It's all niche until you're too successful and the bureaucrats try and pick your pockets.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple TV to Be Exclusive Home of Major League Soccer Starting in 2023
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Honestly, this alone would sell the product (Sport) more than many other things. Being able to advertise the games as being FULL 4K HDR/Dolby Vision for every game. Even if you didn't like soccer, you would watch it cause it looked so good. 😊
Great article by The Athletic.
theathletic.com
How will MLS’ Apple TV deal affect the league? Everything we know about the agreement
The deal represents a big change for MLS, both in terms of revenue and options for viewers.
theathletic.com
Apple TV and Apple TV+ subscriptions are not required. MLS will be its own separate thing. And after decades of MLS soccer in Dallas I still see people shocked to find out that we have a MLS team. So it’s not that exposure has been great so far.
I wonder if Apple will try for Major League Rugby. They already have a streaming infrastructure and I’d be surprised if the rights were more than $25M. Could be a good small investment to grow the Apple sporting brand. Then, Major League Cricket is starting… they’d probably give away tv rights for $50 and lots of cricket fans in Asia would watch it.
I imagine it's more lucrative to have the stakeholders of each country bid for broadcasting rights, than to manage it all by themselves (the app would really only be used once every 4 years).
And that might not be a bad thing, for the sport in question, as it would probably suddenly get more coverage than it ever got from ESPN, especially if it’s a sport like pro lacrosse. (I hadn’t even realized pro lacrosse was even a thing. I knew about college lacrosse, which I admittedly tend to associate with elite eastern schools [like rowing or water polo, or polo itself for that matter].)
Yeah, I do the Univision trick myself. I’m kinda angry though that SAP doesn’t go to English like how an NBC would go from English to Spanish. Boooo. Haha.
It sounds like 100% of the time you make up numbers. Everyone that speaks English knows what the term “soccer” means, and since the US, and Canada, make up more native English speakers than the rest of the world combined, it’s also the most used term for the sport - and that’s ignoring South Africa, Australia and New Zealand where football is rugby; and specific to Australia, football is a type of rugby on an oval field.
It’s the English that invented the term soccer, after all, then exported it around the world under that name. The usage of “football” as the primary name only hit England in the 70s when the NASL landed Pele on the Cosmos; they couldn’t allow Americans to one up them. Rugby is also football, full name Rugby Football as opposed to Association Football, yet nobody gets all huffy about calling it just rugby.
I LOATHE exclusivity for this crap. Not only are we going to be bombarded with ads during games in which every player is going to be covered in a smattering of logos and the announcers will spend 1/3rd of the time talking about themselves, and 2/3rds of the time talking about the sponsors (and once in a while, maybe, call a play if they get bored); but these greedy sports leagues are also going to sign exclusive deals limiting our ability to watch! Everything about professional sports is incredibly anti-consumer and hostile. They have a 'product' that fans really want, and are constantly testing the limits of how much fans will endure before they finally give up.
HOWEVER; in the sports world where everything IS exclusive, at least it's not exclusive to a Cable or Satellite provider like is happening with Baseball and other sports. Where you cannot (legally) stream the games at all no matter which services you subscribe to.
So in my mind, this is an improvement over the current model, but... still really sucks.
HOWEVER; in the sports world where everything IS exclusive, at least it's not exclusive to a Cable or Satellite provider like is happening with Baseball and other sports. Where you cannot (legally) stream the games at all no matter which services you subscribe to.
So in my mind, this is an improvement over the current model, but... still really sucks.
Might be available only in the US. Apple should make it available everywhere.
This talk of niche sports got me thinking. I know soccer is considered the world’s game, but I know there’s a difference between 1) the game kids play in organized leagues, 2) the game kids play as a pick up sport (or, more broadly, the popular street game), 3) the game students play in school, and 4) the professional sport(s) of choice. And I know soccer isn’t the dominant game globally in all four categories.
In the US, soccer is actually the most common sport for category 1 (with baseball in a distant second place, ice hockey in third), but basketball tends to be it for #2 (possibly with football and soccer lagging significantly behind). Basketball and American football tend to be the sports of choice for #3 (with football having slightly more prestige in some places, basketball in others), and #4 tends to be American football, basketball, and baseball.
In Canada and the Arctic countries in general, ice hockey puts in a much stronger showing in all four categories. And ice hockey is pretty popular in the US, especially the further north you go. In Polynesia, rugby seems to be the game of choice, and the Polynesian diaspora has been a key driver of the growth of rugby in the western United States. In India (and possibly some other commonwealth countries), cricket has become the street game of choice, and the Indian diaspora has brought cricket with it to the US and other locations. Baseball gets some measure of professional play in Latin America in general and in Japan. Basketball seems to be most popular (outside of the US) in the continental Far East. Are there any other international sports clusters like this that I’ve forgotten? (I’m sure I’ve ignored a bunch of almost exclusively domestic-only national sports, like Aussie Rules Football).
In short, while soccer is the dominant professional sport in most of the world, it’s not like the US and Canada are the exclusive global holdouts to professional soccer.
In England and the U.K. the main term for it has always been football, it wasn’t something that just came along in the 70’s over here, maybe the 1870’s, but not 1970’s.
Yes there are different codes of it, yes the term soccer may have originated over here, but Soccer has never been the primary term for it, just like football has never been the primary term for Rugby.
I will be interested in seeing who MLS hires for its Spanish broadcasts. (MLS is doing all of the production.) I watch a lot of LigaMX, and I love the announcers. (Enrique Bermúdez is probably my favorite.) I always watch fútbol in Spanish if it's an option.
I think that's about right. Five Thirty Eight's club soccer rankings have MLS clubs with an SPI from 29.4 to 55.8, with the median club at 39.8. The Championship clubs (last season) ranged from 27.6 to 64.1 with the median club at 43.7. (The top League One club was at 29.4.) FWIW, LigaMX had slightly better depth, but similar rankings with the Championship.
I watch a lot of LigaMX and EPL and a fair amount of MLS, and those rankings seem about right: LigaMX > Championship > MLS (but narrowly in each case).
i dont know... certainly in the uk there's always been a small but decent audience for foreign football as long as it is on regularly. from when everyone watched italian football as they showed it on channel 4, and i know a lot of people who watch spanish football.
also MLS tends to attract players, often past it mind you, who we know the names of and that creates interest. I doubt i would pay a decent amount for the whole live package, but if there was a weekly highlights package i would (as a scotsman who lives in portugal) watch it and would develop interest in the teams. At the minute i'd guess id be a New York Red Bulls fan as they have 3 ex celtic players, but then Vancouver have the advantage of not being American and Ryan Gauld is doing well there....
i think this is a win win situation, good for apple in terms of more content for the basic package which will get some games, and good for the MLS in terms of boosting worldwide exposure.
No. 1970s. And cataloged in the book “Soccernomics” on how it was the most common name for the sport from the 1890s, when it was created, up until the 1970s when it became perceived as an Americanism after the NASL landed Pele, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Bobby Moore and George Best - in other words, the NASL suddenly embarrassed the old First Division by signing the biggest names they could never get, and taking away the ones they had. The NASL was so named because we adopted the most popular BRITISH word for the sport to name the league. Hence why the program on Sky has always been named SOCCER Saturday. Why the international aid program iTV runs is called SOCCER Aid.
I want to see professional CornHole brought back like it was popular during the initial round of lockdowns on ESPN.
its really not though. Football is by far the most used term, not just in English albeit with sometimes different spelling like futbol or like here in Portugal, futebol.
and certainly in scotland it was always football (pronounced more like fitba ) , way before the 70s.
i do know what the word soccer means, to most of the world it means what americans call football. even reading the word i read it in an american accent. And i know a lot of aussies call it soccer, but their national federation is called Football Australia, which is a member of AFC, the Asian Football Confederation, having left the OFC, Oceania Football Confederation to increase their chances of getting to the world cup. Similarly apparently a lot of south afrians supposedly call it soccer but not the ones i know who live in Portugal, but their FA is the South African Football Association, a member of CAF, Confederation of African Football.
he most important thing for all the Americas Continent would be unifying Conmebol (South American football association) and Concacaf (North American football association):
1) It would create a spectacular international club competition, to rival the UEFA Champions League. It would generate a lot of investment and business for a supercharged Americas Libertadores Cup: Teams from Brazilian league, Argentinian League, Mexican League, MLS (USA) League, etc.
2) Unifying Copa America and Gold Cup in a Supercharged Copa America. A spectacular international national teams competition, similar to the 2016 Copa America, but with more teams.
3) If we don’t do this now, UEFA (European football association) will be a monopoly.
4) There would be more Americas teams in the World Cup, And the World Cup qualification would be super fun
Soccer Saturday was a play on Sports Saturday, its predecessor, and keeps the aliteration, if it was a Friday it would be Football Friday i guess. you wont hear the word soccer mentioned once in the programme.