The 2024 MLS season wrapped up a couple of weeks ago on December 7th, with the LA Galaxy defeating the New York Red Bulls 2-1. Since then, some of spouted doom and gloom regarding the abysmal performance of the game on broadcast television, which reported a 47% drop in viewership compared to the previous Cup. While that number looks downright awful in a vacuum, I think there are some reasons for it and why it may not be so bad.
Apple TV
The 2024 MLS season was the 2nd of a 10 year deal between MLS and Apple. As I’ve mentioned previously, purchasing MLS Season Pass on Apple TV allows you to watch literally every match, from the season opener through the playoffs, without any blackouts. It makes MLS one of the easiest sports to stay on top of. So if you’re into MLS, then you’re already used to watching every match on Apple TV. Why would those fans be inclined to watch MLS Cup on broadcast television when they could just fire up Apple TV like they’ve done all season? Apple doesn’t release any numbers, so it’s difficult to know for sure if the turnout there was good. That being said, the MLS Commissioner said MLS Season Pass had more subscribers than expected, which seems to bode well. On the flip side, I didn’t even know that it was available on Fox until I started seeing articles about how terrible the viewership was. This leads to the next issue.
Advertising (Or Lack Thereof)
I saw absolutely zero advertising for MLS Cup. As a fan of the NFL, I spend a lot of time on Sundays watching Fox and there was no mention at all that MLS Cup would be playing there. More broadly, the only reason I even knew when the Cup was happening was because I went out of my way to look; it’s not as though this was something Season Pass subscribers got notifications for or anything, nor was it featured prominently in the Apple TV app anywhere.
Contrast this with the NWSL finals, which drew double the number of viewers on broadcast television that the MLS Cup did. I passively knew when that was simply because I saw ads for it on both ESPN and CBS. Making people aware that something is happening does wonders for getting them interested… or at least having it in the back of their mind when trying to decide what to watch.
This stands in contrast to the habitual watching that Apple and MLS strove for this season. For the most part, matches were at a set time (7 PM local) on Saturdays with occasional Wednesday matches. During the season, outside of international breaks, I knew I could fire up Apple TV and watch MLS on Saturday evenings. With MLS Cup, things went haywire for a few reasons that I’ll touch on later, but it meant that, without any type of advertising or notice, I had to go out of my way to know when things were happening.
Playoff Format
If the playoff format for MLS seems strange to you, then you aren’t alone. I saw a ton of talk across the web with people decrying how irritating it was. This season, the first round of the playoffs was a best of 3 series rather than a single match. Considering, how physically demanding the sport is, getting decent matches means having ample rest between each one. This meant the first round of the playoffs ended up taking two weeks for clubs that needed the full 3 games (e.g. FC Cincinnati had 13 days between the first match against New York City FC on October 28th and the final match on November 9th.)
Given the odd time frame of the MLS season compared to other professional soccer clubs across the globe, there was also an international break in the middle of the playoffs. So from the first wild card round starting on October 22nd and the MLS Cup on December 7th, the entirety of the MLS Cup playoffs took 47 days. That’s insane.
Compare this to MLB where, in the 2024 season, the wild card games started on October 1st. The 5th and final game of the World Series concluded on October 30th, after just 30 days. For the NFL last season, wild card games started on January 13th and the Super Bowl happened on February 11th after 29 days. The only comparable thing would be last season in the NHL the playoffs that began on April 17th. The final game of the Stanley Cup was June 13th. That’s a total of 58 days. However, for the NHL postseason there was a total of 88 games played over that span of 58 days. Compare that to MLS Cup where 29 matches were played in 47 days. The NHL had roughly 1.5 games per day while MLS had roughly 0.6 matches per day.
When you have fewer matches over such a long span of time, and when it’s not front-and-center for you when those matches are, it’s easy for the entirety of the playoffs to fall off your radar. Especially when your team of choice isn’t playing. Which segues to the next issue.
Top Seeds Eliminated
This season, many of the top seeds were eliminated early on in the playoffs. Just within the Eastern Conference, Inter Miami, Columbus, and FC Cincinnati were all knocked out in the strange, best of 3 first round. Interestingly enough, if the first round had been a single match like it has historically been, both Inter Miami and FCC would have gone to the next round. I’m sure plenty of fans from those die-hard fanbases stopped watching after their teams were eliminated. They may have been inclined to watch if it was top-of-mind for them, but with no advertising or notifications, I’m sure it would be easy to slip by.
Now that being said, the Cup was ultimately played by a team from New York and a team from Los Angeles, two of the biggest cities in the country. That should offer up huge markets for viewership. But for me as a fan from Cincinnati, for example, I honestly didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another for the finals. There was no Eastern Conference rival of ours playing for me to root against and no Western Conference team I felt strongly about (my sister is a Sounders fan, so I guess I would prefer them to any other.)
Supporters’ Shield
MLS has the MLS Cup to mirror other North American sports where, after a regular season, clubs with good (or passable) records make it to the playoffs and compete for several rounds before a culminating final between two teams, generally from opposing conferences or leagues. This is not how most of the soccer world works, though. In soccer, the championship title is claimed by whoever has the most points at the end of the season. There are no playoffs.
Fairly early on, MLS created the Supporters’ Shield to award the team with the best record at the end of the regular season, thus mirroring most other leagues. But it creates a question of which matters more and who is the overall champion? Inter Miami won the Supporters’ Shield this season, meaning they’re the top team if you follow most other soccer leagues on the planet. The LA Galaxy won the MLS Cup, though, so they’re the top team by the metric of most North American sports. It just creates a strange scenario where you end up with two champions, and it decreases some of the prestige of winning MLS Cup since, if you didn’t also win the Supporters’ Shield, it doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether or not you’re the top club in the league. Likewise, if a club wins the Supporters’ Shield but then doesn’t even make it to MLS Cup, like Inter Miami this season and FC Cincinnati the season prior, it makes those fans less inclined to care about the outcome of the Cup.
What To Do
The good news is that MLS and Apple are already aware of and trying to address some of the problems I’ve outlined above. Per Awful Announcing:
Since starting a new 10-year $2.5 billion media rights deal with Apple in 2023, critics have bashed the league for being out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Other than a limited 34-game linear television schedule on Fox (which only featured Messi’s Inter Miami twice last season and is rarely advertised on the network), one wouldn’t get any exposure to the league unless they specifically clicked the Apple TV streaming tile on their device.
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MLS plans to try and integrate its games directly into pay TV program guides, which would lead you back to the Apple TV platform if selected.
Fixing the playoff structure along with this would probably go a long way to addressing some of the issues. I also do feel like a lot of the nay-saying is overblown, especially with no idea how many people watched via Apple TV. If you’ve ever been to an MLS game, then you know that it’s one of the most hyped and energetic sporting events with absolutely fanatical followers. In Cincinnati, for example, the stadium is absolutely filled for every home game. 85% of the seats are held by season ticket owners, and season ticket turnover rate between the 2023 and 2024 seasons was around 2%. The fanbase is strong, so I’m not going to feel overly concerned about the health of the league when expansion clubs are still coming in and stadiums are still selling out just because fans didn’t swap from Apple TV to broadcast television to watch the Cup or because it wasn’t overly popular with non-fans.