MLS commissioner Don Garber and his deputy commissioner, Gary Stevenson, couldn’t help but be impressed the first time they stepped onto Apple’s $5 billion spaceship of a headquarters. But they had a job to do.
Wouldn’t it just be amazing, they said to each other early last year, if we could come out of this meeting having inspired Apple leadership to believe in Major League Soccer?
They were back in Cupertino in January, this time joined by a number of players, executives, and broadcasters, to celebrate the upcoming launch of the partnership, which officially goes live Wednesday. MLS Season Pass is now available for $99/season or $15/month, with discounts for existing Apple TV+ subscribers and a simple pitch to soccer fans. Every game will be available without regional restrictions.
At the preview event, Apple SVP of services Eddy Cue had his turn to be wishful. When we do this right, he told the gathered crowd, I’d like this to be forever.
Major League Soccer does not have the international star power of the English Premier League and its franchise valuations, though increasing, still trail what neighboring teams in more established sports leagues are worth. But Garber and Stevenson could offer America’s most valuable company something basically no one else could: global rights, a deep level of input and the opportunity Cue had been waiting for.
The way we consume media has advanced dramatically this century. Pull out your iPhone for proof. Yet somehow the experience of watching sports has arguably gotten worse.
Games are now spread across a dizzying array of platforms. Streams lag, stutter, and fluctuate in quality. As The Atlantic put it last fall, “being a fan is now more annoying and expensive than ever.” Even Apple CEO Tim Cook isn’t immune to those frustrations.
“I’m a huge sports fan. Tim is a huge sports fan. And as time has gone on, we’ve looked at sports and said, ‘there’s no better time to be a sports fan and there’s no worse time to be a sports fan,’” Cue said in an interview. “We’re like, ‘Boy, this thing is broken.’ And we think we can make it a lot better.”
The fix would require rights. A lot of rights. Like all the rights. In 2019, Cue said he wasn’t focused on acquiring exclusive rights because the landscape was so fragmented. Instead, his charges built a hub for sports fans that could alert them to close action and link them to other services airing the game. “You really can’t own all the rights,” Cue said back then.
Around that same time, however, Garber was plotting a change. MLS told its clubs not to sign local TV deals past 2022, when its national deals expired, allowing it to go to market with a relatively unprecedented offering for a U.S. league of its size: global distribution rights, with no exceptions.
Last February, Cue and Garber ran into each other in Mexico. “Total coincidence” as Cue remembered it, though Garber admitted that wasn’t totally true. “It wasn’t like we bumped into each other,” Garber said. “I knew he was going to be in a particular place, and somehow I found myself in that same area.”
That run-in netted a three-hour lunch, during which the executives found plenty of common ground. The stage was set for a series of additional meetings, including multiple at Apple Park, en route to finalizing a 10-year deal that guarantees Major League Soccer a reported $250 million per year, with additional upside available depending on how many subscriptions the league sells.
“You’d be hard pressed to find any brand in the world that you would want your league to be associated with [more] than the brand of Apple,” Seattle Sounders investor and longtime sports media executive David Nathanson said.
Those around the league have also been encouraged by how active Cue and other top execs have remained since signing the paperwork.
“This is us all in,” Cue said. “We don’t do that many things and when we do them, we’re all in.”
One of the first changes MLS announced was a redesigned schedule, something that had been top of mind since the league started its latest round of media negotiations.
In 2022, MLS games started at 63 combinations of days and times. Now, the league calendar is oriented around Saturday and Wednesday evenings, with a whiparound show tracking the concurrent action.
Six games per week will be available for free, with Fox also carrying weekly games as well as select playoff matchups. MLS will officially be in charge of the production along with third-party experts, though Apple has committed to being involved with the presentations, too. Before the season kicks off at the end of the month, the league is hiring close to 100 commentators to handle English, Spanish, and French broadcasts, with plans to send them to every game. It has already lured Taylor Twellman from ESPN.
“The MLS fan for 26 years has had to apologize for being an MLS fan,” Twellman said, “and they don’t have to apologize anymore. That’s what sold me.”
Midway through the process, play-by-play caller Max Bretos started to get nervous when he didn’t have one of the gigs locked up. “I wanted to make sure I could get on that roster,” he said. But sure enough, he was among the group invited to Apple Park in January to get a peek at what the service would offer. Even the players were “starry-eyed” that day, Bretos said.
In particular, many international MLS players were excited by how simple it will be for their friends at home to watch their games. Teams hope that that kind of increased exposure internationally will help them recruit talent to the U.S., spurring further interest in those markets and creating a virtuous cycle. It’s exactly the type of flywheel concept you’d expect to find in Silicon Valley.
Right now, Apple is largely focused on delivering what it considers to be the basics—which is not to diminish how unique a unified offering of every game with high quality, consistent presentations would be. Future years could see MLS games become a testing ground for mixed reality features and betting integrations. Apple and MLS are already planning to offer alternate audio feeds featuring local radio announcers.
The game broadcasts are just the beginning of Apple’s vision though. Each team will have their own page within the Apple TV app, loaded with additional highlights and documentary content.
Apple has added sports features across its services too. Apple News now includes sports scores. Fans can track live games on their lock screen. And there are a number of other touchpoints MLS could one day leverage, from Podcasts to Apple Maps and Music, plus Apple’s hundreds of retail locations.
“I’m excited about the concept of … being able to work with Apple where both sides have a long-term commitment to each other and there will be an awful lot of give and take back and forth to design something that’s truly geared around the fans of the league as consumers,” New England Revolution owner Jonathan Kraft said. “We couldn’t have asked for a better partner who’s more committed to us.”
Of course, there’s a downside–there’s always a downside–to the Apple-MLS deal: It immediately adds yet another service diehard soccer fans will have to juggle.
But Cue is confident the ‘every game, everywhere’ offering will also inspire fans to demand more from other leagues. More competition might be annoying in the short run, but necessary to spur progress. “If we do this right,” he said, “every sports fan will want their sport to work this way.”
Apple is also banking on Major League Soccer’s continued growth.
“I believe MLS over this 10-year period is going to be huge,” Cue said. “I don’t want to get in here to be the fourth or fifth or whatever biggest league in the United States. I want to be one of the biggest.”
Back in January, looking out at the gathered players from across the league, Cue might as well have been doing his best Ted Lasso impersonation as he offered a bit of pre-season motivation.
“We’re going to try to do something that is really—” he said, before interrupting himself, “we’re gonna do it, not try—that is completely unprecedented in sports.”
