New York City FC chief executive Brad Sims does not see the day when Major League Soccer returns to broadcast rights in the home market, even if it would benefit the club he helps run.
MLS and Apple will breach their media rights agreement as early as after the 2028-29 season, but Sims doesn’t expect the league to look to return to the old ways as clubs have reached local agreements with regional media partners.
“I don’t see this happening again,” Sims said last week. SBJ Business of Soccer Conference in Atlantawhere the US Men’s National Team held camp during the international break.
NYCFC previously broadcast games locally on YES Network from the club’s first season in 2015 through 2022. In the following campaign, MLS moved all of its teams’ broadcasts to Apple TV as part of the original package dubbed MLS Season Pass that paid the league $250 million annually.
The success of a live-only option for watching MLS matches is up for debate, but Sims admitted that local television would “be better” for a club like NYCFC.
“We were better off financially in a model where we could have local rights,” he said. “I don’t know that that’s what’s best for the league as a whole, as an organization. I think what’s been done, how it’s built, is probably the best path. We have a ways to go in terms of where the owners should be and where the league thinks the broadcast ratings should be. … You’ve got to have a product that people want to watch in the United States and around the world, so that you have broadcasters that are willing to pay for those rights.”
Major League Soccer will be watching closely to see if there is a soccer boom in the United States after the World Cup this summer and how it can leverage that to its advantage when it negotiates its next media rights deal.