Nashville SC opens the Concacaf Champions Cup quarterfinals tomorrow against Club América, starting the first leg of a week that sends four MLS clubs into direct knockout tests with Liga MX opponents. The first legs in all four matchups begin Tuesday and Wednesday, with coverage on FS2 and TUDN.
The timing gives Nashville a fresh stage after one of the strongest starts in MLS. The club has been one of the league’s hottest teams, and it will carry recent history with it into the series: Nashville beat Club América in the 2022 and 2023 editions of Leagues Cup.
That background matters because Nashville is trying to prove its rise is not confined to one competition. MLS said earlier today that its World Player Map now shows 78 countries of birth across league rosters after the close of the Primary Transfer Window, and the average age of players is 25.80, the youngest among top North American professional sports and ahead of the NBA at 26.54.
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Nashville’s own roster is built for this kind of stretch. The club signed Cristian Espinoza in free agency as a Designated Player after it set club records and won its first trophy in 2025, and he has already delivered five goal contributions, including two game-winning goals and one game-winning assist. Hany Mukhtar remains the central figure, with 145 career goal contributions, a total that puts him among a small group of active players with more than 120.
Still, the cleanest storyline has a warning label attached. Nashville’s wins over Club América came in Leagues Cup, not in a two-leg quarterfinal of the region’s top club competition, and this series asks something harder: whether one of MLS’s most in-form sides can turn momentum into a result that survives across both legs. Nashville has made itself a serious contender for a trophy in MLS, the Concacaf Champions Cup and Leagues Cup this year; this week will show whether that claim can withstand the longest kind of pressure.
