Why MLS legends ditched retirement for U.S. Open Cup run with Des Moines Menace
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If you think there is no reason to tune into the U.S. Open Cup this year because your favorite MLS stars are not participating, think again.
The MLS 360 personalities you enjoy watching every week in the AppleTV studio will be coming out of retirement to suit up for amateur USL League Two side Des Moines Menace in the 2025 Open Cup on Wednesday night for (at least) one more memorable dance together.
"We've got a squad and I think if you’re a young fan in Kansas City and you wanna see some of your heroes from yesteryear, it’s going to be fun," MLS legend Sacha Kljestan told SBI Soccer. "We’ll make the time in a small, intimate stadium after the game to sign autographs and take pics with all the kids that are coming."
Kljestan played for the Menace last year, winning a thrilling Round One encounter in penalties before being knocked out, but this year Menace has seen a considerable upgrade in recruitment to form a star-studded team including, among others, fellow MLS Season Pass pundits Dax McCarty, Bradley Wright-Phillips, and Ozzie Alonso alongside Sporting Kansas City legend Benny Feilhaber, who will be facing the team he coached for the past three seasons, Sporting Kansas City II.
From right to left: Sacha Kljestan, Dax McCarty, and Bradley Wright-Phillips alongside host Kevin Egan (Credit: MLS Season Pass on AppleTV)
How did this happen?
The journey to this point began last year when Charlie Bales, then general manager of the Menace, took his first spin class in Newport Beach, California with a couple of friends who introduced him to Kljestan. After a brutal 45 minutes on the stationary bikes, Bales noticed Kljestan's lack of fatigue and began recruiting. Following a few DMs back and forth, Kljestan was in.
Former MLSers Roger Espinoza, Tesho Akindele, and AJ DeLaGarza joined in Round Two but many of Kljestan's buddies were unable to take part in the festivities due to prior obligations, until now.
"This year, [Bales] was like, 'All right, are you guys running it back? What are we doing?'" Kljestan recalled. "I talked to Benny Feilhaber, who’s one of my closest, oldest friends, who I asked to play last year but he couldn’t because he was coaching Sporting KC II. So Benny was really the motivation for it now because he doesn’t have a job right now and so he’s free and he was like, 'Let's do it dude, but let’s get like a real all-star team.'"
Before he was lucky enough to draw his former team as their Round One opponent, Feilhaber was already the driving factor behind Des Moines's latest recruitment campaign. First up, Kljestan's coworkers.
While prepping for their weekly MLS 360 show, he approached McCarty and BWP with the proposal.
"When I retired, I thought I would not touch a soccer field in a competitive way for at least another year or two, maybe play some men's league games, but the pull of friendships and the pull of the game, it just draws you back in so much," McCarty explained to SBI.
"It started out as a little bit of a joke and then he actually really, really wanted me and Bradley Wright-Phillips to join him. So I basically said, if Bradley Wright-Phillips commits to playing in this, I will 100% play, because I knew Brad was waffling and he was on the fence a little bit so it was just a good way to get Brad to commit."
The ball was rolling.
"Ozzie Alonso, who works in the Spanish studio for MLS Season Pass that we share a green room [with], was like, 'Are you guys playing in the Open Cup? Can I play?'" Kljestan recounted. "And we’re like, 'Yeah, of course! This guy's won the Open Cup four times!' So then we just started recruiting guys that we knew that were retired, that were possibly available, sent out a bunch of text messages, and the response was great."
Among the friends who answered the call were former MLS Defender of the Year Matt Hedges, MLS Cup champions AJ DeLaGarza and Mikey Ambrose, and Open Cup champions Victor Ulloa and Justin Meram.
That is a rather impressive list of names, yet according to Kljestan, there could be further eye-catching additions if Des Moines can advance out of Round One.
"That's a strong possibility," he shared. "There were some guys we talked to that just weren’t ready to commit yet, but I think when they see how much fun we have and the buzz that we create if we win they’ll be begging to join the team in the second round and I think there are some potential bigger names also that could be a part of the team in the second round."
Sacha Kljestan takes a corner kick in first Des Moines Menace stint in 2024 (Credit: Des Moines Menace)
Translating the chalkboard to the pitch
With such a deep and talented squad, the questions quickly shift from how good can they be to exactly how you fit all of these legendary players into one team.
"That's the good thing about me just playing. I don't have to worry about how the coaching staff is going to go about that," McCarty quipped. "When you have players that have a relatively high soccer IQ, which is how I would classify a lot of the players we have in midfield with myself and Ozzie and Sasha and Benny, you almost have kind of an unspoken connection on the field to be able to go and just play and find the game and exploit other teams in different ways. I don’t know how it’s going to look on a chalkboard, but when we step out on the field, I think it’ll look pretty fun and hopefully be pretty fluid."
Of more concern might be the fitness of a group of retirees, but last season Kljestan showed he could still hang, going 120 minutes in his first competitive game in nearly 18 months, even if he admittedly, "felt awful after for like a week."
McCarty is the most recent retiree to join the team, having played in an MLS playoff game less than four months ago, and says all things considered his body feels good, though he may not be looking to replicate Kljestan's two-hour shift.
"I’ve always taken pretty good care of my body. I will say that the Ben and Jerry’s intake has gone up a little bit, so that’s a little bit of a problem," McCarty joked, "but I will say that I feel pretty good."
"Now I don’t expect perfection. I don’t expect to feel great. I don’t expect to be 90-minutes fit, but the hope is that with the way we’re gonna approach this game and the way that we’re gonna approach our tactics, I hope that there will be some protections built in, in terms of maybe not having to run around and high press the whole game. That’s certainly something that I don’t think would be too prudent with a couple old guys stepping on the field."
They may be getting old with BWP celebrating his 40th birthday exactly a week before the match, but as we know, they are still very skilled. The thing is, they have rarely played together. For the most part, they have either been on competing club teams throughout their MLS careers or, in the case of Kljestan, McCarty, and Feilhaber, competing with each other for a spot in the U.S. men's national team midfield.
So how will it work when they all step on the field together on Wednesday night after just a single day of training together on Tuesday? The most honest answer is nobody knows, even the players themselves.
"I really don’t know what to expect from us," Kljestan admitted. "I know that we’re all going to be pretty smart, experienced players. We can keep the ball pretty well [but] can we break down a defense? Can we get in behind? Can we set up plays in the final third? Those are all the questions that I think we’re gonna try to be asking over the course of 90 or 120 minutes."
This unpredictability is one of the many things that makes Wednesday's match such an exciting prospect. Among the other reasons for intrigue is an SKC homecoming, which carries the extra baggage of inside knowledge.
"The great news for us is that our first game is against Sporting Kansas City II, who Benny Feilhaber knows very well because he just coached them for three seasons," McCarty pointed out. "I think we definitely have an advantage there with Benny’s knowledge about the players and the team."
It's not just knowledge, either. Feilhaber is recruiting his former players as well.
Balancing the team's age profile, 27-year-old fullback Lucas Rosa followed Feilhaber to Iowa after their time together at SKC II, where he won the team's MVP award in 2023 with 4g/5a across 28 regular-season matches.
"This also comes back to about 20 years of Benny and I being teammates at different points, but never really playing together on the field. We were always kind of competing for a spot in the national team," Kljestan noted. "The three of us have always wanted to play in a game together, whether it would be as pros – which never worked out, we were always on different club teams – or with the national team. So this is a perfect opportunity for us selfishly to get the play with each other again."
Sacha Kljestan prepares to take a free kick in 2024 U.S. Open Cup (Credit: Des Moines Menace)
Shining a light
Of course, Kljestan and his buddies will enjoy their time with the Menace, but don't let him convince you he is selfish in his motivations to bring attention back to the country's oldest competition that has seen declining attendance in recent years. In 2022, the U.S. Open Cup drew an average of nearly 8,000 fans per game, according to Transfermarkt. The following year that figure dropped dramatically to under 5,500, and then again to under 4,000 fans buying tickets to each USOC game last year.
Along with testing his body among, Kljestan originally joined the Menace last season, "just to shine a light on the Open Cup, which is a beautiful tournament that has a ton of history that I love," he explained.
"Just the fact that I got to meet a few people who are from Des Moines, who grew up supporting the Des Moines, and now were either playing for the club or working for the club and they were just like, 'How cool is this that you’re playing for the Menace and that we won a game in the Open Cup and we’re moving on?' That felt special to me."
McCarty is in the same camp.
"I'm a huge proponent of the Open Cup," he said. "I think that every single team that has a semi-professional or professional designation should be able to participate if they choose to do so. I feel like it’s gonna benefit the entire ecosystem in US soccer. That’s what the Open Cup is for. That's what the Open Cup is supposed to do, is to put a shine on the lower leagues and give the underdog a chance to go and slay the dragon, if you will."
That begs the question; who is really the dragon in this scenario?
On the surface, SKC II is a professional MLS affiliate in the third tier of the US Soccer pyramid hosting an amateur club in the fourth tier in front of their home fans, but obviously it is not that simple. In reality, some of the best American soccer players to ever step foot on a pitch are coming together to take on a professional development team full of talented youngsters eager to prove themselves in front of the bright lights.
"It's a big opportunity for them to showcase themselves, even though they’re young and inexperienced, they’re playing a game with a lot on the line where it’s a knockout playoff game. You win or you go home," Kljestan laid it out. "Those are the types of games that make players better so I think it’s an exciting prospect for second teams in MLS."
That leaves only one thing left to discover. Will SKC II slay an emerging dragon or will the Menace's dragon egg hatch and evolve with further additions on an unforgettable USOC run?
"We’re just approaching it as, one game at a time, try to have as much fun as possible," McCarty prefaced. "Then we’re competitors. We want to win. The goal is to win."
