BY : Owen Murray
The Seattle Sounders announced their club-specific membership plan on Wednesday as a reaction to Major League Soccer’s new broadcasting agreement with Apple. The agreement, worth a reported $2.5 billion over ten years (from Sports Business Journal), allows Apple the exclusive rights to broadcast America’s top soccer league. The league marketed the sale as a historic moment for fans, allowing them the opportunity to stream every match without rolling regional blackouts that often plagued those who weren’t able to attend matches or live in the direct area around the team, but some are worried about the price.
The general subscription, unaffiliated with a club, will cost fans $14.99 per month or $99 for the full season’s slate of matches. There’s a discount for viewers who’ve already purchased a subscription to Apple TV+, the company’s flagship streaming service, dropping the yearly price to $79 and the monthly fee to $12.99 per month. The Sounders have compiled a package available for $110, including the MLS on Apple TV subscription pass in addition to exclusive benefits such as pre-sale access for home single tickets and playoff matches and a discount on the official MLS store.
The opportunity to have every match available through one streaming service is a wonderful benefit. It means the end of the regional blackout and allows anyone to find the game from anywhere (theoretically worldwide). It’s a great way to bring every game to one place, and they’re betting on the fact that fans will want to watch teams besides their own in a weekly event that mirrors traditional American sports broadcasts. Additionally, it raises the floor for broadcast quality significantly. Under the past agreements, teams were free to manage the production of their broadcast, which ranged from excellent to unwatchable, with random cuts to the bench and infographics overplay. With the new deal, not only will the production be (probably, a lot is still up in the air) standardized league-wide, but fans will have the opportunity to select the home, away, or (if applicable) national commentary team for the match. With the promises of better production quality comes a whiparound show (think the Golazo! whiparound show from UCL) that is only possible because the league is moving to a Wednesday-Saturday schedule that will have kickoffs rolling across the nation (benefit of four time zones) from around 7 pm to 10 pm Eastern. Sounds great, right? The broadcast is standard, you can sit down and watch all the games for two nights a week, and you get your home commentators for every match. In theory, it’s an elegant solution to a pressing question.
Not quite. In the immediate aftermath of the league’s announcement, fans balked at the asking price, citing disinterest in yet another streaming service. Competitions like the UEFA Champions League and the FIFA World Cup stream on Paramount Plus and Fox Sports, respectively, and major American leagues like the NFL and NBA take up airtime elsewhere. The league moving away almost entirely from those broadcast television outlets could limit the ability of new viewers to access the league. Despite the growing cable-cutter movement, many viewers are reluctant to move away from the standard and will stick with traditional channels like Fox Sports and ESPN. While they will continue to carry matches for the first few years of the deal, Apple will eventually take over exclusive broadcasts of the matches. In addition to the loss of viewers via a move, MLS markets themselves as America’s introduction to football, and having the league behind a new monthly paywall takes away from the number of people who will simply turn on the television and give the first sports they see a chance. Apple TV (Apple’s flagship streaming service) works as a place to facilitate many different types of services, and the yet unnamed MLS streaming service with Apple will be similar to Apple TV+, where the consumer pays an extra fee (for Apple TV+ that’s $4.99 a month) to access a category of shows. If you watched Ted Lasso, chances are you have the service. However, the issue is that MLS games won’t be on TV+. It’ll be behind another paywall for a likely similar cost which means that there will be a number of viewers that simply won’t make the switch. It’s not necessarily a more expensive service, but the prospect of adding yet another streaming service to a growing arsenal will drive off some viewers. For a league that wants to peak when the world’s eyes are on the nation’s football identity in 2026, the choice to risk viewership and sell the league’s broadcasting rights beyond the tournament is a strange one. Not only do they gamble their broadcast audience, but they move the league further away from Fox Sports, who own the rights to both next year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup and the Men’s World Cup in 2026, hosted in North America.
Left with the choice between local networks with the occasional national spot and an independent streaming service, the league chose the latter option. In April 2022, reports cited a likely going price of around $150-200 million per year, an increase from the $90 million per year of the previous deal. Prospective bidders balked at the asking price, citing the average ratings and the deals for the Champions League and English Premier League that didn’t scale to the league’s aspirations.
Despite all the concerns, Apple offered $2.5 billion over ten years, blowing their competitors out of the water. From there, MLS was compelled to make it work, and league executives were willing to take the jump and weather the storm. For $250,000,000 a year, Apple gained exclusive rights to the league’s broadcast rights and the chance to expand upon the rapidly growing market for football in the United States while the MLS got far more money than they imagined possible to (theoretically) work towards the league’s expansion.
The transition is eased by the league’s agreement with their former broadcast partners, announced this Wednesday, to continue showing a few matches every week on national television, as well as the ties leading up to and concluding in MLS Cup. The deal, running through 2026, seeks to maintain cable viewers’ casual interest in the league but leaves the majority of matches behind the Apple paywall.
Come 2026, the league will be four years deep into the deal and the World Cup will come to the United States of America, Mexico, and Canada. A plethora of players, stadiums, and cities will feature heavily in the summer, and MLS wants to use the tournament as a springboard toward its eventual goal of global relevance and respect. To do that, they need the viewership numbers, and the new deal promises to shake up the scene.