Apple is hurting Lionel Messi

In 2022, Major League Soccer’s future was hanging in the balance. America’s top domestic league had experienced peaks including bringing David Beckham over to the States before he retired. Some of the league’s West Coast teams in Seattle and Portland experienced extreme popularity relatively quickly and the fandom was palpable through the television screen. However, the league was struggling to find a TV partner that would help it see a major uptick in value. That is… until the league found Apple.

One of the country’s technology leaders made its biggest sports bet yet on American soccer. A 10-year, $2.5 billion deal was signed that kept most of MLS exclusive to Apple . Fox and Univision would occasionally be able to air a game but most of the league would now be behind a paywall.

Apple’s deal would eventually help incentivize one of the world’s most popular soccer players ever to finish his career in America. As part of Lionel Messi’s agreement with Inter Miami, Messi gets a cut of revenue from new subscribers to MLS Season Pass, Apple’s streaming service for MLS games.

The streaming service has experienced some relative success. When Messi first jumped on board in 2023, the app experienced a 1,690 percent jump in signups, according to analytics firm Antenna . Apple’s own research showed at the time that 15 percent of those signing up also ended up subscribing to Apple TV Plus.

In February, it was reported that Season Pass surpassed 2 million subscribers . But a big chunk of the subscribers signed up for the service are season ticket holders. If you sign up for season tickets with any MLS team, you receive the streaming service for free. World Soccer Talk estimates that could mean 20 percent of subscribers aren’t paying for the service. Other subscribers also receive the service for free through T-Mobile. It is also unknown how many of these subscribers are actively using or viewing the service.

As Messi Inter Miami goes on a historic run, clinching the Supporters’ Shield – an award given to the team with the best regular season record, one has to question whether the league’s deal with Apple has blunted the impact of one of the all-time greats playing in America.

Messi and Inter Miami’s dominance this season wasn’t a major storyline that sports observers were paying attention to or covering. Highlights haven’t appeared frequently on SportsCenter. Major online highlight factories like Bleacher Report and Overtime also haven’t made much mention of Messi since he made his debut in 2023. Recently, it is more likely that sports fans will come across highlights of a made-up influencer league from Kai Cenat than any type of MLS highlight.

When ESPN and Fox lost the majority of their rights to MLS games, the marketing they threw behind the sport left as well. Fox hasn’t done the best job of promoting or marketing MLS games compared to the spectacle they’ve made out of college football – creating a College GameDay competitor, adding more competitive games to the Saturday noon window, increasing mentions of their games during NFL action and even creating a new window of programming on Friday nights.

Of course, the second most popular sport in the country is incomparable to the MLS but that gives you a sense of the breadth traditional television is willing to go to promote sporting events in today’s era. Fox has barely made any efforts to give the MLS that same type of promotion or major lead-in to boost ratings and attention.

And to be fair to Fox, why would they help bring attention to a property where most games live on Apple?  Why would they help a property that only allowed Fox to air one Inter Miami game the whole season?

Because of MLS’s deal with Apple, we live in a new world where soccer fans have better access to European games than their own domestic league. NBC and CBS have invested money, time, resources, and lucrative time slots into the Premier League and UEFA Champions League respectively.

CBS and NBC air matchups on their over-the-air networks at a good enough cadence that viewers don’t feel like they’re fully missing out on the action even if they don’t subscribe to Peacock or Paramount+. Even Cristiano Ronaldo and games in Saudi Arabia are more accessible to American viewers than MLS. At one point, Ronaldo’s games aired on Fox Sports 2 which reached at least 52 million homes .

Apple and Major League Soccer haven’t done much to help their cause either. Lionel Messi hasn’t sat down to do any major interviews or podcasts to promote himself or the game since he arrived in the United States. He hasn’t sat down with Oprah, Pat McAfee, or Alex Cooper. It’s now been over a year since Messi was made available to speak with reporters .

Feature stories and documentaries about his life have been a highlight of Apple’s sports offerings but if you aren’t in the Apple ecosystem, you would never know it was even available. It is a curiosity as to why Messi has largely played and lived in the shadows especially if they want to increase subscribers.

To make matters worse, when Messi and Inter Milan made a run at the US Open Cup in 2023 shortly after his debut, it picked up major attention because of accessibility. Their semifinal matchup against FC Cincinnati was Pluto TV’s most-watched live event ever and at the time, the No. 6 most-streamed match on CBS Sports digital platforms. Gaining this type of attention would only help Inter Miami and MLS gain more subscribers to their service. Instead, MLS decided to withdraw their first teams from the tournament, focus on their own Leagues Cup tournament with Liga MX, and move most of those games to the same paywall, limiting access.

It is hard for viewers to watch arguably the greatest soccer player in history during his run in the United States if the majority of his games are behind a paywall, there are no marketing partnerships of depth with the big dogs of sports media and there’s not much promotion done on linear television or even free online options like YouTube. It’s a recipe for irrelevance.

Clearly an audience in America for soccer exists. Sports is the most popular medium of entertainment on television and that reign doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon. CBS, NBC, and ESPN wouldn’t be investing in European leagues if audiences weren’t interested. Even MLS itself recently set an attendance record of 11 million fans watching its games live in person. Now it needs to do a better job of taking advantage of its star moment and making the television presentation of its games more accessible.

The only way MLS Season Pass can be more successful down the road is by giving fans more access to games and making its players appear across the media spectrum. It seems as though MLS has some sort of realization of its problem. Messi’s first playoff game will be available for free on Apple TV . It is unknown to what extent Apple will go to promote this offering but they can draw loads of viewers with just one push notification. For his part, Messi is the latest athlete to launch his own production company .

Perhaps MLS can learn a thing or two from the WNBA. Despite the ability to possibly cash in for a payday that would include a paywall, the league stuck with traditional outlets and is reaping the benefits after the emergence of Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and A’ja Wilson among others. The league is available on CBS, Ion, Amazon, ABC, NBA TV, ESPN, ESPN2, X/Twitter, and CBS Sports Network. It has spread the wealth to make sure as many viewers as possible can be exposed to the product. There are still occasional flareups where fans question the sport’s availability, but for the most part, games were available coast to coast and big moments that were happening at any given point went viral on social media to raise awareness about what’s happening. The WNBA playoffs are widely available on ESPN and ABC and ratings continue to do well even without Clark and the Indiana Fever’s presence.

MLS doesn’t have that same ability thanks to the Apple paywall. And if Lionel Messi and Inter Miami go on to win a championship, it will largely fly under America’s radar because of it.

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