What does the new Apple TV deal mean for MLS?

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What does the new Apple TV deal mean for MLS?

If you’re reading this, you’ve seen the headlines. $2.5 BILLION dollars for Major League Soccer. A relationship with APPLE. NO Blackouts!

The last domestic TV deal signed in 2015 totaled roughly $720 million, so this seems like a pretty big step up. Perhaps MLS will finally be a league of choice. It is 2022 after all.

As usual, to get at something closer to the truth we must go beneath the headlines. There are a few drivers of the headline value that need to be unwound to determine just where we might expect MLS to go from here and how this might transform the quality on the pitch.

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Fear and Desire: TV Ratings, Revenue, and MLS’ relationship with the Latinx Community

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Fear and Desire: TV Ratings, Revenue, and MLS’ relationship with the Latinx Community

There’s a great little line of dialogue in the 1993 film ‘True Romance’* where Christian Slater tells Saul Rubinek “You have to come to terms with your fear and desire.” This is a phrase I love so much that I would put it in a sermon, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s simply no good way to quote Quentin Tarantino from the pulpit.

Fear and desire - that is the perfect expression for MLS' odd relationship towards the domestic Latinx** market. It also applies well to how MLS and Mexico's Liga MX soccer begin out their strange and exciting new venture, as the two have planned for an expanded 'Leagues' Cup' competition, and are exploring the possibility of interleague play and perhaps more.

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MLS Television Blackouts: When Emotion and Data Collide

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MLS Television Blackouts: When Emotion and Data Collide

Major League Soccer placed a calculated bet a few years back. They wagered they had core fans for life while they went searching for more marginal fans. The first part of this bet became public when MLS announced that ESPN had exercised their right to stream out-of-market games, and they would fold their digital streaming service MLS LIVE. All out-of-market content would move to a new ESPN+ app. It was sold as a great deal for existing fans. MLS Live was running at $70+ per season and the ESPN+ app was under $60 per year, and there was more content available. Sounds like a win, right?

But MLS LIVE wasn’t just an out-of-market service, because thirteen teams in 2017 did not exercise a blackout policy for their local games. Blackouts happen when a game is not televised for a specific group of people. They are very frustrating for fans who have paid for a service yet aren’t able to watch the game on a channel they thought they had paid for. The benefit of MLS LIVE was that fans of those thirteen teams that had severed ties with cable (aka "cut the cord") could watch their local team with the app. As a cord cutting Philadelphia Union fan, one of the teams that did not enforce blackouts, I was very happy with MLS LIVE.

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