In a change to his regularly scheduled programming, Mark Goldbridge took a break from blowing steam out his ears at another Andre Onana howler and venting his shouty exasperation at Manchester United’s latest calamity to talk – and watch – all things Gegenpressing and Ballbesitzfußball with his audience of over one million YouTube subscribers.
This was after the Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL) struck an agreement with Goldbridge to broadcast 20 live Bundesliga matches on his That’s Football YouTube channel this season. Bayern Munich’s opening weekend win over RB Leipzig raised the curtain on the new deal, with nearly 500,000 viewers watching along with Goldbridge.
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Major League Soccer is in the middle of its own streaming deal, but the league probably isn’t reaching such numbers for a single-game broadcast on MLS Season Pass. While the league has been coy on viewership since saddling up with Apple TV two years ago, Don Garber recently put the average number of viewers per match at 120,000, considerably lower than the 343,000 average viewers MLS was reportedly getting per match on ESPN in 2022.
Garber would, and has, argued MLS is now judging its viewership numbers differently. “The media and pundits just don’t get it yet,” the commissioner told Front Office Sports. MLS was on linear TV for years and was never able to leverage that exposure into anything meaningful. While MLS attendance figures are among the strongest in the world, the league has long struggled as a TV product. The 10-year, $2.5bn Apple TV deal was an opportunity to move the goalposts.
In the time since MLS Season Pass launched, though, the broadcast landscape has shifted. Leagues are increasingly focused on drawing as many eyeballs as possible, wary of how disappearing behind a paywall can put them out of sight, out of mind. The Bundesliga clearly just wants to be seen, hence its deal with the (red) devil.
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Of course, the Bundesliga’s hiring of a chuntering rage baiter is controversial, especially when the rage baiter in question once said “the German league is shit.” However, his audience of young, Gen Z fans is clearly hard to ignore, as is the fact YouTube boasts over 122 million daily active users. Unlike MLS, the Bundesliga has gone to where the audience already is; it hasn’t asked fans to come with them to a new (and niche) streaming service.
The Apple TV deal has had some benefits for MLS. The league has, in a literal sense, never looked better. The Athletic reported that last season, no match was broadcast using fewer than 10 cameras. Whereas previously it wasn’t even a guarantee that matches would be broadcast in 1080p, now all games are bright and beautiful, albeit dependent on the strength of your wifi connection.
For the fan who wants a broad view of the league, it’s handy to have everything all in one place. Gone are the days of frantically searching for a game before kick-off only to find coverage had been delayed due to a college basketball game that had overrun. MLS’s RedZone-style whiparound offering – MLS 360 – is also an entertaining, if slightly anxiety-inducing, watch every Saturday evening.
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In many other ways, though, MLS is handcuffed by Apple. Could MLS 360 ever be broadcast on YouTube, where so many live streams have found success? As long as Google is a direct competitor to Apple, it seems unlikely (even if highlights are currently uploaded to YouTube).
Other leagues that have launched a streaming service of their own like MLS Season Pass have enjoyed some success. Most notably, Ligue 1’s new Ligue 1+ service attracted 600,000 subscribers in its first week, going a long way to reaching its target of one million by the end of the 2025-26 season.
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The Premier League has also hinted at the potential launch of a Netflix-style service in some countries and territories. The English Football League operated a centralised streaming platform called iFollow for a number of seasons until Sky Sports took over rights last year.
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These, however, are leagues in countries where soccer is an easier sell, where the sports landscape isn’t as competitive as it is in the US. MLS isn’t just up against the Premier League and Liga MX and every other soccer league around the world, but the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB and NHL too – all of which have more linear TV exposure than MLS, and by a lot.
The docuseries Onside: Major League Soccer was the league’s attempt at replicating Drive To Survive, which has been transformational for the fortunes of Formula 1. The eight-episode first season was interesting enough, providing a glimpse behind the scenes that did something to round out the likes of Riqui Puig and Pat Noonan as personalities.
But with this too, MLS missed the boat. There’s a golf Drive To Survive. There was a tennis one too. Amazon’s All Or Nothing series has focused on several teams from the Dallas Cowboys to Manchester City and the Brazilian national team. Welcome To Wrexham has made an impact, turning a lower league Welsh club into a global brand, but countless other teams and leagues have chased the Drive To Survive effect without much success.
While MLS’s deal with Apple TV once felt admirably radical, it has since fallen behind the curve. MLS Season Pass is essentially the same product now in its third season as it was on the day it launched, the only major differences being that some commentary is now done remotely (a downgrade) and the creation of Sunday Night Soccer (a welcome development).
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Some MLS clubs are so desperate to be back in the public eye that they have struck agreements with local networks to show matches on a tape delay. The league still has some linear TV exposure through a sub-licensing arrangement with Fox, but those matches often feel like an afterthought.
Will we ever see, say, Soccerwise broadcast a live MLS match on YouTube like Goldbridge will for the Bundesliga 19 more times this season? Could MLS do anything more to plug itself into the vibrant online community around American soccer? Could it go where the fans already are?
Maybe, but MLS needs Tim Cook’s permission first.
