The MLS Season Pass subscription service, which has been a core element of the league’s Apple TV deal, is reportedly being discontinued.
Apple is discontinuing its MLS Season Pass subscription service as of next season and will make MLS matches available to all Apple TV subscribers for no additional fee, Paul Tenorio of The Athletic reported Thursday. MLS Season Pass, which is wrapping up its third year, cost $15/mo on top of the base Apple TV price of $13/mo.
MLS Season Pass was the lynchpin of the ten-year Apple TV-MLS media rights deal. While some matches were set aside for the base Apple TV subscription and others are simulcast on Fox Sports’ linear networks, the majority of the MLS season required a subscription.
Initially, MLS Season Pass was only available through Apple. But this season, the service was also made available outside of the Apple TV app via traditional cable providers like Xfinity and DIRECTV. MLS commissioner Don Garber credited that change for the 50 percent increase in viewership that the league touted at midseason.
That 50 percent increase translated into 120,000 unique viewers per match, a rare public acknowledgement of the size of the Apple TV audience. (That figure is not the same as the average minute audience typically reported on this site and others.)
With the exception of some Lionel Messi Inter Miami matches, MLS has not generated the kind of linear television audiences that had been the norm prior to the start of the Apple deal in 2023. Last year’s MLS Cup averaged a quarter of the audience it pulled two years ago, before the deal began.
The news Thursday came as MLS owners were expected to vote on a much bigger change, a calendar shift to a fall-spring schedule. Currently, MLS begins its season around late February and crowns its champion in November or December. According to Tenorio and Tom Bogert, the fall-spring schedule would run from late summer (July or August) through May, with a lengthy winter break from mid-December to February.
