There are a number of good-news stories that MLS is eager to bring to a wider public as attendances rise and sponsorship revenues fatten. Broadcast ratings are not one of them.
This month’s MLS Cup final between the Los Angeles Galaxy and the New York Red Bulls, two venerable clubs in the nation’s biggest media markets, was watched by an average of 468,000 viewers on Fox and Fox Deportes – a drop of nearly half from the audience of 890,000 on those channels in 2023. The title-clinching game of October’s MLB World Series, meanwhile – another LA-NY clash, as the Dodgers beat the Yankees – drew an average of 18.6m people on Fox.
That modest figure doesn’t tell the whole story for MLS, as the Galaxy’s 2-1 win was also available via Apple platforms as part of the eye-catching $2.5bn, 10-year deal the league struck with the tech giant. That near-exclusive arrangement to cover every game began last season and was hailed as a milestone in sports streaming: it centralized previously local rights, standardized kick-off times and gave a generous boost to the coffers of a league that struggles to attract TV viewers despite skyrocketing expansion fees as it enlarges its collection of clubs.
But how many people are watching the subscription package? Well, MLS commissioner Don Garber could tell you. But then he’d have to kill you. Apple doesn’t make ratings public for its Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass services, so divining the viewership for matches, even the championship game, is a matter of guesswork and interpreting the crumbs that occasionally get dropped.
All the same, it’s reasonable to infer that if the numbers were impressive, we’d know. MLS’s PR department, for example, is keen to tell you that more than 11m fans attended regular-season matches in 2024, the average attendance was a league-record 23,234, sponsorship revenues rose by 13%, TikTok followers ticked up by 26% and 16 July was the best sales day in the history of the league’s online store. Notably absent from this positivity blitz are any metrics about the league’s most important revenue source.
In an era when ballooning broadcast rights fees are critical drivers for team valuations and player salaries, MLS is an oddity: growing despite TV ratings, not because of them. Drawing on Nielsen estimates and back-of-the-envelope calculations, one reporter surmised that the MLS final drew an audience of only about 65,000 on Apple TV+.
That’s an undercooked number that doesn’t appear to take into account additional viewers on Apple’s linked-but-distinct MLS Season Pass offering – or indeed, international eyeballs, since the match was available in over 100 countries and regions. Still, even if the true figure were, say, triple that and added to the Fox 468,000, it’s underwhelming for the flagship event in a country of 335m people. And Apple, which charges a regular annual price of $99, even gave away the match for free.
It was also broadcast on a massive screen in Times Square, which is visited by 250,000 to 400,000 pedestrians each day. Did more New Yorkers catch a passing glimpse of MLS Cup on the Mega-Zilla than watched the game nationwide on an Apple platform?
We can only speculate. But we can note that Garber told reporters earlier this month: “We have over a million viewers watching [regular-season] games on a Saturday night, the collective viewership of those games. We’re proud of that. That’s way more than we’ve ever had for a regular season match.” It’s sophistry, though, to compare the viewership for one fixture with the combined tally for many. MLS often stages more than 10 games on Saturday evenings. Last year, Apple executive Eddy Cue divulged, somewhat vaguely: “We’ve had more than a million viewers to watch the biggest games this season; no one expected that.”
The Fox viewership was barely superior to the 431,000 who tuned in to CBS for the minor-league USL Championship on 23 November – and less than half the 968,000 who watched the Orlando Pride defeat the Washington Spirit in the NWSL final on the same channel on the same day. And massively down on the 2.2m who saw LAFC lift MLS Cup in 2022 on Fox and Univision. (It was the most-viewed MLS Cup since 1997 according to the league, who did issue a media release about that statistic.)
Possible explanations? Any sport that isn’t the NFL is subject to ratings turbulence, even the NBA. It can’t have helped that this year MLS Cup went head-to-head with American college football’s SEC Championship game, which averaged 16.6m viewers on ABC. Or that Inter Miami lost in the first round of the playoffs. Lionel Messi is so central to MLS’s appeal and marketing strategies that a game without him almost seems like a non-event. And Messi’s Miami were shockingly knocked out by Atlanta United on 9 November, a month before the final.
MLS is perhaps also being punished for its unwieldy padded postseason. Too many teams qualify, devaluing the regular season; there is a confusing mix of game formats from round to round and a momentum-killing international break in the middle. And audiences for soccer in the US are fragile: highly variable depending on the network, the day, the kick-off time, the alternatives and the prestige of the competition. Nearly 3.8m viewers watched the US men’s team lose to Uruguay in the Copa América in July. But it’s common for lower-profile matches on obscure channels to attract one-tenth of that figure.
It’s convenient for diehard supporters to have a one-stop broadcast shop. But with no local broadcasts and only 34 regular-season and eight playoff games on Fox channels, MLS has clearly lost some visibility, reducing its prospects of ensnaring casual fans.
“The deal with Apple takes MLS out of the mainstream. People watch sports the way they watch everything else on TV, they scroll through the guide and they land on familiar places,” says Jon Lewis, founder of Sports Media Watch. “When you’re having most of your games behind a paywall you’re going to have a difficult time broadening your audience.”
Especially when “you don’t have Messi in there and you don’t have a season of national TV exposure and you’re just sauntering in on a Saturday in December without a lot of momentum,” Lewis adds. “You now have a viewer base that consists of people who have to affirmatively seek out MLS. And the number of people who would affirmatively seek out MLS rather than just come across it… is not as high as I think a lot of people might think.”
Despite the vast cultural and financial heft of Apple, its TV business is surprisingly niche. According to Nielsen’s estimates, streaming platforms represented 42% of American TV viewing in November but Apple TV+ accounted for less than 1% of that - far behind Netflix, Prime Video and YouTube.
“Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day,” Bloomberg asserted in July. The report added that Apple has spent over $20bn on original content since 2019; the $250m it pays annually to show every MLS game is comparable to the sum it lavished on a single miniseries, Masters of the Air.
It may well wish for more bang for its buck, especially at a time when streaming services are generally looking to cut costs, but with recent quarterly revenue of $95bn, Apple is not exactly hard up. MLS, meanwhile, might feel that losing the attention of a few hundred thousand casual fans is a worthwhile sacrifice given the long-term financial benefits of the deal and the control it provides over production and narratives.
It’s certainly strange and concerning that the championship game of the soccer league with the second-highest total attendance in the world apparently struggles to outdo pickleball in the TV ratings. And whether some of the less-enticing matches even outdraw pro cornhole is an open question. But it’s not a crisis, especially since a North American World Cup, with the interest and income it will bestow, is only 18 months away. The most likely near-term effect of modest TV audiences is to add impetus to the idea that MLS should rework its calendar and switch to a fall-to-spring season, harmonizing with European leagues and ensuring the postseason does not clash with almighty American football.
“Strictly from a business standpoint I don’t necessarily see there being really anything that warrants immediate action,” Lewis says – especially with the World Cup on the horizon and the implausibility of getting a better deal anywhere else. MLS’s previous broadcast partnerships were together worth only $90m a year.
“TV money matters more than TV viewership,” Lewis says. “Is there the possibility that the viewership will erode so badly over the course of this deal that MLS has no choice but to take less money in a decade? Yeah, that’s possible, but I don’t think that’s a high enough risk or an immediate enough risk to take any action. Beyond anything else, we have no idea what the industry’s going to look like in 2032 when this deal is up. So I think, stay the course.”
