Landon Donovan thinks MLS is confusing accessibility with visibility.
The U.S. men’s national team’s all-time leading scorer said during a recent appearance on Front Office Sports’ Portfolio Players that a conversation he had with commissioner Don Garber on Tim Howard’s Unfiltered Soccer podcast stuck with him. Garber told him the league tried something new with the Apple deal, saw it wasn’t working, and made changes. Specifically, he acknowledged that requiring fans to pay $99 per year for MLS Season Pass on top of an Apple TV subscription was a significant misstep, and that the league was “way early” on its move to a streaming-exclusive model.
“He said, ‘Putting it behind a second paywall proved to be the wrong idea,'” Donovan said. “We had to adjust, and we saw what the market said, and we listened.”
The MLS and Apple renegotiated last November, scrapping the Season Pass and cutting the original 10-year, $2.5 billion deal short by three and a half years, with the agreement now set to expire after the 2028-29 season rather than 2032. The league also secured an additional $50 million under the revised arrangement, per Sportico. Every MLS game is now available to any Apple TV subscriber at no extra cost.
But Donovan’s concern isn’t the paywall. It’s that MLS abandoned linear television before it had built an audience capable of surviving without it.
The U.S. men’s national team’s all-time leading scorer said during a recent appearance on Front Office Sports’ Portfolio Players that a conversation he had with commissioner Don Garber on Tim Howard’s Unfiltered Soccer podcast stuck with him. Garber told him the league tried something new with the Apple deal, saw it wasn’t working, and made changes. Specifically, he acknowledged that requiring fans to pay $99 per year for MLS Season Pass on top of an Apple TV subscription was a significant misstep, and that the league was “way early” on its move to a streaming-exclusive model.
“He said, ‘Putting it behind a second paywall proved to be the wrong idea,'” Donovan said. “We had to adjust, and we saw what the market said, and we listened.”
The MLS and Apple renegotiated last November, scrapping the Season Pass and cutting the original 10-year, $2.5 billion deal short by three and a half years, with the agreement now set to expire after the 2028-29 season rather than 2032. The league also secured an additional $50 million under the revised arrangement, per Sportico. Every MLS game is now available to any Apple TV subscriber at no extra cost.
But Donovan’s concern isn’t the paywall. It’s that MLS abandoned linear television before it had built an audience capable of surviving without it.
2 days ago
