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Apple TV to Include MLS Games at No Extra Cost Starting in 2026
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I like it when they fall down and start crying after not being touched. Screams serious sport.
There are no sports after Football, Basball and Basketball in the US. The rest is just space filler on the various sports networks.
It’s FREE just as long as you pay more.
American football sucks but hey it’s an American company and I doubt even Apple could afford European leagues. I’d only really watch if British/German/Spanish/French leagues were included.
American teams are corporate soulless clubs. The fans are just as miserable too. They should stick to their own “football” you know the one where they carry an egg thing? Or baseball or basketball.
American football sucks but hey it’s an American company and I doubt even Apple could afford European leagues. I’d only really watch if British/German/Spanish/French leagues were included.
American teams are corporate soulless clubs. The fans are just as miserable too. They should stick to their own “football” you know the one where they carry an egg thing? Or baseball or basketball.
That would be a problem. I’d they keep the price as it is then bring it, otherwise I don’t want to pay more for some sports that I don’t want to watch. Thats the problem Disney has right now where they are raising the price for ESPN even though people just want to watch some Disney movies.
If Apple starts having the World Cup or Olympic Games for free, then I might be interested.
But Apple TV just has too American content. It's either not interesting, or just jarring.
But Apple TV just has too American content. It's either not interesting, or just jarring.
Apple could easily afford the European leagues, and with money to spare.
The Premier League’s TV rights outside of the U.K. is between £1bn-£1.5bn, with the total rights for the U.K. aswell costing £3.5bn per season.
La Liga doesn’t come anywhere near that number, nor do the German or Italian leagues. The French Ligue 1 heads from TV rights disaster to TV rights disaster.
If you look at other leagues, say the Scottish League, their whole league system gets less money than the EFL (lower leagues) in England get.
Outside of the Premier League, the next costliest would like be the UEFA competitions.
The NFL’s domestic (USA) TV rights totals about £9bn/$11bn per year, that’s just for in the USA. Apple could easily buy the global rights to the top 5 leagues, UEFA competitions, and pretty much all of the other leagues in Europe for the same price.
Not true though. You have pretty much every major city either creating an MLS or trying to get one. That’s with the addition of them building soccer specific stadiums, and the buy in alone being at $500m.
Even places where you never thought soccer would ever take off have popular teams.
Quite true, in fact that's why the NFL is expanding out into Europe with their games and are even considering expanding with a new team in London. They see that real Football the type that we Yanks refer to as Soccer is the #1 global sport and the NFL is trying to counter its popularity.
Please. Soccer in the US is just a pin prick. About twice as much viewership as ice skating and four times as much as golf which isn’t saying much. MLS is cheap and easy to set up in existing NFL and College stadiums. The few stadiums they are building are small, cheap and disposable.
Companies always announce these great new additions to their streaming service for "free", and then conveniently 6-12 months later announce a price increase, usually to "keep up with demands of a challenging market and increasing costs for content creation" or some crap.
It costs a minimum of $500m just to join the MLS now. That is without players wages, players fees, new stadiums etc.
that’s half a billion dollars just to be allowed to create a team.
The new New York City stadium is estimated to cost up to $1bn. This is for a a 25,000 seater stadium. To put that into perspective Tottenham Hotspur built a new stadium with a capacity of over 60k, removable pitches to allow for NFL games. This is a stadium that is regarded as the best in soccer, potentially all of sport, and was largely built on land that they already owned.
The money being invested in soccer by the USA isn’t just a pin prick. You even have USL teams building their own stadiums. Your country is throwing money at the sport, you are even throwing money at hosting the World Cup, a the Club World Cup, the former of which has the highest ticket prices for any previous World Cup.
You have people offering thousands of dollars to season ticket holders who are willing to sell them their ticket for game in which Messi is playing in.
COSM in LA is showing more Soccer events than it is for any other sport, and the same will apply to the new COSM’s that will open in other cities.
You’ve got southern cities that are taking an interest in the sport. Atlanta were selling out Mercedes Benz stadium, Nashville, the home of country music has probably one of the most loyalist and active fanbases in the MLS.
In fact considering that Oakland are in the same metropolitan area as San Francisco, and that the 49ers actually play in San Jose now, only Green Bay, and Jacksonville have NFL teams in cities that don’t have an MLS team.
You might not like the sport, but the facts are there, the interest in it in the USA is rising fast, and that equals the money you Americans are throwing at it.
So is the NBA and it is growing fast. Adam Silver says that his goal is to make the NBA the 2nd most played sport in the world. He plans to open an NBA League in Europe. Basketball and European Football have two things in common. It takes little money for kids to learn how to play and it is easy to setup, little equipment is necessary.
American football costs a lot of money in uniforms and it is such a violent sport that many former players don't want their kids playing the sport. What's really ironic is that NBA and Footballers tend to make more money than NFL payers. In the NBA, star players can average $35-50 million per year and it is all guaranteed unlike in the NFL where most all of the lucrative contracts are not guaranteed.
I think this is the weirdest part of US sports, teams are not clubs but franchises of the league. You can't get a few friends together, create a club and play in the lowest tier of a league system. (this is not free either but it costs way less than $500m) See AFC Wimbledon as an example. Which was founded when the original Wimbledon football club moved to Milton Keynes.
A few things are annoying though, in many countries sport clubs have become companies instead of clubs. And many are being sold and bought by rich people, companies, or even countries. For example England had an influx of Russian oligarchs and Germany has their company teams, like Bayer Leverkusen. That is why I see some who simply say, don't care anymore, I rather watch Altona 93 in the 4th league at their old and small stadium than HSV or FC St. Pauli in the 1st league.
You have one nice stadium, majority funded by of country investors at $780 million because there was little to no public support for the project. Small market Buffalo Bills new stadium $2.2 billion. Sofi in LA $5.5 Billion. The financial delta between public support is enormous. 25,000 seats is a small college football venue in the US and they can’t even fill them for MLS.
Stop pretending people are taking soccer seriously in the US. Just like people should stop pretending the NFL will actually take off in Europe. People will go to an NFL game in Europe for the novelty of it and sell out stadiums, but that’s about it. Quite frankly, I wish the NFL would give up on this nonsense. Just like MLS should give up.
The franchise system is designed for revenue sharing and there are some tax benefits to it as well.
NBA is a high yield, small team environment, so yes they get paid more on average. In terms of high yield contracts, MLB kicks all their butts. NFL has an average salary of $5.2 million and their massive revenue is done with once a week games. It’s not in decline due to injury concerns either. That’s overplayed in the media. MLB could actually make more if they shrunk the season to weekend games only where attendance is higher making it an event. They’d need larger stadiums though. MLS makes a third of NHL in revenue, and even the NHL is considered a minor sport in the US. NCAA football revenue doubles them at $1.4 billion in revenue. Cost of uniforms is negligible as it’s a write off.
Highest paid annual contracts by sport:
NBA $71 million/yr - 82 games
MLB $70 million - 162 games
NFL $60 million - 17 games
NHL $14 million - 82 games
MLS $20 million - 34 games - Contrast that to Ronaldo at $355 million. Messi is essentially being paid to promote the sport just like Beckham was. They had to scrape up every dime to get them.
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23 out of 30 MLS stadiums are soccer specific stadiums. Two of them were build with soccer as part of a dual purpose. The New York City stadium will move the team out of a baseball stadium and into a soccer specific stadium.
It is part of the rules of the MLS that you either need to build a soccer specific stadium, or one with the purpose of soccer being played on it with the correct dimensions, and without NFL marking on it.
The reason most MLS don’t cost billions is because of the capacity of them. They have a capacity of 20k-30k, instead of the NFL capacities of 60k-80k. SOFI cost so much largely down to how it had to be built in the ground, and has facilities outside of being a stadium. The Mercedes Benz stadium in Atlanta is one of the most expensive stadiums built and that was built with dual-purpose in mind.
MLS teams usually represent cities and urban areas, where as NFL teams for example largely represent whole and multiple states. As yet there is no demand from MLS teams to build such big stadiums.
The NFL gets decent crowds in Europe, they messed up this year with the pricing structure of the London games, but generally they get good crowds. A few one of games isn’t a bad idea but I agree, there probably isn’t a need for a European league. As for the MLS, the increase in teams with their popularity etc shows that there is a demand there.
The problem that I think people like you have is that they believe that MLS wants to be or even thinks it will become the number 1 sport. That’s not right, the MLS didn’t need to be number 1, 2, or even the 3rd most popular sport in the USA. It simply just needs to be there for an option for those who like the sport. As I have said the increase in fan attending and demand for new teams shows that those people are there.
The USA also has the advantage that many people follow multiple sports. So filling an NFL, MLS, NBA, NHL, and even a MLB team or any combination of them is fairly common. It means all those leagues have the ability to gain more fans.
In Europe that largely isn’t the case.
I'm pretty sure NBA players are all for playing less and making more. In fact there's this thing the last several years in the NBA of player load mgmt. That's where players decide or the team decides they don't want to play so they're not tired by the end of the season and they still get paid. The NFL player money and if you do follow the sport is a sham, because pretty much every lucrative NFL contract has loopholes where teams don't have to pay the player after so many years. In Miami, Tua's contract is not all guaranteed and he can be cut after the 2026 season.
Your bias towards the MLS shows because the MLS is not established as the other sports in the US. You pay according to the fan base and player interest. The superstars are in Europe such as the English Premier League, La Liga, Italian Series A where they are banking money. The two players you mentioned were brought in to increase exposure to MLS and that they have. Many of the aging superstars playing alongside Messi would not have bothered with the MLS but they came to play with him, much like LeBron getting players to join him. Ronaldo went to the Saudi Arabia league because of Saudi money and that was to grow their League. But have you noticed a trend. How many NFL Leagues are there, one? How many soccer leagues around the world are there? A lot more than 1 perhaps well into the hundreds. That's what the NFL and Roger Goodell are looking at.
The fact that the NFL is trying to expand interest outside of the US shows that they are keeping a watchful eye on the growing popularity of football (soccer) in the US. In case you haven't heard the term, soccer moms or dads has become a thing the last 30 plus years.
And that's how you grow a fanbase by introducing a sport to kids and their parents. It takes time but decades later it takes over. Look, i'm approaching 70 yrs old and back in my days baseball was the thing. I lived in NYC and saw Mantle, Yaz and other MLB greats play at Yankee Stadium. No one back then saw the NFL leapfrogging baseball. Then one day my dad was talking to his friend about this cool fast paced sport but it was violent. I'm a preteen and it got my interest and I started watching the sport and today the NFL has become Goliath. That's how you grow a sport with kids and it takes time, perhaps many decades.
I'm now an NBA fan as well as a fan of the Premier League because it is a much faster paced game rather than the 10 secs of play broken up by a huddle or TV timeout.