Why MLS’ New Apple TV Package Could Reduce Betting On The League

Earlier Tuesday, Bloomberg published an interesting story about Apple TV’s approach to monetizing its new worldwide streaming deal with Major League Soccer. Among the revelations: unlike nearly every other current sports broadcaster, the company was refusing — at least initially — to entertain sponsorship offers from betting companies.

This could certainly be a strategy of corporate conscience. Even many experienced gamblers (and some betting firms) lament the overwhelming presence of betting advertising in current sports TV. Those advertisements are often misleading in nature with regards to the nature of sports gambling in general and sometimes also in terms of specific promotional offers.

Additionally, since Apple’s MLS Season Pass is a subscription service ($14.99 per month or $99.99 per year), there may also be a sense of duty on the company’s part to at curate advertising to more closely match hardcore Major League Soccer fans’ interests.

And maybe there’s even a realization that the unique shape of Apple’s MLS rights agreement may have the side effect of decreasing the league’s exposure mainstream sports bettors, and a corresponding strategy adjustment. If so, it would be an about-face from the recent past when MLS was one of the earliest major American sports leagues to court attention from online sportsbooks, but not an illogical one.

The league first went in on its own partnership with sportsbook operastor BetMGM in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. That relationship included BetMGM listing its match odds next to games on the certain schedule elements of the MLSsoccer.com website, as well as a sponsored, free-to-play MLS Predict 6 weekly competition, and a weekly sponsored article reviewing the MLS Cup team odds. (Full disclosure here: As a former freelance editor for MLSsoccer.com, I sometimes wrote the body of these weekly sponsored posts.)

Yet there have been other ways in which the league or its partners have limited its appeal to gamblers. The biggest complaint for regular bettors might be substandard league-wide injury reporting relative to other American sports. But even under the previous national TV deal, the kickoff times were often not ideal. The most national telecasts were concentrated in the summer when fewer viewers are home. And all three of the league’s partners generally orchestrated their MLS schedules around their other more popular TV properties.

Yet the new relationship with Apple is even less likely to give recreational punters reason or opportunity to learn more about MLS and get in the action.

You can understand why MLS opted for a new kind of relationship in terms of its primary broadcast rights. The decline of cable TV is real and well documented, particularly with younger audiences that are more amenable to MLS games.

But most of what still holds the cable landscape together at all is televised sports. And it’s also what drives betting action across the country, particularly as more players have access to online and mobile wagering from their own homes or wherever they happen to be out enjoying a meal or a drink.

The terms of MLS’ new lineal TV deal with FOX (separate from their larger Apple deal) will bring only 34 matches a season to network and cable TV. That’s roughly a third of what was shown nationally under the previous 10-year national package with FOX, Univision and ESPN. And part of Apple’s acquisition of global streaming rights was the elimination of local cable or network broadcasts.

In other words, since very few bars and restaurants are likely to fork over the money for an MLS-specific streaming package, there’s a lot fewer games that could show up on a TV screen in a public place. That kind of thing might not be a major driver of your overall broadcast audience. But it can have an outsized impact in terms of attracting betting action on an event.

There’s also the more compact nature of new MLS schedule, with the overwhelming majority of matchesoccurring after 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Apple and MLS are hoping to capitalize with an NFL Redzone-style whip-around show each matchday. But the timeline could reduce the number of games bettors place wagers on, since it will become harder to track wagers on multiple MLS games a weekend in real time.

So just maybe, that has led Apple, MLS or both to conclude that efforts to build visibility in the gambling space might be better spent elsewhere. And that would certainly be a different strategy than the tack the rest of the televised sports world seems to be taking. But Apple’s corporate success has been built largely by taking the road less traveled. And MLS is clearly banking on the company’s somewhat unique sense of vision to help build the league’s profile.