The size of the American TV audience for the 2024 MLS Cup final on Fox and Fox Deportes was cut nearly in half from the 2023 event, in disappointing news for the league that was first reported on Wednesday by the Sports Business Journal.
According to Nielsen, a combined audience of only 468,000 watched the LA Galaxy's 2-1 victory over the New York Red Bulls on Dec. 7, down from the 890,000 who viewed the Columbus' 2-1 victory over LAFC on the same platforms in the 2023 final.
Maybe even more alarmingly, that 2023 figure was also a decrease of more than 50% from the Nielsen audience of 2.16 million that watched the thrilling 2022 final between LAFC and the Philadelphia Union on Fox and Univision, a game LAFC won on penalties following a 3-3 draw.
There is an obvious lurking variable separating the last two years from 2022, the fact that the 2023 and 2024 ratings are not a complete picture of the total audience.
Unlike the league's first 27 seasons, both the 2023 and 2024 and finals were also available for free on Apple TV as part of the league's 10-year, $2.5 - worldwide streaming agreement with the technology giants. The league and Apple TV have yet to make those audience numbers public, and the streaming industry as a whole does not have an accepted standard metric in the way Nielsen ratings are for televison.
Even so, the numbers should be concerning for a league for which has always been a problematic piece of the puzzle in terms of elevating itself to "major league" status in North American sports or on the global soccer stage.
And even if the MLS Cup final ratings aren't a full picture of the game's audience -- and were also impacted by a scheduling clash against several conference championship college football games -- they still present fans and investors with the impression of a league struggling to grow despite the promise of Lionel Messi's arrival in the league and the approaching 2026 World Cup.
That could threaten the momentum the league is gaining from other more positive news, such as the continued growth in Matchday attendance -- up 6% from 2023 and 11% from 2022 -- and a 13% increase in league and club sponsorship revenue.
Here's three question MLS exectuves need to be asking after their receiving their recent ratings black eye.
In navigating new terrain as the first major pro sports league to sign a primary rights deal with a partner that operates exclusively in the streaming world, MLS is operating in terrain without established best practices.
And as that journey continues, perhaps it's worth considering whether MLS is showing too much deference to the linear TV partners that simulcast a selection of games on network and cable TV in the United States and Canada.
In the U.S., MLS reached a a four-year agreement with Fox to continue to show 34 regular season matches, plus the MLS All-Star Game, MLS Cup final and select MLS Cup Playoff and Leagus Cup matches. It has a similar agreement in Canada with TSN and RDS, focused primarily on the league's three Canadian clubs. But all of those games are also available on Apple TV's MLS Season Pass service, with a separate broadcast produced by Apple TV and MLS talent.
And the product that has emerged week to week on Fox and FS1 leaves open to question whether the relationship is still in MLS' best interest.
National broadcasts over the air on Fox have been focused primarily in the late Saturday afternoon TV window, which has never been advantageous for TV audiences, while the schedule of games shown on the FS1 cable channel has been scattered at best.
The quality of the Fox production has also significantly decreased during this new four-year deal. Nearly every Fox/FS1 game during the last two seasons was called from a remote studio. The network's lead soccer talent -- play by play announcer John Strong, color analyst Stuart Holden and studio fixtures Alexi Lalas and Rob Stone -- are also absent from most of these telecasts. (This was not the case for the final, which Fox televised on site with Strong and Holden on the call).
While regular season ratings on Fox and FS1 in Year 2 of the deal were improved from Year 1, they weren't as strong generally as what the league posted at the end of its previous agreement with Fox, ESPN and Univision, which expired at the end of the 2022 campaign. And with the relatively small audiences that have turned in weekly, it's fair to question whether continuing to receive pretty minor national exposure is worth ceding ground on things like match scheduling and promotion.
Apple TV could easily develop its own selection of "national" TV matches that could be scheduled in standalone windows (i.e. not when other MLS games are being played), at times designed to maximize audience size rather than fit in Fox's available scheduling windows. As of now, games to be shown exclusively on MLS Season Pass platform are scheduled mostly as 7:30 p.m. local kickoffs on Saturday and some Wednesday nights, functioning as a replacement for regional sports networks that televised games not on national TV up until 2022.
There are a range of credible reasons Apple TV and MLS may continue to resist sharing more concrete audience data, from user privacy concerns to the reality that the nature of streaming audience figures and TV audience figures are different.
But if the league is being honest that it continues to see stronger viewership trends via MLS Season Pass and other Apple platforms than is disclosed publicly, it needs to find some sort of metric to be able to share publicly.
The perception that results from not sharing data is that the data must be poor. So does the fact that Apple TV aggressively slashed prices of the MLS Season Pass service throughout the regular season.
Even if there reasonable reasons to abstain from sharing raw numbers right now, that's a perception MLS has to own, since it was pretty proactive about sharing positive ratings data during its previous partnership with ESPN, Fox and Univision.
Maybe the answer is to be clearer about the revenue generated directly from the streaming package, between subscription fees and advertising sales. A smaller audience that is paying an annual subscription fee and is returning to the platform on a regular basis is arguably more valuable than a larger audience that just happens to land on a national TV telecast once and a while while flipping through the channels.
The 2024 final was the first in 10 years contested between two of the league's remaining nine founding clubs, and in that context perhaps its unsurprising that viewership decreased from 2023.
In the phase of rapid MLS expansion that began in 2015, founding clubs have always lacked some of the widespread appeal that more recent entrants have acquired by beginning their history in a time when pro soccer was more widely accepted.
Of those founding clubs, only the Galaxy and the New England Revolution placed in the top 14 in MLS in average attendance during the 2024 season. And only five of those nine clubs placed a player on the league's top 25 most popular player jerseys sold in 2024.
As for the two teams that reached the final, the Galxy have one of the healthiest brands of teams from the original MLS era in the late 90s. But there's no denying that health decreased in the decade between the club's MLS Cup wins in 2014 and 2024, when the Galaxy found themselves more often outside the playoffs than in them.
There is some irony there, given that the Galaxy spent the last decade chasing the kinds of stars that should've moved the national needle. Yet after repeated failures with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Javier "Chicharito" Hernandez in the squad, their success came with a younger roster built on talent that was mostly in its prime or still on the upside of its career, but mostly without street cred to followers of the European club game.
Meanwhile, the Red Bulls still continue to operate in relative anonymity beyond their hardcore following in a New York sports market that may be the hardest in the nation to crack. And although they own an MLS record with 15 consecutive playoff appearances, it's not clear there is an easy fix to bring more visibility when even New York City FC's MLS Cup triumph in 2021 didn't really achieve it.