2023-08-04 12:28:31
The good outlook for North American soccer stems from the financial realities of the MLS and its clubs, where the arrival of Lionel Messi al Inter Miamiis a sign of greater investment and a search for worldwide notoriety, for a league that is still small next to other local ones such as the NHL (the famous ice hockey).
NFL football rakes in $14 billion a year; NBA basketball about US$8 billion; and the NHL $4 billion. MLS revenue today is approximately $1 billion per year, 25% of NHL revenue.
It’s a gap that probably won’t close anytime soon, and it’s likely that MLS remains the fifth largest league and popular in North America for quite some time.
But his jump is undeniable. The deal for NHL television this season is worth $725 million. The English Premier League has just signed a US television contract worth 450 million dollars a year.
Lto MLS went from US$ 90 million to 300 millionfrom a little more than US$ 3 million per club per season to 10 million: it opened to Apple Tv live sports broadcasting. A strong bet for the manzanita platform. But the ratings accompany: they are increasing from the 384,000 viewers on average that MLS had on ESPN in 2022.
Television
The Major League Soccer It’s been around for a quarter of a century, but the recent scramble for TV rights is what fueled its new future. Apple went all-out, putting money on the table and deploying an innovative content strategy so that the world’s most popular game can finally make a dent in the country.
And Apple’s push for MLS goes well beyond the 10-year rights deal it signed, under which it will pay the league no less than US$ 2,500 million. The technological giant financed the arrival of Lionel Messi at Inter Miami; He pays the Argentine a part of the new subscriptions to his season pass. This is how the Argentine swells his billing in the US where he is the highest paid athlete: a 50 million contract with the club and another 50 million in advertising. Only 25 come from the agreement with Adidas.
Apple also reinforced its package of programs dedicated to the analysis of the league, compensating for the lack of fiction that the strike of writers and producers brings to the US: Apple TV+ announced a four-part documentary series on Messi, Produced by Smuggler Entertainment.
The platform seeks to capture the same magic as Netflix’s F1 documentary series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive”, which is in its fifth season, and has been credited with boosting viewership for live F1 racing on the ABC and ESPN networks. In short, Apple does not share subscription numbers, but Eddy Cue, its senior vice president of services, assured the media that the MLS Season Pass he was already “much better than we had anticipated” in his first year. Something in which Messi was key.
Appetizer
In terms of ticket revenue, while some MLS clubs have impressive attendance figures, more than half of the league averages fewer than 15,000 fans per gamewith tickets that have an average of 45 to 50 dollars: something that Messi’s arrival disrupted multiplying by at least ten.
The club’s annual income from tickets would go from 11 million dollars to about 30. It is true that only 1 or 2 MLS teams are profitable. The rest lose millions of dollars a year. But the breaking point is near, and the balance will soon start to turn positive.
Some call MLS a Ponzi scheme (the league had 20 teams in 2016 and now 29, with new ones financing expansion), but the business plans prove effective: viewers grew 38% and the ad pattern was multiplied by 3. “They will do well,” said Lee Berke of LHB Sports, a sports media consulting firm.
“But there are things that are working for them and things that may slow down their growth.” “The 2022 playoffs have been good in linear terms, but they still have a lot to grow compared to the Liga MX or the Premier League”, pointed out Berke, referring to the international leagues with which the MLS refers. NBCUniversal averaged 414,000 viewers for its English Premier League soccer package, almost double that of MLS.
“Paramount+ bid aggressively for a variety of international soccer packages. And it saw a big increase in NBC’s pay to retain the Premier League. And the same thing happened with MLS”, adds the sports analyst.
by RN
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