Why MLS needs to give up its TV dreams
Let the people have soccer
San Diego FC’s first game in franchise history, in Los Angeles against LA Galaxy, was starting in thirty minutes. One hundred-and-twenty miles south, in downtown San Diego, I couldn’t find a place to watch it.
“What channel?” the bartender at an Irish pub asked me, after I had asked him to put the game on.
“It’s not on any channel,” I said. How was I to describe, in a moment of urgency, ‘MLS Season Pass on Apple TV’? I tried another bar around the corner.
“San Diego FC? I don’t even know what that is,” this bartender said.
I fled to the Gaslamp. Some place in San Diego’s nightlife and tourist center would have the game, I thought, and I was right, though that place sold Bud Lights for $9. I retreated to my apartment and paid Apple $100 for the privilege of watching every game of the ninth-strongest soccer league in the world.
It was an inauspicious start for an expansion franchise that I predicted would struggle, and it was a poor reflection of San Diego, whose unrequited football fandom had long elicited respect. San Diego FC would soon prove me wrong on the field, but in that moment it was clearer than ever that top flight soccer in the US isn’t a premium TV product, not yet, anyway, and MLS should stop acting like it is. The sooner it drops the charade, the sooner it will grow in popularity among those exasperated by streaming paywalls and $9 domestic drafts. This is to say it will become more popular among nearly everyone.
In 2022, MLS and Apple announced a 10-year, $2.5 billion broadcasting agreement. Most games were put behind Apple TV’s paywall with the cost of admission starting at $12.99 per month. Effectively no one has watched the US’s top flight soccer league on television since.
Last year’s MLS Cup final between LA Galaxy and New York Red Bulls averaged 468,000 viewers on a Fox simulcast. The World Series between teams in those cities and aired on the same channel averaged 18.6 million. As the Guardian pointed out, MLS’s championship earned half as many viewers as the NWSL’s and only a few thousand more than the USL’s. The latter is the men’s league in the second division, which, until a couple years ago, only USL players knew existed.
Apple won’t disclose subscriber data. MLS executives anonymously complained to The Athletic earlier this year about the league’s broadcasting model. MLS commissioner Don Garber told CNBC, “We have more subscribers than we and Apple thought we would have,” which is as convincing and inspiring as Donald Trump’s trade representatives. That no one involved with the league will go on the record about its TV subscriber data indicates it is a disaster. As a TV product, MLS more or less doesn’t exist. Just ask bartenders in San Diego.
As someone who wrote last week, in this newsletter’s most-read piece ever, “Can we all just admit that MLS is terrible?” I might revel in MLS’s broadcasting failures, but they don’t help my cause, for my implicit contention is that the US is capable of having and Americans are dying for an elite domestic league. MLS’s paywall repels an untold number of casual fans and makes resentful hardcore fans (and freelance journalists).
Across YouTube TV, Peacock, MLB.TV, Apple TV+ and now MLS Season Pass, I peg my monthly sports-watching costs at $118. It’d be much higher if I included in the calculation last season’s $349 NFL Sunday Ticket subscription for which I forgot to turn off auto-renew and whose email receipt felt like a jab in the kidneys. Of course, MLB, NFL, and so on are the best leagues in the world in their respective sport.
To put a finer point on it, MLS’s broadcasting model is suppressing interest in the league. It’s similar to what I wrote about MLB’s broadcasting model. Limiting the supply of sport through cartel monopoly, then exorbitantly charging to access that supply results in profits, sure, but also pissed-off fans and a reservoir of would-be fans behind the dam, so to speak (and to speak nothing about the social and cultural impacts of gatekeeping a popular game).
More importantly, following well-worn major league broadcasting models forces MLS executives and owners—sorry, investor-operators—to think about the league in a way that’s misaligned with world football and its fans. MLS thought its fortunes relied on streaming. A better future awaits in not worrying about TV at all.
English football became an international phenomenon in the 1990s after the formation of the Premier League and Robert Murdoch’s Sky Sports winning its broadcast rights.
Professional American football eclipsed the college game in the 1960s after NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle sold broadcast rights nationally as a league rather than regionally by team.
And stodgy MLB somehow had the foresight to pioneer league streaming services and, for all its faults, MLB.TV remains the best league-specific stream in sports.
It’s easy, then, to ascribe these leagues’ dominance to their decades airing on TV, and we should levy tariffs not on imports but on pundits every time they say “MLS is just not as established.” MLS was founded 130 years after England’s Football Association, we get it.
But this framing presumes it’s inevitable that television distribution leads to omnipotence, when nothing in human relations is inevitable, and it ignores a more compelling reason for the dominance of these leagues.
Throughout its history, MLB has warded off, bought out, and merged with countless competitors. The league sells the story of Jackie Robinson as a paragon of American progress, which it is, but it’s also a story of American business. The Negro leagues featured such quality baseball, and had such a rabid following, that they could have competed as a major league, had the American and National Leagues recognized them as such. Instead, MLB refused to compete with the Negro leagues, then after World War II it drained them of vitality and viability by poaching their best players.
The modern NFL and NBA are products of mergers of distinct leagues, and the Football Association administers a system in which hundreds, if not thousands of clubs compete to advance up (or avoid going down) England’s famous football pyramid. It’s not time that made these leagues great. It was competition. The need—I mean this literally, since capitalism depends on the perpetual accumulation of capital—to feature the best players, the best venues, and the best on-field product resulted, eventually, in leagues worth marketing and watching on TV. It’s not a coincidence that the major leagues had consolidated by the end of the 1970s, with few new competitors threatening MLB, NBA, etc. since then. The advent of modern television broadcasting and marketing around this time entrenched the leagues’ nascent monopolies.
MLS, on the other hand, was conceived in the era of monopoly so league founders set it up as NFL Lite—a closed league, a franchise model, a salary cap. Television was a vital part of its business model from the start, and when the league turned on the lights and aired its first game on ESPN viewers were treated to anonymous players, poor play, and bizarre rules, such as hockey-like shootouts and a clock that counted down.
Thirty years later, the rules are normal, but the gameplay remains poor. The “Designated Player” that the league invented to allow superstars like Beckham and Messi to play here is a marketing tool masquerading as a roster rule. Competition and greatness is not in the league’s DNA. MLS was created to be a league for TV rather than a league worthy of being broadcast. It’s a fine but crucial distinction.
And the public gets this, even if unwittingly. People may not know soccer, but they know greatness when they see it and they know when they’re getting ripped off. No one’s watching MLS on Apple TV because MLS doesn't deserve to be watched on Apple TV.
The monopolistic franchise model also corrupts the notion of a football club, a term several MLS teams use.
Tottenham Hotspur was formed in 1882 by a group of North London schoolboys. By 1885, membership dues resulted in a yearly profit of a shilling. Today, Tottenham is a corporate behemoth owned by bajillionaire Daniel Levy, but the club still maintains a membership, which gives long-suffering Tottenham their essence and holds management accountable. This is not unique, and many clubs around the world are member- or publicly-owned.
By billing themselves as ‘clubs,’ MLS teams take from the essence without providing for the accountability. I would go so far as to say these monikers are lies. Every MLS team is owned by the league! What is a club without members? I guess an MBA would call this marketing. In any case, MLS’s broadcast appeal rests on nationally relevant, geographically-rooted brands, just like in the other leagues.
The difference is MLS never existed in a competitive marketplace. Its fortunes never relied almost entirely on gate receipts (i.e. the appeal of good teams). Winning has never been relevant. In turn, MLS’s geographical pools of fans have never been treated to a great product or have never had to suffer the ignominy of relegation. Casual or would-be fans never have had to care.
What’s more, the monopolistic demand of serving a national audience has resulted in a sterile, lifeless identity, a point I made in my FAQ on San Diego FC:
This pairing of mass markets and monopoly leads to a “flattening” effect. Team names are generic—I wonder how many focus groups it took to come up with “San Diego FC,” or before them, “LAFC”—and logos, crests, and wordmarks are simple and scalable, as SDFC’s logos are. And there is nothing to say about their kits. The primary colors are chrome, which is a web browser, and azul, an indeterminate shade of blue.
There are notable fan cultures around MLS, and I commend those fans, but MLS executives thought its $2.5 billion deal with Apple signified its growing appeal as a consumer product. They were wrong. It was an outgrowth of its maturing, if hollow monopoly. MLS (or any top flight league in the US) will start becoming the fifth major league the moment it gives away its TV product for free.
That’s how the NWSL championship viewership eclipsed MLS’s—the women’s league put it on CBS, a “linear” outlet that costs viewers nothing, and NWSL games have appeared on CBS and similar outlets since the league’s inception. The league also streams its games for free through its NWSL+ platform. CBS’s cameras aren’t as crisp as Apple TV’s, its graphics are more generic, and there isn’t big-name commentary. But the games are accessible.
The NFL became the most popular sport in the country by doing exactly this. Growing up, CBS generally showed the AFC, FOX generally showed the NFC, and ABC marked the end of the action with Monday Night Football. (But with the viewing public increasingly in a vise, and with new technologies emerging, the NFL began sprawling behind paywalls and its own cable channel, which your provider may or may not carry, while it kept just enough content on basic cable to pacify its fans. This supports my hot take that the NFL isn’t as popular as it’s made out to be. It just has the most sophisticated, all-encompassing broadcast operation in sports, undergirded by its monopoly, that makes it nearly impossible to not watch the NFL.)
MLS abandoning its exclusive/paid streaming model and providing non-exclusive broadcasts free to consumers would force its teams to rely on gate receipts and other revenues, which inherently incentivizes them to field a competitive team. It is doubtless MLS would earn less money, at least initially, and its investors would never agree to that, but at long last winning would mean something! In American soccer! Can you imagine?
I also think MLS should depart from the national model and “regionalize” the league, forcing its teams to compete in local entertainment markets. Perhaps we get stylized logos and colors again, or maybe charming traditions sprout from fan bases that the teams can market, or, as in baseball, a consistent set of commentators could call every game on a random ass local channel and develop a relationship with viewers. If knew it would stop the recurring subscription charges, then I would throw my TV off my balcony the next time I hear Apple TV’s announcers remind a national audience that it’s the first season for SDFC and its star Chucky Lozano is the team’s first Designated Player.
I’d sacrifice at least two digits to break up Big Sports, but MLS even gets to keep its monopoly in this scenario. If the league made its salary cap a little more flexible and gave up its streaming dreams, then they’d cut USL down at the knees, as airing games for free, empowering local fan culture, and opening up its league for greater competitiveness is what USL is doing to challenge MLS’s supremacy. During SDFC’s first game we got a glimpse of this possible (and better) future.
SDFC dominated possession in the first half against LA Galaxy, the defending MLS champions, and the visitors had to repel only a couple decent chances. Early in the second half, Danish winger Anders Dreyer netted SDFC’s first-ever goal off a turnover deep in the opponent’s half. SDFC’s supporters section, stuffed in a corner at Dignity Health Sports Park, erupted, but the moment of the match—so far, the moment of the franchise—awaited in stoppage time.
Forward Tomás Ángel poked the ball away from a desperate LA Galaxy attack and Dreyer took possession on the right flank. After a dribble, Dreyer bent a pass around two defenders to a streaking Ángel. Dreyer couldn’t have played a better ball if he picked it up and placed it at his teammate’s feet, and Ángel waited for and paid Dreyer back with a leading pass into the box. Dreyer’s left foot, the foot that made him worthy of a $5 million transfer from RSC Anderlecht, drove the ball off the crossbar and into the net. The Dane sprinted toward San Diego’s corner of the stadium, slid on his knees, and beamed at the hysteria.
“When the first goal went in, we turned it up, we started going harder and harder,” Miguel Barajas told me. Barajas is the president of the San Diego Independent Supporters Union, which organizes SDFC’s supporter groups and which led the visiting contingent to Los Angeles. “Once that second goal hit, it was straight pandemonium in the stands. And then seeing all the videos [on social media] and everything—it kind of felt almost like a World Cup environment.”
I experienced none of it. No one in my neighborhood knew what MLS Season Pass on Apple TV was. I don’t blame them.
Ninth-strongest league in the world? Seems a bit charitable TBH. There are probably 9 better leagues in Europe: EPL, EFL Championship, La Liga, Ligue Un, Serie A, Liga (POR), Bundesliga, Eredivisie, BPL (Belgium).
Even more fun trying to watch Concacaf Champions Cup or Canadian National team games, where you have to subscribe to OneSoccer.
Your article eloquently explains why I threw my TV off the balcony, stopped all my sports subscriptions and used the savings to buy an analog AM/FM radio. 📻 Where have you gone Vin Scully?