Major League Soccer should have had any sports league’s dream on Saturday when teams from New York and Los Angeles contested the MLS Cup Final. And yet, compared to the World Series which saw a Dodgers-Yankees matchup draw multi-year highs, MLS drew an embarrassing viewership total on Fox Sports.
But that only tells part of the story.
MLS is in its second year of their Apple TV deal which has taken the entire league behind a paywall, save for a few select games that are still broadcast on Fox Sports. One of those included the Galaxy-Red Bulls MLS Cup Final on Saturday. But up against college football’s Championship Saturday, the game drew miserably. Just 468,000 viewers tuned in to Fox and Fox Deportes for the MLS Cup Final, down an astonishing 47% from last year’s Columbus Crew-LAFC game.
To put that number in perspective, more people watched the second tier USL Championship Game on CBS (431k) than the MLS Cup Final on Fox (427k). The game was also more than doubled by the NWSL title game that aired on CBS in primetime at 967,900.
But what the league would obviously point to is that since fans watch games on Apple TV all season long, that’s where the bulk of the audience would be. Right?
Uhh… about that.
According to John Ourand in his Puck newsletter, it’s not clear that anyone actually watched the MLS Cup Final on Apple TV+. Like, at all.
Nielsen estimates Apple TV+’s viewership total during the MLS Cup Final averaged out to 287,000 viewers in real time. Compared to the previous Saturday in the same timeslot, Apple had 222,000 viewers. Do the math and you can estimate that only about 65,000 viewers were watching the MLS Cup Final on Apple streaming. In fact, Apple TV+ viewership exploded after the final was done when total viewership increased to 385,000.
Apple is paying $2.5 BILLION over 10 years to have 65,000 people show up for a championship game broadcast? If those are indeed the real numbers, the Apple-MLS deal may go down as one of the worst contracts in the history of sports broadcasting, both for the league and for the media company. Lionel Messi’s arrival was supposed to be the gamechanger that made MLS take a step forward in popularity and relevance. That has not happened, at least nationally.
Instead, Major League Soccer is the proverbial tree falling in the woods with nobody around to hear it. Maybe there’s a reason why Apple and MLS don’t want to share what their really subscriber numbers really are.
[Puck]
About Matt Yoder