David Samson skewers MLS after Don Garber reveals lackluster viewership

Meadowlark Media’s resident sports business analyst is taking aim at a new target: MLS.

Former Miami Marlins president and current host of Meadowlark’s Nothing Personal podcast David Samson took issue with MLS commissioner Don Garber spinning a positive viewership story for the league during last week’s MLS All-Star Game. Speaking with the press, Garber explained that MLS viewership has increased by 50% year-over-year, and that matches were averaging 120,000 viewers on Apple TV+.

As we reported shortly after Garber’s remarks, the exact context of that 120,000 viewers figure is unclear. But regardless, that audience size does not look good in a historical context. And Samson believes the league’s big bet on Lionel Messi hasn’t paid off if the way MLS wants.

@nothingpersonal.npds MLS Apple TV viewership numbers are scary bad… is Messi to blame? 🤔 #mls #messi ♬ original sound – Nothing Personal Podcast

“How do you spin the fact that Messi is not providing the sort of increases that one would have expected?” Samson posed on a recent episode of Nothing Personal. “As you recall, Messi gets a piece of [MLS Season Pass] subscribers. The problem is, nobody’s subscribing. And nobody’s watching.

“Don Garber tried to put a positive spin on this by saying, ‘We’re averaging 120,000 unique viewers per match. That’s an increase of over 50% from last year.’ So they went from 80,000 to 120,000. And you may say to yourself, ‘That sounds amazing!’ 120,000? Let’s just see if we can put some numbers in perspective here. In the final year of the deal with ESPN and ABC, the Disney Company, Major League Soccer averaged 343,000 viewers. The MLS Cup Final, when it was on Fox, drew 427,000. Do you know that there was a USL Championship Game on CBS? The USL on CBS, 431,000 people watched.

“I’m just trying to figure out if Don Garber is saying that Major League Soccer has a seat at the table with the four major sports when they went fully streaming, which other leagues are trying to think about doing a national strategy, but it’s from a bigger base where they’re also keeping games on other distribution channels. Take a look at what the NBA and the NFL did, and what MLB is doing.

“But maybe, just maybe, all of the pro formas, all the projections that they did, all of the hope and faith that they had that things were going to change, as it turns out, that change has not come at the speed or the breadth that they expected. And the BS here is that by bringing in Messi, and by having him associated with Apple and Major League Soccer, that it will have ascended on a path to the final table of the big four in a way that it just hasn’t.”

There’s no question, MLS sacrificed some percentage of its viewership in order to secure a larger paycheck from Apple. That check, which nets the league $250 million per year, was far larger than any traditional linear TV network was willing to pay the league.

Whether or not that’s a tradeoff that will help MLS long-term is unclear. Touting viewership that is less than half of what the league was getting in its last deal certainly isn’t encouraging, especially since the league added a global sensation in Lionel Messi during the course of that new deal.

And it’s certainly not a decision that has put the league in the good graces of fans who now need to shell out money for a season-long subscription. So while the long-term impact is still fuzzy, Samson puts forth a reasonable argument that the league isn’t on the best trajectory at the moment.