Kentucky’s new pro soccer rivalry is ready for its first match in Lexington
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- For the second time this year, Lexington Sporting Club and Louisville City will play.
- Louisville defeated Lexington, 2-0, in a match played in May in Louisville.
- Saturday's matchup between LSC and Louisville will be part of the USL Jagermeister Cup.
For the first time, Kentucky’s budding professional soccer rivalry will stage a match in Lexington.
On Saturday night, Lexington Sporting Club will host Louisville City FC for a match at the Lexington SC Stadium along Athens Boonesboro Road near Interstate 75.
The matchup between LSC and LouCity — which is set for a 7 p.m. kickoff Saturday — is part of the USL Jagermeister Cup.
Earlier this season in May, Lexington and Louisville faced each other in a USL Championship match at Louisville’s Lynn Family Stadium. That game, which took place just a few days before the Kentucky Derby, ended in a 2-0 victory for Lou City.
Lexington played more than 40 minutes of that match down to 10 men following a red card. Both of Louisville’s goals came after a straight red was shown to Lexington’s Forster Ajago.
This is the first year in which Lexington and Louisville are both playing in the Championship, which is the second-highest tier of men’s professional soccer in the United States.
Saturday night’s match isn’t part of that competition, but the Jagermeister Cup nonetheless offers another competitive setting for another chapter in the emerging LouCity-LSC rivalry.
This will be the third ever competitive meeting between Lexington and Louisville in men’s pro soccer. In addition to the meeting in May, LouCity defeated LSC 1-0 in April 2023 in the second round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, a national single-elimination tournament held each year.
As such, Lexington is still looking to score its first goal and secure its first points-bearing result against Louisville.
“I liked a lot of that game. I thought that we were there. We met the expectations of the game in terms of the intensity and the requirements.,” Lexington head coach Terry Boss said when reflecting on his team’s first match this year against Louisville. “They are so aggressive. They want to press. They want to make the game chaotic. We want to try and calm the game down. So, you love games like this. It’s going to come down to who can execute their style of football better.”
LouCity has long been considered one of the elite clubs in the Championship. The club has won more than 200 matches across the Championship regular season, playoffs and Jagermeister Cup. LouCity won the USL Cup championship in 2017 and 2018, and the team is perennially at the top of the league standings.
That’s once again the case this year.
Louisville City boasts an 11-1-5 (W-L-D) mark in Championship matches and its 38 points this season are second in both the Eastern Conference and in the league overall. Only the Charleston Battery are above LouCity in the table.
Lexington Sporting Club is 4-6-7 this season in Championship play, with its 19 points good enough for 10th place in a crowded 12-team Western Conference. The top eight teams in each Championship conference advance to the playoffs, and Lexington is just one point behind that mark.
Specifically, Boss’ team has turned things around in recent weeks. Since June 7, Lexington is unbeaten with four wins and two draws across six matches in all competitions.
“I think that’s been the beautiful thing about our process. Whether we’re winning or whether we’re losing, the process has been the same,” Boss said. “I give the guys a lot of credit that even when the results weren’t going the way we wanted them to, they never wavered. They didn’t flinch and they just kept going.”
Some recent national recognition went Lexington’s way when 23-year-old goalkeeper Brooks Thompson (a southern Indiana native) was named this week’s Championship Player of the Week after he had a five-save shutout on Saturday in Lexington’s 0-0 road draw at Sacramento Republic.
“It takes 10 (outfield) guys on the field all working so we get that clean sheet. It’s not just me,” said Thompson, who has taken over starting goalkeeper duties from Logan Ketterer. “So I think that’s a reflection of just the team’s work.”
During its current six-match unbeaten run, Lexington has only conceded three times.
“It took a while for us to get together (on the same page) as a team. A lot of players coming together,” defender Gael Gibert added. “Obviously, the biggest thing was us being resilient when the momentum was not going well for us.”
A likely sellout crowd could also help tip the scales toward Lexington on Saturday. On Wednesday morning, LSC announced that only 500 tickets were still available for the match against Louisville.
An announced crowd of 8,233 gathered on the first Thursday night in May in Louisville for the first meeting between the teams this year.
LSC hasn’t played a home match since June 20.
“It’s going to be massive,” Boss, Lexington’s first-year coach, said of the expected crowd impact.
It’s important to reiterate that, unlike the earlier meeting this season between Lexington and Louisville, Saturday’s match will not count toward the Championship standings. It only matters for the Jagermeister Cup, a newly expanded competition in which Lexington and Louisville are part of the same six-team group.
All six teams in that group — Loudoun United, Louisville, Charlotte Independence, Lexington, North Carolina and Richmond Kickers — have played three matches so far. Saturday will be the fourth and final group stage game of the tournament.
Louisville has won two of its matches and lost one. Lexington has won, drawn and lost one match each.
Saturday’s meeting between Lexington and Louisville will also determine who wins the first edition of the Commonwealth Cup, a new rivalry series created for the teams. If the teams end up splitting the results against each other this year — which can only happen if Lexington wins Saturday — then the Commonwealth Cup will be determined by goal differential. If needed, other traditional soccer tie-breaking procedures would then be used to determine the winner.
The Commonwealth Cup will be awarded in an on-field trophy presentation following Saturday’s match.
UK basketball to have presence at Lexington vs. LouCity soccer match
There will be a heavy Kentucky basketball influence on Saturday’s match between Lexington and Louisville.
LSC will be debuting a new jersey for the game, inspired by the “icicles” jersey worn by the Kentucky basketball team during the 1994-95 season. The blue-and-white kit has proved to be a hit with fans: LSC has announced that its “icicles” shirt is the best-selling jersey in the team’s young history.
This “icicles” jersey represents a stark departure from Lexington’s normal color pattern of green and black, and it’s the latest effort from LSC to lean into its Kentucky roots with on-field apparel. LSC’s normal home uniform invokes design elements from horse racing and its normal road kit has a bourbon-theme to it.
Kentucky basketball senior guard Otega Oweh and former UK standout Tony Delk both wore the new LSC jersey in promotional materials released by the club.
On Saturday night, Oweh will be at the Lexington SC stadium from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. for an autograph session before the LSC match against Louisville City. That autograph session will take place on the south side of the Lexington SC Stadium, behind the supporters’ section.
