New York City FC CEO Brad Sims doesn’t foresee the day that Major League Soccer ever returns to local market broadcast rights, even if it would benefit the club that he helps run.
MLS and Apple will break their media rights agreement early following the 2028-29 season, but Sims does not anticipate the league looking to return to the old ways where clubs reached local agreements with regional media partners.
“I don’t see that ever happening again,” Sims said during last week’s SBJ Business of Soccer conference in Atlanta, where the U.S. Men’s National Team has set up camp during the international break.
NYCFC previously aired games locally on YES Network from the club’s first season in 2015 through 2022. In the following campaign, MLS moved all its teams’ broadcasts to Apple TV as part of the original package dubbed MLS Season Pass that paid the league $250 million per year.
The success of the streaming-only option to watch MLS games is up for debate, but Sims admitted that a local rights TV “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 best for the league as a whole, as an enterprise. I think that what was done, and how it was built, is probably the best path. We have a ways to go in terms of where the owners and where the league thinks the broadcast rates should be. … You got to have a product that people want to watch in the U.S. and globally and so that you have broadcasters willing to pay for those rights.”
The MLS will be watching closely to see if there is a soccer boom in the United States following this summer’s World Cup and how it can leverage that in its favor when it negotiates its next media rights deal.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
