August 5, 2026
Leagues Cup 2026: The Format, Results and Odds
All 36 clubs, three matches each, no draws at all. The 2026 Leagues Cup format, opening night results, this week's odds, and how to bet it with Bitcoin.
Leagues Cup 2026: The Format, the Results and the Odds
The Leagues Cup is the tournament where all 18 Liga MX clubs play 18 clubs from Major League Soccer. The 2026 edition started on 4 August and finishes on 6 September. There is no group stage in the usual sense, there are no draws, and the format is different enough from an ordinary cup that it is worth ten minutes of your time before you back anything. Below: the format, Tuesday's results, this week's fixtures with prices, and how to bet the tournament with Bitcoin or a stablecoin.
The format, and the rule that catches people out
Thirty six clubs. All 18 from Liga MX, and the 18 MLS clubs that made the 2025 playoffs, nine from each conference.
The opening phase runs 4 to 13 August. Every club plays three matches, and every single one of those matches is MLS against Liga MX. Nobody faces a club from their own league. That is 54 matches in ten days.
There are no groups. Instead there are two tables, one for the MLS clubs and one for the Liga MX clubs, and each club is ranked only against the others in its own league.
Now the part that catches people out. There are no draws in this tournament. If a match is level after 90 minutes it goes straight to a penalty shootout, with no extra time. Points are awarded like this:
3 points for winning inside 90 minutes
2 points for winning the shootout
1 point for losing the shootout
0 points for losing inside 90 minutes
So a club can finish a match level, lose on penalties, and still bank a point. That single rule changes how the table moves, and it is the reason a Leagues Cup group looks nothing like a World Cup group even though the maths looks similar at a glance.
Why the draw is priced when the tournament has no draws
Look at any Leagues Cup match on our soccer board and you will see three prices: home, draw, away. That looks like a contradiction and it is not one.
The 1x2 market settles on the 90 minutes. If a match finishes level and goes to penalties, the 1x2 settles as a draw no matter who wins the shootout. The shootout decides the tournament points. It does not decide that market.
That gap is worth understanding because it runs both ways. A club can take 2 points in the table on a night your bet on them to win lost. Read the market name before you assume backing a side to win a knockout-style match covers a shootout, because on the 1x2 it does not.
How opening night went
Six matches on Tuesday 4 August, and MLS took most of it.
Charlotte FC 3-0 Pumas UNAM. Brandt Bronico opened it, Archie Goodwin added a second early in the second half and Tyger Smalls converted a penalty. Pumas were Liga MX runners-up last season, which makes this the heaviest result of the round.
FC Cincinnati 3-1 Pachuca. Pachuca led inside seven minutes and lost anyway, Evander levelling before Pavel Bucha put Cincinnati ahead and substitute Kenji Mboma Dem finished it.
Columbus Crew 3-1 Atlas. The 2024 champions went three up before Atlas got one back through a Columbus own goal.
Minnesota United 1-2 FC Juarez. Guilherme Castilho headed Juarez in front, Tomas Chancalay levelled, and Oscar Estupinan won it before half time. Minnesota had most of the ball and lost anyway.
Vancouver Whitecaps 0-1 Atlante. The result of the night. Jhojan Julio scored the only goal, and it is Atlante's first win in this tournament in the club's history. Atlante only returned to Liga MX recently after more than a decade away, and Vancouver went into the tournament as one of the two shortest prices to win the whole thing.
Tigres UANL 1-1 Real Salt Lake, decided on penalties. Juan Brunetta scored early for Tigres and Pablo Ruiz levelled it inside quarter of an hour. This is the rule above in action: level at 90, so straight to the shootout, and the loser still leaves with a point.
What is on tonight and this week, with prices
Decimal, and these move all day. Six more matches on Wednesday 5 August and six on Thursday 6 August, then the second round of fixtures runs 7 to 9 August and the third 11 to 13 August.
Inter Miami v Atletico San Luis, 7.30pm ET: Miami 1.37, draw 5.40, San Luis 6.60
Monterrey v Orlando City, 7.30pm ET: Monterrey 2.22, draw 3.90, Orlando 2.80
Toluca v Seattle Sounders, 10.00pm ET: Toluca 1.37, draw 4.80, Seattle 7.80
The Toluca match is one of only four in this phase being played in Mexico, and the first time the tournament has staged matches there at all. Everything else is in the United States or Canada, which is a structural point worth holding on to: Liga MX clubs play almost the whole thing away from home.
What the three prices add up to
Take Toluca against Seattle. Divide one by each price to turn it into a percentage. One divided by 1.37 is 73.0 per cent, one divided by 4.80 is 20.8 per cent, one divided by 7.80 is 12.8 per cent. Add them and you get 106.6 per cent.
A real set of three probabilities adds to 100. The extra 6.6 points is the margin. Every Leagues Cup match on the board runs in the same band, around 106.4 to 106.7 per cent.
Compare that to baseball, where a two-way moneyline on the same MLB board runs about 105.2 per cent. A three-way market costs more than a two-way one, because there is a third outcome to price. That is not a quirk of this tournament, it is true of soccer generally, and it is the strongest argument for knowing exactly what a draw is worth before you dismiss it. Our MLS betting guide and Liga MX guide both work through the same three-way maths on league fixtures.
The knockout stage, and what the winner actually gets
The top four from each of the two tables go through, so eight clubs in total. The bracket is fixed and every quarter final is cross-league: the top MLS club plays the fourth Liga MX club, second plays third, and so on.
Quarter finals are 25 to 27 August. Semi finals are 1 and 2 September. The third place match and the final are both on Sunday 6 September. The venue for the final has not been announced yet.
The prize is not only the trophy. The champion, the runner up and the third placed club all take a berth in the 2027 Concacaf Champions Cup, and the champion enters that competition directly at the round of 16. That is why clubs treat this as a real tournament rather than a summer exhibition, and it is the main reason the team news is worth checking before you back anyone.
One record worth knowing: MLS clubs have won all three editions since the tournament expanded. Inter Miami in 2023, Columbus Crew in 2024, Seattle Sounders in 2025. No Liga MX club has reached the semi finals in the last two years. Whether that is a real edge or just home advantage repeated three times is the question the whole outright market is arguing about.
Leagues Cup betting with Bitcoin
Every match in the tournament is on the crypto sportsbook with match odds, and the board runs in play from kickoff. Jacks Club takes Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC, Litecoin, XRP, Solana, TON and TRON, and there is no fiat rail at all. You deposit in a coin, you bet in it, and you are paid out in it.
One practical thing about betting soccer with Bitcoin that nobody mentions, and it matters more in this tournament than most. Fund the account before kickoff, not during. A Leagues Cup match packs a lot into 90 minutes, and the in-play price moves hardest in the two or three minutes around a goal or a red card. A deposit needs network confirmations before it is usable, and confirmation time is measured in minutes while the market you wanted is measured in seconds. If you intend to bet in play, the money has to already be there.
The second thing is which coin you move. If you are placing several small bets across a matchday rather than one large one, network fees are a bigger share of your outlay than they look, and the fee is a property of the network rather than of the bet. Moving USDT on a low-fee network costs less than moving the same value on an expensive one. That is worth thirty seconds of thought before your first deposit and nothing after it.
If you are new to either league, start with the two guides linked above rather than the tournament. The Leagues Cup is a strange competition sitting on top of two normal ones, and the clubs are easier to price once you know how they were going in their own league. The same is true in reverse: both leagues pause their own fixtures for this, so form carried into September comes from these ten days.
Three things to hold on to
Three matches is a tiny sample and the table knows it. A club plays three games and then either goes through or goes home. One shootout loss can be the difference between fourth and fifth in a table of 18. That makes early results matter more than they would in a league, and it makes the second and third rounds of fixtures more volatile than the first, because clubs start doing arithmetic.
Travel is not evenly shared. Fifty of the 54 opening matches are in the United States or Canada. Liga MX clubs are away from home almost throughout, in August, in the middle of their own Apertura. Some of them will rotate heavily. That is a squad-news question rather than a quality question, and it is the single most useful thing to check in the hour before kickoff.
Nobody has to win a shootout to progress. Because a shootout loss still pays a point, a club that draws all three matches and loses all three shootouts finishes on 3 points, the same as a club that won one match outright and lost the other two. Those are very different teams with identical records, and the table cannot tell them apart. Goal difference and the head-to-head detail do the separating.