Taylor Twellman is an unapologetic apostle for the partnership between MLS and Apple. He had a terrific broadcast career going at ESPN — along with being the face of that network’s soccer coverage, Twellman enjoyed the contractual flexibility to morph onto the network’s news and debate shows — but he left the company in January to be part of a unique and landmark experiment in the sports media rights space — a 10-year deal between Apple and MLS that has the tech giant paying the soccer league $2.5 billion for the rights to every single MLS match — regular season, postseason, Leagues Cup, all in one place with no blackouts.
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“For the first time in 27 years, there is a media platform and a media partner that has the exact same energy and the exact same ambition that the league has,” Twellman said, who spent 13 years at ESPN. “This league is prepared to go to new heights and they need to go to new heights. The way Apple goes about their business has always been unique to me because they open up a blank piece of paper and they write down how can we make the consumer experience better? In 2022, there were 62 different start times for (MLS) games. So Apple alone comes in and says: We want to change this. We’re going to simplify the schedules. That is something all of us that who have been around this league and this game have waited 27 years for. What convinced me was the energy, the resources and the ambition of Apple wanting to take Major League Soccer where they’ve always wanted to go and just haven’t been able to go there.”
The journey started Saturday as MLS kicked off its 28th season. Curious, I jumped on Apple TV at 4:25 p.m. ET Saturday for Nashville SC-New York City FC and was treated to five minutes of music with a promise that match coverage was coming soon. Eventually, we arrived. “The new era of MLS starts now,” host Liam McHugh said. The picture quality and graphics popped off the screen, the studio featuring McHugh, Kaylyn Kyle, Sacha Kljestan and Bradley Wright-Phillips looked futuristic, and the conversation between the group treated me as a serious soccer viewer, as opposed to what I mostly received for the recently completed World Cup studio coverage from Qatar. Good start, Apple.
@TVAnswerMan To me this looks like great 1080p on Apple TV MLS Season Pass on first impressions. I will send another photo when games begin. pic.twitter.com/ZdkSA6UgSt
— Dallas Derringer (@ManBengals) February 25, 2023
My colleague Daniel Brown’s piece on Apple’s MLS ambitions is worth reading on Apple’s grand designs, and it’s important to note some games will air in front of the Apple/MLS paywall as well as Fox/Fs1’s 34 regular-season games as the exclusive U.S. English and Spanish language TV home. Watching MLS Season Pass, one fantastic viewer benefit was the ability to flip between the television broadcast and radio announcers. Same with the option to watch a Spanish-language version. I liked what I initially saw from “MLS 360,” which was a Red Zone-style show. The pricing point — Apple TV+ subscribers have to pay additionally for MLS Season Pass — will be an issue for non-diehard fans. Same with the usual saw — toggling between streaming and linear TV.
Danielle Slaton, a retired U.S. national team player and a broadcaster for San Jose Earthquakes prior to joining MLS/Apple, said the partnership presents an opportunity to change how MLS is perceived globally. “I think if we do our jobs right, we’re going to help change the landscape of the way that media is consumed in this country and across the world,” Slaton said. “I really feel confident in that. We’re either going to get graded an ‘ A’ or an ‘F.’ But I believe that people are going to make the jump because of the way that we are building it and presenting it to the world.”
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“Listen, I played in the 1990 World Cup and know what it’s like not having anybody care,” said Marcelo Balboa, who will call Spanish-language broadcasts of MLS alongside Jorge Perez Navarro. “Run-down hotels, $5 a day per diem. I played through those days and that era. When 1994 came around it opened eyes for people of what soccer was. Just like in 1999 (when) the women (won) the World Cup and sold out a stadium that no one thought they were going to sell out because it was in the United States. Do we compare ourselves to the EPL? We shouldn’t. We are a global market. Big teams are coming and taking our players. I think you have to be willing to give this league a chance. We get stuck sometimes comparing MLS to every other league in the world. We are 27 years new compared to 100-year-old leagues.”
Balboa, Slaton and Twellman all said that Apple has not given them a directive on being cheerleaders for the league. (Here’s a list of the league broadcasters and programming.) But Twellman was realistic that conversations with league officials are likely to come, as they did at ESPN, when an analyst offers a critical take. “Just because my mic flag has an Apple on it and it doesn’t say ESPN doesn’t mean I’m not going to give my opinion,” Twellman said. “But it also doesn’t mean in the previous years I was doing this, regarding MLS or FIFA or whatever it may be, that I wasn’t having conversations behind the scenes the same. It’s going to be interesting as certain things come up.”
I asked Twellman if he was worried that ESPN — still the biggest sports brand in the U.S. — would intentionally freeze out MLS now that it doesn’t have a financial stake in the game.
“ESPN had MLS for 27 years: How much did they do on SportsCenter?” Twellman said. “The soccer people within that company were doing anything and everything they could to claw, scrap, whatever they could. … But I think they’re not going to be able to ignore this and here’s the reason why: Copa America is going to be hosted in the United States in 2024. The World Cup is going to be here in 2026. The ESPNs and NBCs of the world that don’t have any say in these entities, it’s still news. So if the base of your SportsCenters and your news programs are what’s going on and what’s popular, given 2026 and what MLS can do on the backs of that, they’re not going to be able to ignore that. ESPN will have to make a decision if they want to show that but I’m not so sure this league has to have that anymore with how media on TV is changing.”
You can fill libraries with the amount of words spilled on college football media rights deals. (It’s not going to be the best library in town, but it’s sure to draw traffic and produce plenty of outrage.) This publication has multiple college football writers offering thoughts and more thoughts as well as deep analysis on the situation. I recommend them all, as well as Daniel Kaplan and Bill Shea on the streaming versus cable dilemma. Here is what I can offer as of this writing, having spent last week talking to industry sources. There are a number of companies — you have read about them — open to something with the Pac-12, but the way to characterize things is there is interest at a certain price versus a must-have for the product. (That’s the difference between Big Ten and SEC football and the Pac-12.) For instance, there is conceptual interest from the Amazon side for a Friday night Pac-12 football game. Why? Well, they can promote it big during their “Thursday Night Football” franchise and they would not be going up against the Saturday college football schedule. It’d be another nice piece for Amazon’s growing sports portfolio. But the price has to be right and from what I understand —Amazon and the Pac-12 were far apart earlier this month regarding any kind of a deal. The Pac-12’s premium inventory — such as its conference championships — is of definite interest for the companies with linear assets but would the conference parcel that out? One industry source said ESPN had general interest in the Pac-12 — and likely a Saturday 10:30 p.m. ET window for football games — but with so many assets coming up for bid (NBA, college football playoffs, NCAA championships, NASCAR etc …) and Disney in cost-conscious mode, there was no chance it was going to break the bank for Pac-12 inventory. I’ve heard the Pac-12 was hoping to get a deal done by the conclusion of the Pac-12 college basketball tournament, but where you can get a deal done with a longtime linear player in a couple of weeks, the deals with streamers are more complex and take longer. If I was a consultant and the Pac-12 asked me what we should do — note, this is not happening — I would sign a short-term deal with ESPN and with one streaming service. The money will not make my college presidents happy (and George Kliavkoff was hired to bring in a big money deal), but I’d play the medium-term market, trade dollars for exposure in the near term, and see where streaming versus cable is in, say, 2028.
Some things I read over the last week that were interesting to me:
• So you want to visit Greenland? By
• Americans in Their 30s Are Piling On Debt. By Gina Herb and AnnaMaria Andriotis of The Wall Street Journal.
• LIV’s sound and fury signify nothing. By Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post.
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• Warner Bros. Discovery Looks to Get Out of Regional Sports TV Business. By Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal.
• When Pelé visited Howard University’s soccer team: ‘He transcended everything.’ By Pablo Maurer of The Athletic.
• What Fox News Hosts Said Privately versus Publicly About Voter Fraud.
• Russian propagandists are buying Twitter blue-check verifications. By Joeseph Menn of The Washington Post.
• Why ‘National Divorce’ Is an Insanely Bad Idea. By Wilfred Reilly of the National Review.
• One Year Inside a Radical New Approach to America’s Overdose Crisis.
• Korfball is not new, but its proponents say it has new relevance amid questions about the gender divide in sports. Now it just needs to catch on outside the Netherlands.
• Classy move by MLS Communications to honor Grant Wahl.
• Remembering Mandy Jenkins, Kent State grad and national digital news pioneer. (Condolences to her family.) By Anna Huntsman, Ideastream Public Media.
• This football coach spent years saving his city’s kids from gun violence. Then someone shot him. By Suzette Hackney of USA TODAY.
• As Rams imploded, Sean McVay faded away: How they found their way back to each other. By Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic.
• A first-ever oral history of how top U.S. and Western officials saw the warning signs of a European land war, their frantic attempts to stop it — and the moment Putin actually crossed the border. By Garrett M. Graff of Politico.
• Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. By Hannah Dreir of The New York Times.
• Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege. By Theo Baker of The Stanford Daily.
Episode 281 of the Sports Media Podcast features a conversation with The Boston Globe sports media writer Chad Finn and Sports Business Journal assistant managing editor/digital Austin Karp. In this podcast, the group discusses the NBA All-Star Game averaging a record-l0w 4.6 million viewers on TNT/TBS; the expectations for the launch of MLS/Apple Season Pass and what we expect from the look of the product and viewership; the viewership for the Daytona 500; how Daytona compares to other sports properties; the launch of the XFL; whether we think spring football can work; a potential Pac-12 media rights deal; why the Pac-12 has little leverage over media companies; LIV golf’s prospects as a media play; Charles Barkley as a potential CNN analyst, and more.
(Photo of Javain Brown (23) celebrating his goal against Real Salt Lake on Saturday night at BC Place: Christopher Morris / Corbis / Getty Images)
