MLS knows its Apple package needs to reach more people, even if it isn’t putting more games on TV yet

Out of everything that’s been said about the additions to this year’s MLS-Apple streaming package, one line has stood out the most.

During a news conference last month, the league’s executive vice president of media, Seth Bacon, said his side and the tech giant “understood and agreed” on the idea of having just 33 regular-season games on traditional television each year.

“The idea was,” he said, “let’s make sure that we have this linear [television] window, so that we can help with that transition as fans watch the league go to an entirely digital environment.”

There is no question that the media as a whole, and the sports media specifically, are transitioning to a digital future. Apple has baseball and MLS. ESPN’s separate-from-cable paid streaming platform has NHL games. NBC’s Peacock will have exclusive NBA games next season and already has college football. Amazon sells NFL games as much as books, clothes, and paper towels.

But an entirely digital future? That’s a different story. Teams in cities where the local cable sports channels have gone out of business — which isn’t the case in Philadelphia, thanks to Comcast — stream their games online, but not almost-exclusively as MLS has. No, they have gone back to a platform that has long been proven to draw big audiences: free-to-air broadcast television.

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Many major sports leagues have increased their focus on broadcast TV, too: baseball with Fox, NFL and NBA with ABC, and NBA with NBC starting next season. Such a focus has been especially helpful for the two largest women’s pro sports leagues, the NWSL and WNBA. Both have big deals not just with ABC and CBS, but the free-to-air ION network of local channels nationwide.

Soccer’s USL, which runs lower-division men’s leagues, also puts a few games a year on CBS, and that has paid off. The second-tier USL Championship’s title game last year drew more TV viewers than Fox’s MLS Cup broadcast, though the MLS Cup was also free on Apple and many hardcore fans watched there.

All of this has left MLS fans wondering whether it’s a good idea that for the third year of Fox’s four-year deal with the league, just 15 games will air on the network’s free broadcast channel — the one that makes baseball, the NFL, college football, and college basketball so easy to watch.

On top of that, 13 of the 15 broadcasts are from February through the first weekend of May. There’s one game Memorial Day weekend and one in mid-June, and that’s it for the year. Just two of the games are in prime time — Austin-Portland on April 5 (two small markets, to boot), and Orlando-Atlanta on April 26.

And none involves Lionel Messi, the league’s biggest-ever star. His Inter Miami has just two regular-season games on any linear channels (cable outlet FS1), on July 12 against Nashville and July 26 against Cincinnati. That’s because, multiple sources have told The Inquirer, Apple caps the number of Miami games Fox can air, to push viewers toward the streaming platform.

(Fox also has the Concacaf Champions Cup, which Miami is in and Apple doesn’t have rights to, and a few games in the Leagues Cup, whose broadcast schedule isn’t set yet.)

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This is the landscape as MLS begins its 30th season — the last full campaign before the United States, Canada, and Mexico co-host the biggest World Cup in history next year.

Also, sports leagues routinely start negotiating broadcast deals in the calendar year before existing ones expire. While it’s not known what direction MLS will go for its next linear TV deals, it wouldn’t be surprising if the league starts putting out feelers sometime this year.

Bacon sat down for a chat with The Inquirer recently. He stood his corner, but he took questions and gave answers.

“We had a ton of confidence coming into this deal that this wouldn’t be something that our fans wouldn’t know how to access,” Bacon said, citing the relative youth and digital savvy of the league’s core audience.

“But as we think about how we’re going to appeal to and attract the biggest possible audience to grow our fan base and attract the most subscribers, we knew that we were probably early. We’re completely comfortable being early, because we always want to be first movers.”

He portrayed the desire to keep games on linear TV not just as for attracting broad audiences, but as related to that sense of early.

“But if we were a little early, we wanted to have some of those linear windows that still offered that broad linear distribution to noncore fans, to general sports fans,” Bacon said. “To attract them, to expose them to what’s happening with the league, and to get them curious and more engaged.”

He spoke of a “need to use that [World Cup] and every possible lever we have to continue to grow our fan base.” That’s easy to agree with, regardless of whether you agree with the MLS-Apple philosophy.

» READ MORE: The English Premier League has ‘no intention’ to bring regular-season games to the U.S. any time soon

Later, Bacon said something that sounded simple on the surface but that critics would immediately jump on: “We are always looking for ways to expose our content to the most number of fans possible.”

Why would the critics jump? Because for the last two years, Apple forced everyone inside its gates to watch all but those few Fox games. You had to have a device with the Apple TV app, and if your device didn’t — such as Windows PCs for some of 2023 and every Android phone through last year — you had to make it work in a web browser. That was possible, and not hard if you knew what you were doing, but it was extra steps.

This year, those gates have opened up in significant ways. There’s finally an Android app, and Apple has deals with Comcast and DirecTV to distribute MLS Season Pass through those companies’ TV boxes. Comcast’s X1 cable and Flex streaming boxes will have MLS games in their sports tab like anything else, and subscribers will get the MLS 360 Saturday night live highlights show for no extra charge. DirecTV will have games on TV channels 480 to 495.

Comcast being interested in the deal surprised many people, because MLS and Comcast haven’t worked together much in recent years. But Comcast and Apple work together right now, on a bundled streaming deal of Peacock, Apple TV+, and Netflix. There’s another sign of how the sports TV world is changing.

“We understand how much our customers value an exceptional viewing experience, especially when it comes to live sports,” Comcast vice president of sports entertainment Vito Forlenza said in a statement. “Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to find and watch their favorite teams and events.

“By offering MLS 360 for free to all customers, integrating every MLS match into our grid guide, and allowing customers to watch without launching an app, we are giving new and existing fans the simplest way to enjoy the excitement of the season alongside their other favorite programming,” Forlenza said.

» READ MORE: Apple and Comcast partner to make Major League Soccer matches easier to watch

MLS has also restarted a deal with T-Mobile to offer Season Pass free to any of the company’s 104 million cell phone customers in the U.S. who sign up. The deal ran in 2023, but not last year.

None of this is the same as putting more games on traditional TV. On that count, fans will keep comparing MLS to the NWSL’s many free-to-air broadcasts.

But at least there’s some proof that MLS has heard critics who say that while a worldwide deal with Apple sounds nice, the games take too much effort for casual fans to find.

“What we need to do is educate people and create more opportunities for them to access the content,” Bacon said. “And that’s exactly what we do with the addition of new ways on new platforms to access the content — new partnerships like we have with DirecTV and Comcast.

“These are all ways that we are working together with Apple to continue to grow the reach and the accessibility of the product.”

As the Fox deal turns toward its backstretch, fans will be watching to see how many more ways MLS and Apple want to embrace.

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