MLS and Apple TV: how a league sold every single game

On 13 November 2025, Apple and MLS officially announced that from the 2026 season every league match would be included in the basic Apple TV subscription at no extra cost. That statement killed off MLS Season Pass, the $14.99-a-month or $99-a-season package that had defined the relationship between the two parties since 2023. A standalone paid product ceased to exist three years after it was born, and no single decision explains the state of the MLS broadcast business better.

Exactly what the deal covers

The original version was announced on 14 June 2022. Apple confirmed in its own release a ten-year partnership, running from 2023 to 2032, in which the Apple TV app would be the exclusive home for every live MLS match, plus the Leagues Cup and a selection of MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT fixtures. Two details in that official text matter enormously: the deal wiped out local blackouts, and it did not require a traditional pay-TV subscription. Commentary would be available in English and Spanish, and in French for matches involving the Canadian clubs.

The November 2025 update keeps that perimeter and widens it inside the base subscription. From 2026, an Apple TV subscriber gets the full regular season, the Leagues Cup, the MLS All-Star Game, the Campeones Cup and the MLS Cup Playoffs, across more than a hundred countries and territories, with no blackouts. Apple TV costs $12.99 a month in the United States, so the supporter who used to pay for two products now pays for one, and pays less than the two used to cost together.

One contract instead of a map of contracts

To see why that is strange, it helps to remember how league rights are normally sold. The standard model is territorial: the competition slices its product up and auctions it market by market. One deal for Spain, another for Mexico, another for the United Kingdom, another for Brazil. Each buyer pays for its own patch, sets its own price and decides which matches go out and at what time, and the supporter who moves country discovers that their league has changed channel and changed language.

MLS did something different, and it spent years setting it up. In 2018 the league told its franchises that no new regional deal could run beyond the end of the 2022 season, precisely so that it could sit down with a single partner holding complete exclusivity over every match, free of the local blackouts that weigh down other American sports products. Before Apple, for instance, ESPN+ held the out-of-market rights. After Apple, there is one global shop window.

That design carries an obvious upside and an equally obvious cost. The upside is uniformity: same catalogue, same terms, no match blocked, wherever you live. The cost is dependence. The league gives up the ability to price to each market's capacity to pay and ties itself to the commercial reach of a single distributor. If Apple TV is not well established in a country, neither is MLS.

The numbers: published and confirmed are not the same thing

This is where precision matters, because almost everything repeated about the money in this deal is journalism, not official documentation. The famous figure - a minimum of $250 million a year, $2.5 billion across ten years - comes from a Sports Business Journal report in 2022 that outlets including Fortune and Variety subsequently picked up. The official Apple release contained no figure at all, and commissioner Don Garber declined to confirm the total when he was asked. It is a reported figure, not a confirmed one, and we have spent four years treating it as though it were the latter.

The same goes for the revision. In November 2025, Sportico reported that the contract had been restructured and would now end in 2029 rather than 2032: seven years instead of ten. According to that same report, Apple gave up its contractual right to walk away after 2027 and MLS would receive around $200 million for 2026, $107.5 million for the short 2027 season and $275 million for each of 2027-28 and 2028-29, leaving the league roughly $50 million better off through to 2029 than under the previous terms. Neither MLS nor Apple has published these amounts. Again: reported, not confirmed.

The opacity is not an accident, it is a feature of the arrangement. Apple has never made MLS Season Pass subscriber numbers public, and it has been reported that league executives had to sign non-disclosure agreements to see those figures at all. Garber himself has publicly pointed at Apple as the reason for that lack of transparency. The one audience number the league did put on the table was an approximate average of 120,000 unique viewers per match, up by close to 50% year on year.

Under the new model, MLS announced that the opening weekend of 2026 drew 9.7 million viewers across all platforms, 59% more than the year before. That is an official league figure, but it is worth reading with the caveats Ian Quillen set out in Forbes: it is a global number that includes international partners broadcasting simultaneously, it is not comparable with domestic Nielsen measurement, and it is impossible to separate how much of the rise comes from tearing down the paywall and how much from genuinely new interest.

What changed for fans outside the United States

For anyone following MLS from Spain, Mexico or Argentina, the 2026 change is mostly a cut in the cost of entry. You used to pay for the subscription and then the package on top; now the subscription is enough. The catalogue is identical in every territory where Apple TV operates, Spanish commentary comes as standard and no match is geo-blocked, which is still more than most of Europe's big leagues can say.

There is a second change, less discussed, that will affect the overseas viewer more than any television deal. The MLS Board of Governors approved a move to a summer-to-spring calendar from 2027: kick-off in mid-July, Decision Day in April and the MLS Cup Playoffs in May, with a shortened bridge season running from February to May 2027 and fourteen matches per team. The league stops playing against the grain of the rest of the world and falls into step with the European calendar and its transfer windows. That calendar also explains why the revision reported by Sportico contains an isolated payment of $107.5 million: it covers a season that lasts half a year.

Messi and the part of the contract nobody has published

Lionel Messi arrived at Inter Miami in 2023, months after the Apple deal began, and it has been impossible to analyse the league's broadcast business without him ever since. On 23 October 2025 the club announced his renewal through to the end of the 2028 season, with a video shot on the turf of the future Miami Freedom Park. That is a fact confirmed by Inter Miami themselves and verified by ESPN, NBC News and MLS.

His pay is documented too. According to figures published by the players' union, the MLSPA, Messi's guaranteed compensation for 2026 is $28.3 million, on a base salary of $25 million: the highest in the league's history and almost triple that of the second-highest earner, Son Heung-min at LAFC. On top of that, Inter Miami co-owner Jorge Mas said publicly that the total paid to Messi runs to somewhere around $70 million to $80 million a year once sponsorship and commercial deals are added in. That is an owner's statement, not an audited document, and it should be taken as such.

The most quoted element is also the least verifiable: it has been widely reported that Messi takes a share of the revenue from new subscriptions to the league's streaming service. The existence of the mechanism has been referred to by MLS and Inter Miami executives, but its specific terms have never been made public, so it is set down here as press reporting rather than confirmed fact. It leaves an interesting question open, too. A share of subscriptions only makes sense while there is a specific subscription to sell. Scrapping MLS Season Pass in 2026 changes that arithmetic, and neither Apple nor MLS nor the club has explained how.

"MLS stopped selling matches country by country and started selling a single subscription to the entire world."

The provisional verdict is of a bet half executed. The league got what it wanted, a single global product with no blackouts, and in return accepted dependence on a partner that does not publish its numbers. By shortening the contract to 2029 and pulling down the paywall, MLS has put itself in the best possible position for the next negotiation: it will arrive with audiences inflated by relative free access, a calendar aligned with Europe and a World Cup just played at home. Whether that turns into a bigger contract is something we will only find out in 2029.

In the meantime, broadcast rights get negotiated behind closed doors, but the table does not. That part you can build yourself in Fut Simulator Pro:

• Simulate the full MLS regular season and see how the standings shake out.
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• Switch competition and follow the FA Cup and Carabao Cup brackets round by round.