Well that's extreme spin right there! This is the first time they present the number this way, and conveniently its the highest ever The individual Fox number must be like 200k or something... Also the trolls who were predicting 100 mIlLiOnzzzz are going to tweet up a shitstorm tonight.
Both parties are likely happy if they’re giving specific numbers. No doom this year. Although some will resort to “MLS is screwed after Messi retires.”
Hey now. MLS will be on the Summer/Spring schedule by then and that will unlock MLS's popularity to levels it has never seen before!! Up until a point, where the lack of pro/rel will hold the league back and ultimately doom it.
Plenty of room for doom. Third lowest rating for the 2 TV channels of all time and this is with the Messi effect. So as a Galaxy fan it makes me sad that the shocking 427,000 happened for our title...Ticket prices reached World Cup group stage levels, but I guess the only people who gave a shit were at the stadium. Anyway, back to the doom and gloom. First year of Apple TV deal Fox + FoxD got 890k so Messi only moved the needle by 100k viewers. That is TERRIBLE. 11.7% increase. 11.7% FOR THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD AND GREATEST PLAYER OF ALL TIME!!! I'll be honest - I started this post as a sarcastic dig at the trolls but then I realized how dire things really are. With Apple kicking MLS to the curb forcing MLS to renegotiate for their next TV deal this is literally existential dread right now. Next TV deal will be 20-25 million not $250. Can MLS survive that? Garber is literally shitting bricks right now. EDIT- The ONLY consolation is that there was only 1 home market. Ratings would likely increase a tiny bit if the opponent was from a Western market with fans like Seattle. Or if it was LAFC with Son.
They are unlikely to fold outright, but REALLY tough times are ahead with multiple strikes and lockouts and a visible decrease in quality.
Did they? If you do some not so scientific math, over 3/4 of viewers watched on a different platform for this Cup. Going conservative, the would mean that possibly over 1 million watched on Apple last year. . If Apple kicked MLS to the curb is a stretch and there is no logical evidence of that. The league switched seasons and paid added money while shortening the deal. They added F1 to Apple TV so for all we know they might have had good numbers for the free games and Apple changed the deal. We will probably never know until the next contract, so let's see.
See, adding in Apple numbers is completely apples to oranges. Apple is international, while all we had before were national ratings. For all we know MLS had good international ratings on ESPN.
I had the option to watch the MLS CUP on FOX and Apple TV, I choose the 2nd one, so it was 4.6 million total, it is that a bad number?
But it is the most watched MLS CUP final ever with over 20k in BC place for viewing party the most ever and you still not happy.
We don't know if it's the most watched MLS Cup final ever. We only ever had US numbers. Sometimes Canada numbers. Plus advertisers only care about the US numbers for the next deal (most likely).
If 3 million watched on AppleTV and ~1 million watched on Fox (this part we know) then that leaves only 600k that watched on TSN and HBO Max in Mexico... Maybe that's right, not sure. I would expect higher ratings in Canada because of the Canadian team.
The previous record, prior to 2023, for MLS Cup viewers outside of US/Canada was probably about 15k, and I'm probably barely exaggerating. It was never consistently available on any broad distribution channel, and if it was, it was typically in the middle of the night. Where could Argentinian fans watch MLS Cup 2021? Nowhere, because Maxi Moralez' wife had to help his parents find an illegal stream. Were any of Beckham's MLS Cups available on SKY? Maybe Sky 8 on tape delay.
I understand that you like to jump to doom, but you really need to at least consider using logic along the way. Apple is now paying MORE for the remainder of the contract than they were previously. They voluntarily agreed to renegotiate the contract, remove the paywall, and pay more for the content. Kind of hard to imagine them agreeing to this if the market value was only $25m.
Man, I even posted intentionally optimistic stuff to avoid this kind of BS and I still get this crap. Insane.