The MLS-Apple Deal Shows Another Side to the Sports Streaming Morass

Heading into year three, MLS Season Pass looks a bit like a disaster.

Not to be confused with Sunday Night Football. (Credit: Apple)

We all know that sports broadcasting rights are a mess in the streaming environment. The erosion of the cable bundle and terrible deals with a regional sports monopoly are choking the life out of the NBA. The NFL throws more games—including playoff games—to its streaming partners each year. U.S.-based fans of European soccer need three or four subscriptions to watch their favorite clubs in a litany of competitions. The Big Ten’s mega-deal with Peacock continues to flummox and infuriate dads across the Midwest.

These examples demonstrate how streaming’s expansion pushes fans to subscribe to multiple services (often alongside cable or a streaming alternative like YouTube TV). But Major League Soccer’s Season Pass partnership with Apple TV+ illustrates the problems with almost every game streaming on a single platform. As MLS ramps up for its third season of the Season Pass deal, the league and its streaming partner are searching for a workable strategy that makes new fans of America’s take on the world’s most popular sport.

Hand up: I thought MLS and Apple TV+ made a perfect pair when the agreement was announced in 2022. After 25 years, MLS had only partially leveraged the growing interest in global soccer. The league’s prior TV deal included an inconsistent pattern of ugly broadcasts on Fox and just about everything else buried on ESPN+. Apple made some waves with its pristine Friday Night Baseball broadcasts and wanted to wade deeper into the streaming waters. The subscription was only $95 (and $20 cheaper for Apple TV+ subscribers) for the season. It seemed like a win-win for two parties looking to improve their respective statures.

Season Pass, however, has been an uneven product in its initial two years. The on-site production quality has been much better than Fox’s nasty work, but almost everything else has disappointed. MLS and Apple’s big idea was MLS 360, the live “whip-around” studio show that bounces from game to game, ala NFL RedZone. While the folks in the studio are solid, the decision to play every game in two big chunks leads to some chaotic and poorly managed coverage. RedZone works because it has one host—not one host and three analysts—and captures multiple plays within the titular red zone. MLS 360 skips around nearly a dozen games at once, desperate to find a scoring moment. The flow of a soccer game doesn’t quite match the rapid whip-around coverage approach.

MLS 360 is still fine. Yet, despite an influx of money from Apple, MLS’s in-house production efforts have been pretty limited. Short-form docu-content is all over the Season Pass vertical. Even the good stuff, like the player profile series Breakaway, is far too short with 6–8-minute episodes. Lionel Messi’s arrival at Inter Miami was the subject of a much-hyped docuseries, Messi Meets America, that bored me, a sports doc apologist, into stopping after one episode.

Beyond the lackluster quality and range of Season Pass programming, it’s not yet clear that the MLS/Apple team-up is actually drawing more people to the league. In 2023, Sports Business Journal reported that Season Pass had surpassed 2 million subscribers in its first season, but those numbers were inflated by the free access granted to all season ticket holders and T-Mobile subscribers. No similar report emerged at the end of the 2024 season, when season ticket holders continued to get free access but T-Mobile stopped the free deal for its customers. The one piece of public viewership data underlines massive declines for the few games that still simulcast on Fox. This includes the season-ending MLS Cup, which dipped nearly 50 percent in viewership between 2023 and 2024.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, MLS and Apple’s plans for the 2025 season underline an effort to reach more or different viewers. The centerpiece of the third-year plan is Sunday Night Soccer, a weekly showcase broadcast with “enhanced” coverage and production value. Notably, SNS will be freely available to all Apple TV+ subscribers (reportedly around 25 million), not just Season Pass subscribers. Also new this year is the terribly titled Onside: Major League Soccer, a six-episode docuseries produced by Box to Box of Formula 1: Drive to Survive fame.

Both updates sound good if late-developing. One would think MLS and Apple would want a premier branded broadcast to drive interest in their new venture. One would also think that a season-long docuseries would start filming the moment MLS and Apple signed the deal in 2022. Even the shift to more varied scheduling—so fans can more easily check in on multiple games over a night or weekend—should have been on the table last season. Instead, it all took until the third year when a lot of the coverage of Season Pass has the same tenor as this post—what’s going on here, exactly?

Meanwhile, the Season Pass subscription is freely open to even more people this year. T-Mobile customers (including myself) are eating once more. Xfinity customers will get free access to MLS 360 even if they don’t pay for full-game broadcasts. Season ticket holders will get more value from their free subscriptions because of the varied schedule.

Again, we don’t have a lot of data to make firm conclusions. But these are not choices that scream “successful partnership.” MLS and Apple now seem stuck in a cycle of annoying the league’s smaller but passionate fanbase without drawing in a healthy number of new fans. The companies clearly thought that they could avoid churn in year two on the back of Messi’s presence, but they’re back to giving away the product for free. What happens in 2026 if they cut the T-Mobile (again) and Xfinity deals and Messi’s ready to retire? Nothing good.

The middling reach of Season Pass shows the precarity of the streaming ecosystem. On the one hand, an all-in-one product is ultimately good for fans, even if the execution could improve. On the other hand, this approach inherently limits MLS’s reach at a time when it employs the sport’s greatest-ever competitor in ways that split rights deals never would. Perhaps the real lesson here is that streaming sports rights agreements don’t work unless you’re the NFL or Netflix. But that reality leaves every other league and streamer scrambling to reach (exploit) increasingly annoyed audiences.

This is TV Plus, a newsletter about television written by Cory Barker, a media studies professor and veteran blogger. Readers can expect dispatches on industry trends, overlooked shows, and historical antecedents to current events.

You can follow me on Bluesky or email me at barkerc65[at]gmail.com. Thanks for tuning in.