US Soccer and the National Women’s Soccer League are set to launch a new club competition that will feature all sanctioned professional women’s teams across the country, The Cutback can reveal.
There are currently 24 sanctioned professional women’s teams in the US, 16 in the NWSL and eight in the USL-Super League.
The new competition is to be called the Crest Cup and it will be a single-elimination knockout format, culminating in a championship final.
The cup will serve as a pathway to qualify for the Concacaf W Champions Cup and feature a total prize pool of more than $1.5million.
Work to finalise the plans for the new domestic tournament is ongoing, with details surrounding timing and regulations still being discussed between U.S. Soccer, NWSL clubs and the NWSL Players Association (NWSLPA).
The league is expected to announce the new competition on Wednesday.
Women’s football in the US has not previously had an inter-league cup competition where teams from different professional leagues have the opportunity to compete against each other in a formalised event.
US Soccer’s US Open Cup is the country’s oldest men’s knockout football club competition, mirroring that of England’s FA Cup, it features teams from across the professional landscape in the US.
The NWSL has run the Challenge Cup as an additional domestic club competition since 2020, when it was initially introduced as a one-off summer tournament during the Covid-19 impacted season.
Since then, it has been tweaked multiple times and since 2024 has been a one-off game between the previous season’s winners of the Championship, the team that wins the playoffs, and the Shield, the trophy awarded to the team that finishes top at the end of the regular season.
The NWSL has been contacted for comment.