The identities of the three Liga MX teams New York City FC will face in the 2025 Leagues Cup are now confirmed, with Club Puebla, Club León, and Deportivo Toluca FC officially lined up as opponents during Phase One of the reformatted tournament.
Two of the three games will be "away" matches for New York City, though they just have to travel across the Hudson River to Harrison, New Jersey. Puebla and León will both face NYCFC at the newly-dubbed Sports Illustrated Stadium, with the team's Leagues Cup opener vs. Puebla on Tuesday, July 29.
That will be followed by a marquee visit from Colombian star James Rodríguez and his Club León teammates, scheduled for Friday, August 1 – with the James connection already being promoted by New York City FC over on Twitter. Expect ticket sales to be decent for a Friday night game with him and the rest of his León teammates in town.
NYCFC then plays its final of the three Phase One games inside New York City at its usual home, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Toluca steps onto the Yankee Soccer Stadium pitch for the first time on Tuesday, August 5 to round out the not-quite-Group Stage.
Remember, new for this year's installment of Leagues Cup, all the games through the Quarterfinals will be direct head-to-heads between Liga MX and MLS sides. The competition also did away with its old traditional Group Stage in favor of what they've dubbed "Phase One," when each of the 36 teams plays three games against teams from their opposite league. The full explanation of all that has changed with this year's Leagues Cup can be found here.
Andrew Leigh
Part of the new setup for this tournament involved splitting the field of 36 teams into two geographic regions, East and West, and then ranking the teams within those regions based on their 2024 regular season performances in MLS and Liga MX. NYCFC gets an opponent from each of the three tiers – Toluca is the highest-ranked Mexican side in NYCFC's group, while Puebla is the very lowest-ranked team, and León has a spot in Tier 2, the same tier occupied by New York City.
To advance to the Knockout Stage of this year's tournament, NYCFC will need to put up enough points to be one of the Top 4 MLS teams in the competition – while MLS teams are only playing Liga MX sides during Phase One, they're competing against their fellow MLS sides in one big league table to determine who gets the league's four spots in the Quarterfinals.
New York City doesn't have the best record historically when facing teams from Liga MX. According to our Hudson River Blue stats database, NYCFC is 2 W-2 D-3 L in its seven head-to-heads against Mexican opponents, with a -3 goal differential. The only Liga MX side they faced in the 2024 Leagues Cup was Tigres, who NYCFC beat 2-1 at Red Bull Arena to advance to the Quarterfinals.
To get back to the Quarterfinals for a second straight year, NYCFC will have to get through a trio of potentially tricky Liga MX opponents.
Toluca finished sixth in the overall table during the 2023-2024 season, then followed that up by placing second during the Apertura portion of the 2024-2025 season. They currently sit in eighth place through six matches of the ongoing Clausura half of the 2024-2025 campaign, and they're one of the top-ranked Liga MX sides who benefit through hosting privileges and less travel. Toluca gets two games in the classic New Jersey/New York area, as they also will host CF Montréal in Harrison, NJ at Sports Illustrated Stadium as part of their Phase One schedule.
León has James Rodríguez (one goal, two assists through five matches so far) and they've jumped out to an unbeaten start to the Clausura after placing 11th in the Apertura and ninth in the overall 2023-2024 table.
Puebla was dead last in the 2023-2024 Liga MX table, but they climbed up to 15th during the Apertura of 2024-2025 and are a similar 14th through six Clausura matches.
Interestingly, New York City's MLS rivals CF Montréal and Columbus Crew will play these same exact Liga MX opponents during each of their Leagues Cup Phase One campaigns. That means it will be easy to compare and contrast the point totals each of NYCFC, Montréal, and the Crew take from their three games – so it's kind of like a big six-team group, but we will continue to not call it a group stage, don't worry.
