El Paso Locomotive FC has entered the 2025 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, giving the Sun City another chance to watch its USL Championship club test itself against the full breadth of American soccer — from amateur sides to MLS heavyweights. Results from Locomotive's 2025 Cup campaign have drawn attention beyond the Southwest, including coverage from ESPN Philippines, a signal of just how far the club's profile has traveled since its founding in 2019.
The Open Cup matters to clubs like Locomotive in ways that the regular season simply cannot replicate. It is the one competition where a well-organized USL side can legitimately draw an MLS opponent and, on the right night at Southwest University Park, turn that matchup into something the league cannot manufacture on its own. El Paso has been that kind of club — scrappy, tactically disciplined, backed by a fanbase that treats the stadium on a Friday night like something sacred.
Locomotive have consistently been among the more competitive lower-division sides in Open Cup history, and the 2025 edition offers another opportunity to build on that reputation. The club's ability to navigate early rounds against regional opponents before potentially facing top-flight competition is precisely the kind of narrative the Open Cup was designed to produce. For El Paso, a city with deep soccer roots fed by cross-border culture and generations of players who grew up watching the game on both sides of the Rio Grande, every Cup match carries weight beyond the scoreline.
The international reach of the coverage — an ESPN Philippines distribution picking up Locomotive results — reflects something genuine about how the sport has grown in this country and how clubs outside the MLS bubble now register on a global radar. El Paso is not New York or Los Angeles. It is a border city of roughly 700,000 people that built a soccer club from scratch and filled seats. That story travels.
What Locomotive does in this year's Cup will define another chapter of a still-young franchise trying to establish itself as a perennial force in American soccer's most storied single-elimination competition. The bracket will not get easier, but then again, it never does — and that has never seemed to bother El Paso much.