After Dismal 2024 MLS Cup TV Ratings, 3 Big Questions To Ask

US television viewership for the 2024 MLS Cup Final on Fox and Fox Deportes has nearly halved compared to the 2023 event, in disappointing news for the league. It was first reported Wednesday by the Sports Business Journal.

According to Nielsen, a total audience of just 468,000 watched LA Galaxy 2-1 win over New York Red Bulls on December 7down from the 890,000 people who watched Columbus' 2-1 win over Los Angeles on the same platforms in the 2023 final.

Perhaps more troubling is that the 2023 number was also a drop of more than 50% from the Nielsen audience of 2.16 million who watched the thrilling 2022 final between LAFC and Philadelphia Union on Fox and Univision, a game that LAFC won on penalties after a 3-3 draw.

There is a clear underlying variable separating the last two years from 2022, which is that the 2023 and 2024 ratings are not a complete picture of the overall audience.

Unlike the league's first 27 seasons, the 2023 and 2024 seasons and the Finals were also available for free on Apple TV as part of the league. 10 years, $2.50 – Global Broadcast Agreement With tech giants. The league and Apple TV have yet to announce those audience numbers, and the streaming industry as a whole doesn't have an accepted standard metric the way Nielsen TV ratings do.

However, the numbers should be alarming for a league that has always been so 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.

Even if the final MLS Cup ratings aren't a complete picture of the game's audience — and were also affected by scheduling conflicts against several college soccer conference championship games — they still give fans and investors the impression that the league is 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 positive news, such as continued growth in match attendance — up 6% from 2023 and 11% from 2022 — and a 13% increase in league and club sponsorship revenue.

Here are three questions MLS executives should ask after getting their latest (black eye) evaluations.

Is the NFL showing too much respect for Fox?

By navigating new terrain as the first major professional sports league to sign a major rights agreement with a partner that operates exclusively in the live streaming world, MLS is navigating terrain without established best practices.

As this journey continues, it might be worth considering whether MLS is showing too much respect for its linear TV partners that simulcast a selection of games on network and cable TV in the U.S. and Canada.

In the United States, Major League Soccer has reached a level Four-year agreement With Fox continuing to show 34 regular season games, plus the MLS All-Star Game, the MLS Cup Final and select matches from the MLS Cup and Leagus Cup playoffs. It has a similar agreement in Canada with TSN and RDS, and focuses primarily on the three Canadian clubs in the league. But all of these games are also available on Apple TV's MLS Season Pass service, with separate broadcasts produced by Apple TV and MLS Talent.

And the product, which has appeared week after week on Fox and FS1, leaves the door open to question whether the relationship is still in MLS' best interests.

Fox's national over-the-air broadcasts were primarily focused on the late Saturday afternoon TV window, which was never helpful to the television audience, while the schedule of games shown on cable channel FS1 was sparse at best.

Fox's production quality also declined significantly during this new four-year deal. Nearly every Fox/FS1 game over the last two seasons has been called from a remote studio. The network's leading football talent – ​​play by 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 television shows. (This was not the case for the final, which Fox televised on location with Strong and Holden on the call.)

While regular season ratings on Fox and FS1 improved in the second year of the deal compared to the first year, they were not as strong overall 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. With relatively few fans tuning in weekly, it's fair to question whether continuing to have so little national exposure is worth compromising on things like scheduling and promotion.

Apple TV could easily develop its own set of “national” television matches that could be scheduled in standalone windows (i.e. not when other MLS games are being played), sometimes designed to maximize audience size rather than fit into Fox's available scheduling windows. As of now, the games that will be shown exclusively on the MLS Season Pass platform are mostly scheduled at 7:30 p.m., local beginning on Saturdays and some Wednesday nights, and serve as an alternative to regional sports networks broadcasting games on national television through 2022.

What Apple TV data is appropriate to share?

There are a range of credible reasons why Apple TV and MLS may continue to resist sharing more tangible audience data, from concerns about user privacy to the fact that streaming and TV audience numbers are different in nature.

But if the league is honest that it's still seeing stronger viewing trends across MLS Season Pass and other Apple platforms than what's being disclosed publicly, it needs to find some sort of metric so it can share publicly.

The perception that comes from not sharing data is that the data must be bad. So does the fact that Apple TV aggressively reduced prices for its MLS Season Pass throughout the regular season.

Even if there are reasonable reasons to refrain from sharing raw numbers right now, that's a perception that MLS should have, given that it has been so proactive about sharing positive ratings data during its previous partnerships with ESPN, Fox and Univision.

Perhaps the answer is to explain the revenue generated directly from the streaming package, between subscription fees and ad sales. A smaller audience that pays an annual subscription fee and returns to the platform on a regular basis is arguably more valuable than a larger audience that happens to be on national TV every now and then while channel surfing.

How to solve the founding club problem?

The 2024 final was the first in 10 years between two of the league's nine remaining founding clubs, and in this context it is perhaps not surprising that viewership has declined since 2023.

In Major League Soccer's rapid expansion phase that began in 2015, established clubs always lacked some of the broad appeal that newcomers gained by beginning their history at a time when professional soccer was more widely accepted.

Of those established clubs, only the Galaxy and New England Revolution placed in the top 14 in MLS. In average attendance during the 2024 season. Only five of those nine clubs have appointed a player On the list of the top 25 jerseys sold to players in the league In 2024.

As for the two teams that made it to the final, the Galaxy have one of the healthiest squads from the MLS era of the late 1990s. But there's no denying that health declined in the decade between the club's MLS Cup win in 2014 and 2024, when the Galaxy found themselves more often outside of the playoffs than in them.

There's some irony here, given that the galaxy has spent the past decade chasing the kinds of stars that should have moved the national needle. However, after repeated failures with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez in the team, their success came with a younger roster built on talent that was mostly in their prime or still on the positive side of their careers, but mostly without the street cred of their followers. European club match.

Meanwhile, the Red Bulls continue to operate in relative anonymity beyond their hardcore following in a New York sports market that may be the toughest in the country to penetrate. And even though they hold an MLS record with 15 consecutive playoff appearances, it's not clear there's an easy solution to bring more visibility even when New York City FC's MLS Cup win in 2021 didn't really do that.