In a guest post, Adam Gostomelsky previews what to expect in Major League Soccer’s upcoming media rights negotiations.
The first big 2022 TV rights deal is upon us, with MLS commissioner Don Garber expecting to complete an agreement by the end of Q1. The current MLS deal, split with ESPN, FOX, and Univision, currently nets the league $90 million a season — far below its putative rivals the NHL and Major League Baseball. Multiple reports have said MLS hopes the new deal will more than triple the current figure, with $300 million as the target. Here are the key factors that will play into any new television rights contract:
Loss of USMNT rights
Previously, MLS TV deals included the rights to the more popular USMNT games, however due to US Soccer Federation’s decision to bring media rights in-house, MLS can no longer leverage what was once the premium part of their TV package.
Leagues Cup Announcement with Liga MX
The most popular soccer league in the United States is Mexico’s Liga MX. While the 1.14 million viewer average for ABC’s 2021 MLS Cup represented solid growth, it still pales in comparison to Univision’s average viewership of 3 million during Liga MX’s Apertura second leg final in June. The recent announcement of an annual summer tournament in which all teams from MLS and Liga MX will take part has the potential to create some high value games for networks during the typically weak summer programming season. While high in potential, the current, albeit much smaller and less ambitious version of this tournament saw 133,000 people tuned into ESPN2 on a Wednesday night in September to watch the Seattle Sounders and Santos Laguna play in this year’s final.
MLS will have control over the media rights for the tournament, with all games being played in the US. Liga MX TV rights are sold by each club independently, rather than as on a league-wide basis, and range from $2 million to $15 million for the most popular clubs, like Club América.
Premier League Bidding Result
According to Sports Business Journal, nine different companies submitted first round bids for rights to the English Premier League, with six of them being asked to submit a second bid. And because the Premier League’s rights were sold exclusively to NBC, it does mean that there are a number of suitors still looking for soccer content, including traditional heavyweights ESPN, FOX, and WarnerMedia, as well as streamers like Amazon and Paramount+.
2026 World Cup
The World Cup is the highest profile sporting competition across the world, and the most successful World Cup ever hosted is arguably the 1994 edition hosted in the US in terms of attendance and financial success. The ’94 success came in spite of the fact that, at the time, MLS (nor any other professional soccer league) did not exist. 1994 also saw only 24 entrants into the tournament. 32 years later in 2026, 48 teams will come to the US (as well as Mexico and Canada for some games) in what is likely to be not only the most popular and financially successful World Cup in history. Having the rights to MLS games in the lead in and for the inevitable post-World Cup popularity boost may prove incredibly valuable to networks, especially to FOX, which owns the exclusive rights to the 2026 World Cup.
Demographics
MLS has a unique demographic profile, boasting the youngest audience of any US sports league — a Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing Fan Insights survey conducted in 2020 pegged 70% of US soccer fans being under 40 years old — and, according to MLS themselves, a “very tech-savvy digitally-native fanbase. And a very unduplicated fanbase.”
In 2021, MLS averaged 276,000 viewers in 31 regular season games on ESPN’s various channels, including ABC — an 18.45% increase on 2020’s numbers. For comparison, NBC reported an average of 414,000 viewers for English Premier League games in 2020-21 and an average of 609,000 viewers for the newest season thus far.
Also in 2021 was the first ever Thanksgiving-day game, a Western Conference semi-final matchup between the Colorado Rapids and the Portland Timbers, that drew 1.894 million viewers on FOX, making it the most watched MLS match on FOX of all time and the second most-viewed club soccer match in the English language in 2021.
Who is in Play?
In short: everyone. Little is known of who the front-runner might be at this point, as all signs point to MLS being incredibly open to any of numerous different directions. There are many unknowns; per Sam Stejskal of The Athletic, it is still “unclear if individual clubs will be able to have their own broadcast teams on individual matches or if the league will shift to an NFL-like model of only having one commentary team for each game in a new deal. It’s also unclear if the networks themselves will handle production for the huge volume of matches MLS is offering or if they’ll contract some or all of those responsibilities to a third party.” Nonetheless, it is clear MLS has been preparing for this moment to negotiate what could be a transformative television deal for the US’s top soccer league.
“Many years ago, we went to our clubs and said, all of your local deals need to expire by the end of the [2022] season,” Garber told reporters on Dec. 7th. “All of your streaming deals need to expire,” Garber added. “All of your data deals, all of your sports betting deals, everything that has a touch point with a consumer is all now in a package that we’re able to engage with traditional media companies that are transforming themselves digitally, to new media companies.”
Sources:
• https://theathletic.com/3003883/2021/12/07/las-vegas-is-mls-expansion-frontrunner-media-rights-diversity-policy-and-more-discussed-at-state-of-the-league/?article_source=search&search_query=MLS%20tv
• https://worldsoccertalk.com/watch-liga-mx-us-tv-internet/
• https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/18/major-league-soccer-viewership-is-up-now-it-needs-networks-to-pay-more.html
• https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/colorado-portland-thanksgiving-game-on-fox-sets-mls-playoff-viewership-record
• https://corporate.univision.com/press/press-releases/2021/06/02/univisions-telecast-of-2nd-leg-of-liga-mx-final-draws-largest-soccer-audience-on-any-network-since-19-gold-cup/
• https://www.mlssoccer.com/news/historic-reimagined-leagues-cup-starting-in-2023
• https://acmconnect.com/blog/liga-mx-leads-in-soccer-viewership-in-u-s/
• https://www.giltedgesoccer.com/industry-stats/average-age-of-soccer-fans-in-america/
• https://worldsoccertalk.com/2021/09/15/mls-bullish-about-next-tv-rights-deal-as-d-day-edges-closer/
• https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/SB-Blogs/Newsletter-Media/2021/12/20.aspx
• https://worldsoccertalk.com/2021/12/02/mls-tv-rights-deal-depends-on-leagues-cup-success/
• https://www.socceramerica.com/publications/article/90890/don-garber-las-vegas-is-frontrunner-for-mlss-30t.html
• https://m.livesoccertv.com/es/news/57900/most-watched-soccer-games-on-u-s-tv-sept-21-27
