MLS TV Rights

For some. For many of us Apple TV was already complimentary under other deals (for me via the JP Morgan Reserve for example). I don't really care since free is free, but it is another notch for me personally in the belt of not renewing in 27.

 

I get it free from T-Mobile, you point isn't invalid that there are a lot of ways to get AppleTV+ without paying a dime.

 

The tv deal changed $ and length but details quiet

MLS Update: Commissioner Don Garber said both the length and financials of @MLS' deal with Apple have changed as part of the move to bring the league’s matches into the main Apple TV offering. He declined to provide details, but said the changes are “very positive for us.” 🧵

— Alex M. Silverman🏒⚽️ (@AlexMSilverman) November 14, 2025

 

I had something similar about a loss of benefit written in the "Schedule Change" thread, saw the good news (IMO) and deleted it.

You're not wrong though. For both of us, this was a $100 benefit. I never subscribed to AppleTV and only downloaded the app for Crew/Crew2 away games. It was then when I "discovered" two movies I had bought a long time ago via the iTunes store had migrated into AppleTV.

If someone, such as you, gets AppleTV included with some other package, you've now lost $100 of benefits. For some people (as I said in the deleted post), $100 could be a substantial benefit.

 

Well I'm going to sound like an elitist but by your own admission, you don't know what the ******** you're talking about.

The price of tickets has more than doubled in less than six years. If just going to games is all someone cares about, that is now cheaper to do by NOT buying a STM. Even at the STM discounted price, values aren't holding in the secondary market and the Crew is doing flash promos for every game because they have thousands of unsold seats. That's the entire ********ing point. Fringe benefits are the only reason to buy Crew STMs right now. Why would anyone pay more than they have to pay to just go to the games?

The Crew continues to restrict or remove these incentives every year. Meanwhile, other franchises recognize this obvious fact and continue to add incentives to retain their STMs. The replica championship ring gifts were a very nice renewal incentive from Columbus after 2020. The ticket exchange program used to be a nice feature and based on how poorly tickets are selling now and how much worse it will get with the schedule change, that may be something for the Crew to bring back. The season kickoff parties and meet the team events where you could actually meet the team were cool things to do. Fun fact: the CBJ still do all of these for their STMs!

Within MLS, I think it's St Louis that pays for their STMs to attend away days. The Red Bulls don't charge their STMs for tickets to the first two rounds of the playoffs. Most teams give their STMs 10% off for concessions, yet we don't even get that.

A business can either charge Ritz Carlton prices for a Ritz experience, or charge Best Western prices for a basic shower and bedsheets. The Crew has taken customers' business for granted and overplayed their hand in thinking they can have their cake and eat it too. They want change premium ticket prices without including any premium benefits. Loyalty only goes so far and once someone hits their breaking point and cancels, it's really hard to ever get them back to that level of loyalty; it's much more common to just lose those fans completely.

That is our reality right now. It's an existential crisis for the club. They spent five years building up a great presence in this community and have now undone all that progress in less than 18 months. Many people are fed up and doing exactly what you advocate by not buying tickets. That's not a good thing for the health of the Columbus Crew. A lot of these people will end up like you, attending a couple games a year and then tapering off until they eventually don't go to games and stop following the team altogether. It becomes increasingly easy to not care and to find other things to spend money on. It's happened to me with OSU basketball and the CBJ in the last five years. Go off on that uninformed soapbox of yours though, I guess.

 

The challenge is that it will be much harder to follow the team if you give up your season tickets and don't buy Apple TV. Now I've had to deal with that with my Gladbach for much of my life, excepting the time when Fox had the Bundesliga. I've NOT gotten ESPN+--yet. May not. We're starting to get into the fixed income years pretty soon, so that will determine some of our choices.

The jump in ticket prices really hurt. We used to have similar prices and locations for both the Crew and Jackets,. Now the Crew is almost twice as much. Mrs KG has already stated, and repeated it last night, that she is NOT going to go to "winter" games. That removes a lot of the value for being a FST holder.

I will probably hang on thru the interim series in 2027. After that, I want to see scheduling. My guess is that I shan't have any trouble getting a ticket when I want to, excepting HIR and Messi (Boooo!).
On perks? The first ring they gave us. The second time, we had to pay for it (and I did get one then for Mrs KG, so we would both have one).

 

The Apple TV deal for MLS was fundamentally flawed and poorly executed. It has failed to grow the league's viewership because it forces fans into yet another niche streaming service. This exclusivity makes it difficult for viewers to switch between sports, a major drawback when compared to more integrated services like YouTube TV.

The league compounded this error by scheduling most games simultaneously (like the NFL) but neglecting to offer a multicast feature to view multiple matches, instead opting for the less engaging "MLS360" RedZone format. By skipping the vital phase of making games easily accessible to casual viewers, MLS prematurely jumped into an exclusive, late-stage distribution model, only now attempting to "self-correct" by removing the secondary paywall to attract the non-core audience.

I started having issues hosting parties once College Football began, with the Crew's game typically getting relegated to a secondary TV elsewhere in the house. The primary TVs (outside and inside) were instead dedicated to games that could be watched via YouTube TV's multicast feature. This isn't just a MLS issue, its an issue with all sports on all streaming services.

 

The Clippers are going to see a boost with the Crew abandoning most of May, June, and July.

I bought a 20-game pack of 2 club seats for the Clippers for $644.
$7 to park instead of $30 at Astor Park.


Is it same as the Crew? Of course not.
But, it's a sporting event and another get-out-of-house activity during prime Central Ohio weather.

And my future mother-in-law ... an early widow... loves baseball.

So ... I have a replacement if I drop Crew season tickets after next sesson. At a fraction of the cost.


The replacement of going to LDC can happen just that quick.

My love for the Crew has not changed.
What's changed is the Crew's greed and MLS's arrogance with the schedule change.

 

Buying season tickets for me is about convenience. No planning needed, game is scheduled and I'm going unless something else comes up I cannot miss, in which case I usually just give the tickets away to a friend or family member. If I just bought game by game, which I used to do when I got tickets through the Nordecke exclusively, there would be games I didn't attend because I was lazy and didn't let Kevin know in time.

Never one time did any ancillary benefit have an impact on my decision to purchase.

 

I was going to agree with this, but then I saw this promo for the home opener, and now I am a little annoyed with my STM I dont get the oportunity to get one of these. My girlfriend collects nutcrackers, so this would have been a nice gift. (She lets me do soccer things, ill let her do Nutcracker collecting.)

When I first got STM, the exchange program was nice. Only took advantage of it 1-2 times.

 

Yeah, I think you nailed it. It's a benefit that varies significantly depending on what you already have/had with AppleTV.

This is a good thing for most people. For me personally, I was previously getting a 100$ benefit as a STM which I now get for free regardless. That's not bad, it just removes another reason for me to keep my season tickets.

The benefits to me keeping my STs keep going down. Prices have gone from 36.23 to 60.23 over 4 years. I get arguably worse gifts as a STM then just buying weekly promotion packs. I can't really sell my tickets at 60.23 for most games and break even, anymore. The quality on the field has dropped.

I reckon that the crew after next season are going to be a made-for-TV product for me, which is honestly fine, since the TV product is finally really good.

 

For the Crew? Probably when it went from season tickets being a good value because they gave you convenience and benefits over buying single games, to not.

Neat. Others do.

The Crew seemingly have the same attitude as you - we'll see how that works out if the team isn't great for any extended period, some games are cold af, and the new stadium shine wears off.

Just because someone can afford season tickets doesn't mean they want to see the prices of their tickets rise while the overall value drops.

I had season tickets 3 years ago that cost me $1950 for the season, came with a bunch of benefits, and came with an amazing product on the field. I was able to sell any ticket I couldn't go to for at least face value.

Next season, I will be paying $3300 for the same tickets, which offer me fewer benefits and a much worse product on the field. Last season, at tickets that were 10% less, I regularly couldn't offload my tickest for facevalue as the team was offering better deals WITH benefits to buy through them.
It's not complicated. The value is worse today as a STM than it has been in years.

If I have one foot out the door, it's on the team for not doing enough to keep me. If they don't care, that's fine. Hopefully, there are dozens of people to take my place, but I worry that they think people like me are replaceable because of positive headwinds that are either going to stop being factors in the future (new stadium buzz, cheap prices, tons of great weather dates) or aren't guaranteed to continue (winning product). We will see what attendance looks like in 2028.

 

I will defend the Apple TV deal in a couple respects.

MLS was early but they aren't wrong. Streamers are going to be buying up a ton of major sports packages. When the NFL goes to renew their TV deal, a chunk of their Sunday games will get sold to a streaming service. Whether it's CBS or Fox losing their half of the deal, or the entire 1pm or 4pm windows going online, at least half of the NFL will be streaming only in the next 5-10 years. They started the process a few years ago by selling TNF to Amazon Prime and Sunday Ticket to YTTV. When the Big Ten renews its TV deal in five years, Fox Big Noon will also become the third- or fourth-tier game each week. The top games will be moved to primetime on Peacock or Netflix. So getting MLS on Apple early will make it easier to stay on there as these companies buy up more and more sports packages. And Apple TV isn't niche. After Netflix, I'd consider it neck and neck with HBO Max for the second-best service.

The TV presentation, while flawed, is also 1000% better. Picture and audio quality are pristine. There are no blackouts. What little original content they make is typically good. They make the big games feel like an event. Every game being saved and available to watch on replay is great. If the Crew was still on regional Sinclair networks (is it FanDuel Ohio now?), we would still be having to stream the alternate channel to watch a game with Neil Sika, poor audio quality, and early 2000s HD picture quality. It looked minor league, which caused casual viewers to perceive it as minor league. That's not the case anymore.

That said, there are obvious issues to be fixed. You've identified some of them. There needs to be a multicast option like Sunday Ticket. Playing every game in the same window instead of staggering them throughout the day is a huge miss. Announcer and pundit quality can still be dramatically improved; most of them insult the audience's intelligence with how surface-level and uninsightful they act, and the rest just spew league propaganda. Compare how much people loved Tony Romo when he started versus the meme he is now, and it shows that viewers like when the broadcasters take their job seriously and educate on strategy and tactics. The MLS marketing plan remains pathetic and short-sighted; the only thing they promote is Lionel Messi. The local radio broadcast option still isn't fixed. Off-season coverage for things like free agency and the schedule release is non-existent.

It can get a lot better. But it was much, much worse and would have stayed that way to not embrace streaming and stick with regional cable broadcasts. That pathway offered zero potential to ever be taken seriously and to grow the viewer base.

 

https://www.sportico.com/leagues/soccer/2025/apple-mls-streaming-contract-change-1234876902/

 

"MLS will be paid $200 million for its 2026 season, the last under the current calendar, then $107.5 million for the shortened “sprint” campaign in 2027, according to someone familiar with the details. It will then be paid $275 million each for the 2027-28 and 2028-29 seasons, said the person, who was granted anonymity because the details are private. MLS ownership was briefed on the new deal at league meetings in Florida on Thursday. "

$857.5 million for the next four seasons. I'd take that deal.

 

Maybe with some of that money, they could add a couple of extra cameras to each match. Would be nice to see a VAR offsides review with a half decent camera angle.

 

I have went on a Crew road trip three out of the last four Memorial Day weekends.

2022 Crew at Atlanta (coupled with a Braves game, and then a USFL game in Birmingham).

2023 Crew at Nashville (coupled with a Nashville Stars game).

2025 Crew at Charlotte (Coupled with a Kannapolis Intimidators game, Charlotte Knights game, and part of a NASCAR series race).

I will miss my Crew Memorial Day weekend trips.

 

As said elsewhere, the CBJ have a "meet the team" night, but it sounds like it's similar to the Crew night where it's "thanks for the autograph" and you move on to the next guy while he moves on to the next fan. It's not like how it used to be with Crew players how they'd mingle for 2-3 hours (and sometimes maybe longer, depending on the player). There was a long-ago Crew event in the arena district where, I think it was Eric Gherig, Brian Dunseth and someone else hanging out at the bar long after.

Given the current reality of the "Meet the Team Night", the only thing I'd change is allow people to wait in line during the final 15-20 minutes. At least they'd have a miniscule chance and some people might still recognize their chance is less than 1% and leave early. Of course, by closing the lines early, people *do* leave early which helps everyone get out of the parking situation a lot easier.

As far as season tickets, here's my thought:
"I'm at most every game. Season tickets guarantee me tickets to the popular games so I won't have to enter any lottery, pay extra via resale or whatever. If I'm at 95% of the games, I might as well pay for the benefits."

With that said, I'm well aware of how easy it is to get most games. Heck, I always opt out of extra games like CONCACAF or Leagues Cup because I can sometimes get those for a significant savings vs if I opted in. ($20 or even free vs $35 or $40). Heck, for that one bonus game that was delayed until midnight and ended up being free, I didn't buy a ticket and ended up going out of town that day anyway.

If they took away the included access to watch away games, but didn't include anything else, that's a $100 jump for no apparent reason.

How many times have I used the backpack or most of the scarves? Zero. I use my "Ohio is Black and Gold" scarf for Cincinnati (I forgot it for the playoff game) and that's it.

But it's still something I'm buying with that cost. (I refuse to say the backpack is free because it isn't.)

Do they not charge for playoff tickets or are they simply included? The Crew used to have four "special games" consisting of USOC, international friendly and playoff games. From what I read, there was a survey when the regular season got longer. The result then was that the STHs wanted to keep the cost the same (same number of tickets and games) vs increasing the price. That was when they went to three special games and now it's just one.

I believe it was Walt Disney who said something about how hard it is to get a fan back once you lost them. There's also the issue of bad news spreading farther. If someone has a terrible time with the Crew experience (including things like parking and egress), they're gonna tell everyone they know that it took them an hour to get out of the lot...part of the reason why attendance sucked at HCS ...once some people realized they were paying to park in a mud pit, they weren't coming back.

 

And Fourth of July fireworks.

 

When we say the AppleTV deal is flawed, I think some of us forget what it was like before.

If someone didn't get the channel on their TV, but *did* get MLS Direct Kick (I had the ESPN+ version) and lived 200 miles from their stadium, they'd be apt to complain about not being able to see their team's road games.

Is AppleTV a bit of a knee-jerk reaction? Perhaps.
But it's also good to have one place for every game and to get the games without worry of blackouts and God forbid someone's provider get into a dispute with the channel owner when the season is 75% over. (As you may have heard, ESPN and Disney channels haven't been available on YouTube TV for two weeks and there's no sign of a resolution, although there typically isn't until a deal has been signed.)

As far as the kickoff times, do I wish more games were at various times? It'd be fun to watch other games on TV and I have almost no interest in two western conference teams, mainly because of the playoff system...but, at the same time, it's also good to know that the majority of Crew games are at 7:30pm vs the random times of years past.

Which is better/worse? The current system or this:
Home Wednesday at 7pm.
Away Sunday at 3pm.
Home Saturday at 4pm.
Home Saturday at 6:30pm
Home Friday at 7:30pm.
Away Tuesday at 7pm.

 

The problem with the other leagues, especially the NFL and NBA, is that you need umpteen different services for every game.

The RSN for your local team or when your favorite team plays your local team.
NBA TV, MLB Network, NFL Network for some games.
The out-of-market package (League Pass, Extra Innings, etc) for other games.
Netflix, Peacock or whatever else for a small number of games each season.

Of course you don't need every service year-round, but it seems the mindsets the leagues have is to spread their stuff out to each service for PR reasons.

What'd be better?
Every game in one place.
OR
Each day of the week having a national "Game of the Week" along with the RSN and league package for everything else?

Take, for example, a Brewers fan who lives in Worthington. They'd need at least 5-8 outlets to watch every Brewers game. (MLB.tv, FanDuel Cincinnati, Guardians.tv, SportsNet Pittsburgh, ESPN, Fox and whatever the hell else.)

Is this really better than "Every Game. One Place."?

I'm with you. It's not perfect, but it's better than it could be. (If we could get the away radio broadcasts, then it'd be a lot better.)

(It sucks for the casuals.)

 

Yeah, but that opens the door for the suburban fireworks.

 

They don't do those as much because of liability.....