What Major League Soccer's 10-year deal with Apple TV means for Real Salt Lake

Fans were excited about a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal between Apple and the league, until the question arose: what happens to RSL's state-of-the-art local broadcasts, and its broadcast partners?

Jun 15, 2022

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Major League Soccer unveiled a landmark new media rights deal Tuesday with a noted international supplier, and this one is truly that: landmark.

Finally, after years of speculating and second-guessing, Apple is joining the sports wars.

Beginning with the 2023 season, MLS will partner with the Cupertino, California-based tech giant as the home of every match available in every market for the next decade. As the tag line for the deal states: every club. Every match.

Gone are the days of blackouts and local broadcast wars blocking out fans of certain clubs because of local television deals and the like. In its place, one centralized platform — built by the league and housed inside Apple’s TV streaming app — will take its place.

“We think our league is perfectly positioned for the next evolution of how people watch live sports,” MLS commissioner Don Garber said in announcing the new deal via press conference. “And with this new partnership with Apple … we’re gonna deliver (our fans) every match anywhere, anytime, anywhere around the world without any restrictions or any blackouts.”

But Apple won’t just be a media-rights holder for Major League Soccer starting in 2023; it will be a partner, as Garber likes to put it.

Multiple reports, from Front Office Sports to The Athletic to Sports Business Journal and beyond, valued the agreement at a minimum of $2.5 billion over the next 10 years, with a minimum payout of $250 million per season to each of the league’s 29 (with St. Louis City SC) or 30 teams (presumably with Las Vegas being the frontrunner for next expansion). The league will receive at least that value each season to split among its teams, but will also receive a share of revenue from subscriptions to a new streaming service buoyed by Apple specifically for the league.

The service will be separate from Apple TV+, but connected through the app. Pricing and other details of the service were not revealed this week.

Among the details of the agreement that are known, these stand out:

Every MLS and Leagues Cup match available via streaming, as well as select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT academy matches.
No cable or television required.
Available via subscription on the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV; as well as smart televisions via Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, VIZIO; Amazon Fire TV and Roku; PlayStation and Xbox consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; Comcast Xfinity; and on the internet at tv.apple.com.
Season-ticket holders for all clubs will get full access to full streaming service with their tickets. Select other matches will be available to Apple TV+ subscribers without a subscription, and a handful more will be available for free.
New weekly whiparound show featuring live look-ins, highlights, interviews and analysis from around the league, a la NFL RedZone.
Original programming produced by MLS on the Apple TV app.

So what’s wrong with the new deal?

If you only consume the league from a national perspective, then probably nothing. But that’s not likely the case for most fans of MLS.

For starters, the new deal means the end of local broadcast agreements. For some clubs, that’s hardly a concern. For others — including Real Salt Lake — it means the end of long-established broadcast partners in the local markets, most recently with Sinclair Broadcasting-owned KMYU and Bonneville’s KSL for streaming.

RSL isn’t the only MLS club in this camp; Rocky Mountain rival Colorado’s 10-year deal with Altitude TV will also end as a result of the league-wide Apple TV deal. But the fans’ relationship with team broadcaster Brian Dunseth is unique.

The new deal has been coming for quite some time. MLS has instructed each of its teams for several years to make sure all of their local television partnerships would expire before the 2023 season, with an eye on bundling them together and selling them to the highest bidder.

One source told Salt City FC as far back as 2018 that Real Salt Lake and the rest of the league were preparing for this moment, though Apple TV was not involved at the time — the streaming service hadn’t even launched yet. ESPN was getting set to launch its own streaming service, ESPN+, where the league has housed the majority of its local broadcasts to this point. But ESPN+ did not bid on the streaming rights after 2023, according to The Athletic, leaving the door open for Apple.

Still, there was no surprise among team staff and personnel, except for whom MLS would ultimately sign under contract for the deal.

“Every knew this was coming,” said Dunseth, the former RSL player and longtime analyst who lives in the Salt Lake area with his family and calls the games for KMYU. “Just not the details.”

Dunseth and his broadcast partner David James don’t know if they’ll be involved with the new venture — they’re in a waiting pattern like the rest of us, he told Salt City FC. But there is hope that MLS will hire additional broadcast talent, directors, producers and other staff to work its full cadre of weekly matches.

The Athletic reported that MLS plans to hire 10-14 broadcast teams to professionally call, direct and produce its games. Every match will also have a local option to listen to the team-specific radio call, as well, so it’s assumed that local radio broadcasts (including the one Real Salt Lake holds with Broadway Media and ESPN 700) won’t be going away.

So is MLS punting on television?

Not exactly. The league still plans to negotiate a new linear broadcast deal, though those plans are likely to be significantly less than the current $90 million deal with ESPN, FOX and Univision. That’s largely because the new deal will not include U.S. Soccer’s broadcast rights, which recently were sold to Turner Sports.

The most likely scenario seems to be a short 3-4 extension of a deal with at least ESPN and Univision, though the league has had reported conversations with several broadcasters. But if it does return to ESPN, there’s also a high probability that fewer games will air on the Worldwide Leader in Sports, likely fewer than the 34 games scheduled to air on the ESPN family of networks in 2022.

That’s because MLS viewership numbers, while growing slightly, have not performed well during the most recent contract. Average viewership in 2022 is just 292,500, which is up from the full-season average of 273,300 in 2021.

But those numbers pale in comparison to larger sports properties, from the behemoth that is the NFL to the NBA, MLB, NHL and NASCAR, or even the PGA Tour, college football and the NBC-owned Premier League rights in North America.

Indeed, even in its own hemisphere, MLS seems to be the third-most watched soccer league, behind the Premiership and Liga MX in Mexico. For those reasons, MLS fetched just $90 million annually from the previous television contract that began in 2015 compared to $450 for the Premier League’s current deal, $470 million for ESPN’s contract with the College Football Playoff, or $2.6 billion annually gobbled up by the NBA from ESPN and Turner.

No, MLS’ main consumer — and one its touted heavily in recent years — has been the 20-39 year old Millennials, many of whom have cut the cord and are more heavily reliant on streaming than ever before. For that reason, a traditional broadcast model hasn’t worked as well in other sports, and something had to change.

Apple was more than happy to make it happen. The tech giant just needed a few assurances first.