Apple Mega-Deal With MLS May Be Just The Kick The League Needs

As soccer’s World Cup comes to a world-entrancing close this weekend, the $2.5 billion, 10-year deal between Apple and North America’s top professional soccer league is looking more and more like a surprisingly big deal for a sport that’s never quite broken through north of the Mexican border.

I talked recently with David Bruce, Major League Soccer’s SVP of brand and integrated marketing, about that unprecedented 360-degree deal with the world’s most valuable consumer company, how MLS is integrating a growing esports division (the FIFA 2023-based eMLS league), and how MLS can leverage all that’s happening to build a global presence.

“We have a real opportunity to capture that interest and bring it back to eMLS and MLS,” said Bruce. “And with the 2026 World Cup being (hosted jointly) in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, there's just an amazing window when we think about supercharging our business and lifting our business.”

It’s not just 2026 on Bruce’s mind, though the young U.S. and Canadian men’s teams each had good showings in the 2022 World Cup before bowing out. That promises even better opportunities ahead, especially as their young stars build higher profiles while playing in MLS and top leagues in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

The thrilling November finale to the 2022 MLS season, a penalty-kick shootout, came down to a stop by Los Angeles Football Club’s backup goalie, John McCarthy, who’d previously played for the opposing Philadelphia franchise (and grew up in that city). It was easily the most notable championship game in MLS’ quarter century.

More than that, online and media conversation about the game spilled far beyond MLS’ usual cultural confines, giving the game and the league far more reach and attention than perhaps at any time in recent memory. It couldn’t have come at a better time, ahead of the Apple-MLS deal’s launch early next year with its potential to put the games in the pockets of hundreds of millions of people.

“They are a huge megaphone,” Bruce said of Apple. “For our story and our product, they've got a huge distribution platform. We have a global deal (that’s) a first in sports. So we've got the backing of this huge brand that, typically, when they do something, they do it really, really well. And they've got an ecosystem and a reach and have more subscribers than any brand on the planet.”

Indeed, putting MLS games on 800 million or so iPhones around the planet makes for a very big megaphone, one that’s been noticed by other sports leagues too.

The deal is unprecedented in sports rights, which more established leagues have carved up among as many distributors as possible. This provider gets mobile, that one out of market games. This other gets Sunday night, and someone else Monday night, etc.

That’s been good business for a must-have league such as the NFL, which has major deals with all four broadcast networks, ESPN, DirecTV, and now Amazon, its own new mobile service, and other partners. The NBA, with more international reach but not the same field of gravity in U.S. TV, does much the same to maximize value.

The NFL, the most popular source of programming by far on broadcast and cable, can count on fans to chase down its games wherever they are. Just look at the big jump in signups this fall for Amazon Prime when it started carrying Thursday Night Football.

Amazon previously streamed Fox’s broadcast of Thursday night games, but now is doing its own show and shoulder programming. It also contracted with DirecTV to deliver its ‘cast to more than 200,000 bars, restaurants and other commercial establishments. Thursday Night Football ratings have been surprisingly strong despite some horrible matchups that tested even the talents of Hall of Fame broadcaster Al Michaels.

Apple remains the most likely company to take over DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket package, but it’s been considered the front-runner on a new package since at least June, and now it’s six months later. Reports suggest the league also wants to sell off a piece of its NFL Media operations as part of the Sunday Ticket deal, which may explain why nothing has been announced yet.

By contrast, the Apple deal for MLS is potentially transformative for the league and possibly even for Apple’s early strides into the business of live sports.

The tech giant launched Friday Night Baseball last April with two MLB games a week that ran through September. That baby step (the company can pull out after two years) also gave Apple a way to test not just sports on TV+ but also to begin building out its version of the advertising ecosystem needed for live sports (and possibly, eventually, a FAST/AVOD version of TV+).

Now comes the MLS deal in January, timed to fill a gap between the 2022 World Cup championship game this weekend, the winter holidays, and the February start of MLS’ regular season.

Of particular note is the much younger U.S. viewership compared to competing sports. A recent Morning Consult survey found that U.S. soccer fans are younger than followers of any other major sport, with half of them under the age of 40. The league’s esports fans tend to be significantly younger too, providing another way to connect for brands wanting a different approach to sports.

The real key is providing a range of content and experiences with MLS wherever they may be, Bruce said. Because of the league’s junior status and youthful audience, it may be well positioned to truly take advantage of the streaming future, where engagement and average revenue are far more important than simply connecting with a set of eyeballs.

“When you think about Apple TV as kind of a boon for the enterprise, definitely ‘check,’” Bruce said. “But when you think about all some of the other touch points and properties that we have, like eMLS, and the impact on them, we think it's going to be really, really substantial. Hopefully, we can go from strength to strength as it relates to our media product distribution, and the places and the access that consumers can have to our product and experience.”

Other U.S. media companies have chosen to tie up with top international leagues and events, spending heavily on video rights for live games from the English Premier League (EPL), UEFA European club championships and similar organizations.

Peacock, Comcast’s SVOD streaming service, has struggled to drive substantial viewership for its scripted programming, but has tapped a sturdy Saturday-morning audience for EPL matches. Paramount Global spent $1.5 billion for UEFA rights as it continues to expand its sports streaming operations on Paramount+ on top of what it’s carrying on CBS.

Those leagues, however, are something like the NFL, in that they’ve been carved up into packages of rights in seemingly every way imaginable.

The big dance between MLS and Apple suggests a new way to play may be coming to American sports leagues.