Sporting Kansas City will learn their first opponent in the 2019 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup when the tournament’s Fourth Round Draw takes place Thursday at 10 a.m. CT. The draw will be live-tweeted via the Open Cup Twitter feed at @opencup.
Four-time champions of the U.S. Open Cup, Sporting will join 31 other clubs in the competition’s Fourth Round. The field will consist of 21 MLS clubs as well as 11 lower-division clubs that have advanced from the previous rounds.
After the completion of the Third Round on Wednesday night, the teams in the Fourth Round will be pooled and divided geographically into eight groups of four. A random draw on Thursday will determine the pairings within each group, with all Third Round winners paired to face an MLS team and not another Third Round winner. This means that five of the 16 Fourth Round matchups will feature two MLS clubs going head-to-head.
Shortly after the draw takes place, U.S. Soccer will announce the exact dates and times for the Fourth Round games, which will be held June 11-12.
The pools created for the Fourth Round Draw will have no bearing on the pairings for the Round of 16, as new geographic pools of four (regardless of division) will be created from the Fourth Round winners to determine the Round of 16 and possible Quarterfinal matchups. The Round of 16 Draw will take place Thursday, June 13.
All U.S. Open Cup matches in 2019 will stream live on ESPN+.
The 2019 U.S. Open Cup winner will claim $300,000 in prize money, a berth in the 2020 Concacaf Champions League and have its name engraved on the Dewar Challenge Trophy, one of the oldest trophies in American team sports and now on display at the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Frisco, Texas. The runner-up will earn $100,000, while the club that advances the furthest from each lower division below Major League Soccer will secure $25,000.
The U.S. Open Cup has crowned a champion annually since 1914, making it the oldest ongoing soccer competition in the U.S. and the world’s third-longest continuously running soccer tournament. In 1999, the competition was renamed to honor American soccer pioneer Lamar Hunt, who owned Kansas City’s MLS club from its founding until 2006.
