Excellent 2022 MLS Cup TV Ratings Also Highlight League’s New York Problem

In the short-term, it’s impossible to look at the TV Ratings for the 2022 MLS Cup as anything other than a significant positive for Major League Soccer.

Between the English telecast on FOX and the Spanish-language broadcast on Univision, the game drew an average of more than 2.1 million viewers, making it the most-watched MLS championship game since 1997.

With the match played a month earlier than in recent years due to the approaching World Cup, those gaudy numbers came despite significant competition during the late-afternoon Eastern Time window. At the same time, CBS showed the biggest SEC Football game of the season, Ge0rgia vs. Tennessee, while NBC had the Breeders’ Cup.

And those lofty ratings came even though MLS narrowly missed out on a New York vs. Los Angeles TV event when the Philadelphia Union defeated New York City FC in the East final.

But there is one bittersweet note in all this for the league. Those ratings were probably so good in part because MLS missed out on an NYC vs. LA final.

Philadelphia, the fourth-largest TV market according to Nielsen, was by far the top-ranking local market for FOX’s telecast with a 4.78 rating. At 1.06, second-ranked Los Angeles was the top-rated market for Univision’s version, while also drawing the fifth-ranked 1.35 rating on FOX.

When NYCFC won the 2021 MLS Cup, a respectable but smaller figure of 1.5 million viewers tuned in overall between the networks. And the event only posted a 1.5 rating among New Yorkers on ABC, and presumably a considerably lower number in Spanish. (Univision’s local market figures from 2021 do not appear to be available.)

That this year’s final performed so well compared to last year underscores how far MLS still has to go in establishing itself in the nation’s top media market.

There are a range of reasons MLS hasn’t caught on as well in New York as it has in LA, but recent on-field success isn’t one of them. The New York Red Bulls won the Supporters’ Shield as the MLS’ best regular season team in 2015 and 2018, while NYCFC won MLS Cup in 2021. Both teams reached the 2022 MLS Cup Playoffs.

However, both NYC teams lag their Los Angeles counterparts — LAFC and the LA Galaxy — in other ways.

For starters, each is part of a broader family of clubs globally, and are not the top dog on their own food chain. That’s a hard sell to a sports fan that is generally used to its teams being among the most famous on the planet.

And since each operates in the second or third tier of their football families, both have focused more on spending on younger, higher-ceiling talent that could eventually make the leap to Europe, and less on bringing in icons like LAFC’s Gareth Bale or the Galaxy’s Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez.

Both teams’ stadium situations are also lacking.

City is a second tennant in Yankee Stadium, an arrangement that has led to several home games being relocated to other venues because of scheduling conflicts. Even when they are in The Bronx, their compact playing surface — with the baseball infield dirt sodded over — is far from ideal.

The Red Bulls play at the 25,000-seat Red Bull Arena, which is electric when full but probably about 7,000 seats too big. And even though it’s situated a short PATH Train ride away from Manhattan, the Harrison, N.J.-based club still struggles to draw fans from the city proper.

The Red Bulls and NYCFC had the two lowest attendances of the playoffs for their two first-round home games. And the announced crowd of 17,113 at the Red Bulls’ 2-1 loss to FC Cincinnati appeared in reality to be much, much smaller than that.

Overall, MLS continues to post positive growth in the areas where it matters, be it TV viewership or in-person attendance. Its total regular season attendance figure of more than 10 million fans bested the previous high by more than 1 million.

But the fact that a final with an LA team performed so much better on TV than a final with a New York team should remind league executives that there is still a lot of room to grow. Especially since so much of that room is in the city where they — like most North American sports leagues — have their headquarters.