Landon Donovan thinks MLS is confusing accessibility with visibility.
The U.S. men’s national team’s all-time leading scorer said during a recent appearance on Front Office Sports’ Portfolio Players that a conversation he had with commissioner Don Garber on Tim Howard’s Unfiltered Soccer podcast stuck with him. Garber told him the league tried something new with the Apple deal, saw it wasn’t working, and made changes. Specifically, he acknowledged that requiring fans to pay $99 per year for MLS Season Pass on top of an Apple TV subscription was a significant misstep, and that the league was “way early” on its move to a streaming-exclusive model.
“He said, ‘Putting it behind a second paywall proved to be the wrong idea,'” Donovan said. “We had to adjust, and we saw what the market said, and we listened.”
The MLS and Apple renegotiated last November, scrapping the Season Pass and cutting the original 10-year, $2.5 billion deal short by three and a half years, with the agreement now set to expire after the 2028-29 season rather than 2032. The league also secured an additional $50 million under the revised arrangement, per Sportico. Every MLS game is now available to any Apple TV subscriber at no extra cost.
But Donovan’s concern isn’t the paywall. It’s that MLS abandoned linear television before it had built an audience capable of surviving without it.
“My thing is I don’t think MLS is mature enough yet to go away from the NBCs and the Foxes and ABCs and the linear television,” Donovan said. “I think we still need that exposure. Even the NFL still does it. The NFL could go all streaming if they want — they’re smart enough to know they need the big media engines to help keep promoting their sport. And MLS, of course, needs to do that too.”
In the first three years of the Apple deal, MLS struggled to meaningfully grow its Season Pass subscription base, even with global icon Lionel Messi entering the league. The little viewership data that trickled out was almost all concerning, and while Year 3 brought some incremental improvements — adding standalone windows to the schedule and striking distribution deals to integrate MLS matches into channel guides — Apple and MLS knew it wasn’t enough.
Dropping the Season Pass was the next logical step, and early returns suggest that Apple and MLS’s new approach is working. Opening weekend saw a 59% year-over-year increase in viewership, per the league. And with the World Cup coming up this summer and a switch to a more favorable summer-to-spring calendar on the horizon, MLS is building solid momentum for the future.
That said, removing the Season Pass paywall makes MLS more accessible to existing Apple TV subscribers, but it does nothing for the far larger group of people who don’t subscribe to Apple TV in the first place. Per Nielsen’s The Gauge data, as Awful Announcing previously noted, Apple TV falls closer to niche apps like AMC+ than to mainstream platforms like Peacock in terms of total viewing time.
The Apple deal expires after the 2028-29 season, right as the afterglow of this summer’s World Cup on North American soil fades and MLS returns to the media rights market for the first time in over a decade. NYCFC president Brad Sims said earlier this year that clubs don’t expect to regain local broadcast rights after the deal ends, meaning whatever MLS negotiates centrally will shape the league’s entire distribution future. What it can command in those negotiations depends on the size and health of its audience going in. Dropping the Season Pass paywall helps, sure, but as Donovan points out, it doesn’t put MLS completely back on television, and for a league at this stage of its development, that still matters.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.