On a crowded day for sports, the MLS Cup failed to break through — at least on traditional television.
Saturday’s MLS Cup between two of the league’s premier franchises, the LA Galaxy and NY Red Bulls, saw its linear television audience drop by nearly 50% year-over-year. According to Alex Silverman of Sports Business Journal, the Galaxy’s win averaged 468,000 viewers between Fox and Fox Deportes, a 47% decline from last year’s linear audience for a Columbus Crew-LAFC final (890,000 viewers on Fox/Fox Deportes).
It should be noted that last year’s MLS Cup was played on a much lighter day for sports on television, with its main competition being the Army-Navy football game. This year’s final was played directly against the SEC Championship game at 4 p.m. ET on Saturday afternoon.
Of course, this is simply one method through which viewers could access the MLS Cup this season, though likely the only method for which there will be publicly reported data. MLS has now concluded the second year of a 10-year deal with Apple TV, which does not release viewership data for the product. Still, last year’s game had nearly double the audience on linear television and was also streamed on Apple TV. Not to mention this year’s game featured the two largest media markets in the country, while last year’s did not.
Notably, at least from a linear standpoint, this year’s NWSL Championship match in November drew more than double the audience of this year’s MLS Cup match. The Orlando Pride’s 1-0 win over the Washington Spirit averaged 967,900 viewers on CBS, also on a college football Saturday (albeit during primetime).
Perhaps the even bigger viewership upset, however, is that the USL (the second-tier professional soccer league in the United States), who played its championship game at noon ET on the same day as the NWSL Championship in November, outdrew the MLS Cup’s English-language linear audience on Fox. The USL Championship Final averaged 431,000 viewers on CBS, while the MLS Cup’s audience on Fox (excluding Fox Deportes) was 427,000 viewers.
For comparison, the final year that the MLS Cup aired on linear television prior to the Apple TV deal drew an audience of 2.16 million viewers between ABC and Univision/TUDN.
There’s no telling what tune-in looked like for this year’s match on Apple TV, where the game aired in front of the MLS Season Pass paywall for all to see. In year two of the league’s new media rights deal, it’s certainly possible that viewers are more accustomed to watching games on Apple TV and, thus, less likely to watch on linear television. Nevertheless, it’s hard to defend losing to the little brother USL outright and getting more than doubled up by a league that’s barely a decade old.
All in all, it’s not a promising look for MLS, which, despite riding a wave of Lionel Messi-driven momentum, hasn’t seemed to capitalize from a viewership perspective. Even though MLS commissioner Don Garber insists subscriber data for MLS Season Pass is strong, Apple (and the league) still refuses to publicize what that data actually looks like. It’s hard to imagine it’d be kept such a secret if it were really as strong as Garber claims.
So, while the jury is still out on whether the league’s decade-long $2.5 billion media rights deal with Apple is a success, early returns are far from positive.
