MLS commissioner Don Garber defended the league’s streaming deal with Apple during a Front Office Sports event, just over a week after revealing some surprising viewership metrics about the 10-year, $2.5 billion media-rights contract.
“The media and pundits just don’t get it yet,” Garber said at Huddle in the Hamptons on Friday. “I’m not sure we are where we need to be, but I know that we’re going to have to get there soon.”
At MLS All-Star festivities in Austin last month, Garber said regular-season matches this season have been averaging 120,000 unique viewers, which was an increase of almost 50% compared to 2024.
However, unique viewers are not a true comparison to the average-minute audience that Nielsen, the industry standard for TV ratings, tracks for most other major sports leagues. In 2022, the last season before the Apple deal went into effect, ESPN networks averaged 343,000 viewers per match for their allotment of national TV broadcasts. Fox Sports also had some English-language broadcasts.
At Huddle in the Hamptons, Garber highlighted the international aspect of Apple’s global deal, saying he’s just as interested in who’s watching in Argentina as he is in who’s watching in Columbus, Ohio. “We had no ability to do that with a domestic linear deal, without going out and selling individual game packages to be the fourth or fifth or tenth program on some channel in Germany,” Garber said.
Garber believes MLS is at the forefront of a sports streaming revolution, despite the viewership not reflecting the switch just yet. “Other than the hassle of people complaining about it, we feel pretty good,” he said.
Garber predicted the world’s top soccer leagues will all eventually use a similar TV distribution model as MLS, which now has 600 games per season, “treated as one global feed” on Apple. “We’re just early,” he said.
Looking back at the decision to broadcast exclusively on the streamer, Garber is confident that moving away from multiple local and national TV partners was the right call. “We had 30 games on ESPN, 30 games on Fox, and 30 Games on Univision, and we had 540 games on local TV, and nobody was watching them, and we weren’t getting paid,” he said.
