the most aesthetically pleasing soccer in MLS history.

Months ago, though it feels like years, Columbus began this season under the guidance of Henrik Rydström, a Swede who couldn’t stop invoking his countrymen the Hives when describing the rock ’n’ roll intensity he wanted from his players. But Rydström’s Crew did not rock. On May 17, shortly before MLS took a break for the World Cup, he was fired with the team in 13th place in the East. It was the fastest dismissal ever for a Crew head coach; in 1996, inaugural skipper Timo Liekoski at least made it to August before getting canned.

Rydström’s interim replacement was Laurent Courtois, who previously led developmental squad Crew 2 to a championship in 2022, left to coach CF Montréal in 2024, and returned to Columbus as a Crew assistant this year. With Courtois at the helm, the team continued to put up uneven results, but they’ve been unbeatable in the Open Cup. Again and again, even during some of their most impotent stretches of league play, Columbus gutted out Open Cup wins this year. In April, they beat the minor-league Richmond Kickers and Knoxville SC. In May, they defeated New York City FC. After a long break in the tournament schedule, they took down Orlando City SC in a semifinal last month, earning them entry in Wednesday night’s final.

To clear up any confusion, this was not MLS Cup. The MLS postseason hasn’t even begun yet. This was a separate competition off to the side, one that had been around for nearly a century before MLS came along. 

Founded in 1914, the Open Cup is so named because any team in the United States can enter it: Major League Soccer sides, minor-league USL teams, even amateurs. The bracket is set up so that your neighbor’s ambitious rec team is weeded out by the time MLS teams enter the fray, but there have been many instances of USL teams upsetting MLS competition — including in 2017 when Columbus lost to the USL version of FC Cincinnati, two years before Cincy joined MLS as an expansion team.

By that point, the Crew already had a long history with the Open Cup. In 1999, the United States Soccer Federation renamed the tournament in honor of Lamar Hunt, the Crew’s first owner, who also founded the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and the MLS franchise Sporting Kansas City. (Hunt also famously came up with the name Super Bowl, taking inspiration from his children’s toy, the Super Ball.)

Then, in 2002, the Crew won its first trophy by defeating the Los Angeles Galaxy in the Open Cup final. The scoreline was 1-0, with the lone goal scored by John Wilmar Pérez. Your author was attending almost every Crew game back then, but that night I opted to see Beck at Mershon Auditorium with the Flaming Lips as his backing band, a far sleepier performance than the pairing suggests. I regret the decision. 

Two other times, Columbus were runners up in the tourney, falling to the Chicago Fire in 1998 and the Seattle Sounders in 2010. So despite the past entanglements, it had been a good long while since the Crew made noise in the Open Cup. That’s partially because, like many MLS teams, Columbus has often deprioritized this tournament to focus on more prestigious international competitions like the CONCACAF Champions League. But in a year when the Black & Gold are far from the top of the table, the Open Cup represented the best chance for glory.

They came into it with momentum. In recent weeks this team has finally been clicking, and their win at Cincinnati on Sunday in the Hell Is Real derby brought them within one point of a playoff berth with four league matches left to play. But first, they stepped outside the MLS schedule to close out the Open Cup against St. Louis. In their fourth season, the 2023 expansion team has been one of the league’s heavyweights. Before finally falling to Minnesota United FC last weekend, they went on an MLS record 21-match unbeaten streak across all competition. They sit second in the Western Conference and fifth in the overall table — a formidable foe, seeking the first hardware in franchise history.

The stakes were high, and the crowd of 20,250 rose to the occasion. The south stands were packed with City supporters, decked out in red, cheering and chanting their lungs out. Across the pitch in the Nordecke, hometown partisans in black and yellow answered with boisterous noise of their own. The energy level was high an hour before the match, and it kept ratcheting up once play began.

Columbus had the better of the play, outshooting St. Louis 15-5 and looking far more dangerous for most of the match. What the game lacked in memorable highlights, it made up for in the persistent sense that you were watching scrappy fighters slug it out, that even the slightest mistake could be enough to tilt the result against you. It was like a divine wrench kept tightening space-time as the minutes ticked away.

If you haven’t checked in with this team lately, you might not recognize all the new faces. Brais Méndez, Santi Rodríguez, Gonzalo Tapia, Anass Zaroury, Josef Martínez — none of these guys were on the team before the World Cup, but they all played significant roles Wednesday night. The newcomers and what remains of the old regime are starting to cohere into a legitimate team. Wednesday night, their attacking was tentative and their finishing imprecise, but they controlled the run of play for long passages of the game. They seemed to be having fun out there together, at least until 90 minutes of soccer turned into 120 and all they could do was grind.

“The connection’s there, the trust, that you know what guys are gonna do, their way they play,” Crew captain Sean Zawadzki said in the locker room afterwards. “So it’s building that, and I think, the last couple of games we’ve really seen that and how can we continue to push.”

Several times Columbus were building steam but saw their progress derailed by a play stoppage. Halftime put an end to a series of gradually intensifying attacks that seemed destined to break the dam eventually. Pressure was mounting again midway through the second half when St. Louis goalkeeper Roman Bürki took a knee to the head and had to be carried out on a stretcher. In postgame comments, Courtois expressed concern for Bürki rather than comment on how the injury shifted the game’s trajectory, but the field did seem to tilt toward St. Louis more often after that. 

Bürki’s replacement loomed large in the shootout, quite literally. When 6’6” backup goalkeeper Ben Lundt stretched his arms out in net, he looked like a grizzly bear standing up. The wingspan helped him block the Crew’s first penalty attempt, guessing correctly and diving to his left to parry Rodriguez’s shot away. On a night when every centimeter mattered, that stop was the difference. For St. Louis, one of America’s historic soccer hubs, it was a long time coming — a win far more than four years in the making. But that doesn’t soften the sting for the home side.

“I’m just very sad to lose a final, especially at home, in front of the fans, in front of family,” defender Steven Moreira said. “So I don’t know what to say.”

Now the Crew’s attention turns back to the playoff bubble. They just endured two grueling contests in four days – a rivalry game followed by a championship match – and now they have to get back out there Saturday for a 3:30 p.m. kickoff versus Toronto FC. Physically and emotionally, this was draining. “Honestly, I feel like everyone gave everything on the pitch, like was ready to die,” Moreira said. But if the Crew has any designs on extending their season, they’ll have to recuperate quickly and focus on what’s working rather than dwell on what didn’t.

“In the last couple of games you can see the quality we have,” Zawadzki said. “Tonight, obviously, we didn’t score, but we’re still creating really good chances, and have four games left in the season. So it’s four finals for us. We know what’s in front of us. We can take it game by game.”