MLS commissioner Don Garber and Apple’s senior vice president of services Eddy Cue took time for a brief interview with Pro Soccer Wire ahead of the announcement of the league’s new 10-year media rights deal with Apple.
This interview has been lightly edited for content.
PSW: Take us through the process that you’ve gone through over the last year or so in getting this deal done. Obviously, you’ve been in talks with a number of different networks and streaming services. Could you share any details about how the talks went?
Garber: We set out on a strategy years ago to in essence, have an expiry of all of our local game agreements, rights agreements, our data agreements, our global agreements, which allowed us to start thinking about how do we put all of our rights together and go to market in a unique way that could offer a global package. Eddy has said that no other league has ever come to him and has been able to offer every game without any blackouts, without any restrictions. And that limited the number of people that could even deliver on that.
We have great longstanding partners that we’ve been in discussions with for many years. But when we were thinking about our fans, our fans are digitally native. They’re streaming sports – over 85 percent of them are watching sports on streaming devices on a weekly basis, more than any other sport anywhere in the world. It made sense for us to target the one company who can deliver for us this unique, unprecedented, global partnership that would have us being able to rethink what is a traditional rights deal … There are so many opportunities here that basically are unique to Apple. So it’s very rare when you go in and say, ‘We’ve got one company that we’re trying to get interested,’ and then you get them interested.
PSW: As part of this deal there will still be some games on linear TV. Can you share any details on how the arrangement will go, considering that Apple now has the rights for every single game? Will networks have to pay Apple to broadcast individual games?
Garber: It’s too early to give any details and it’s a limited number of games. So, we’ll have stuff to talk about in the period of time in front of us, but too early for any details right now.
PSW: One thing that really stuck out about this deal is the length. This ended up being a 10-year deal. There was some speculation that maybe the league would try to do a shorter deal and have it expire either right before or right after the 2026 World Cup to try to capitalize on the huge interest that event is going to bring. So what was the reasoning behind a relatively long deal in this case?
Cue: It’s easy for me: We love creating great products and we’re going to do that together here and we’re committed to this for the long term. It’s like we’re not dating, we want a long-term relationship. What we’re trying to do together is truly innovative. We’re really comfortable and excited about the opportunity to work together and doing that over the long term. Obviously, it makes perfect sense. Why would you do anything else? So it was it was pretty easy for us.
Garber: We’re building a business together, right? Everybody in our industry has got to think about this through a different lens. It’s not just a rights deal, then you get into discussions on renewal right after that. We’re building a business together. And the best way to build a business together is to be committed for the long term, because you have ups and downs along the way and the markets are evolving. The transition over to streaming is developing and all of that has to be seen through the lens of long term.
PSW: One of the big questions with this deal, because all the local deals are expiring, is who’s going to produce these games? This is a huge investment and whether it’s Apple or MLS or a third party there’s a lot of speculation about who might be involved in the production. Do either of you have any insight to share in terms of who might be producing all these games now?
Garber: I can’t give you who yet but what I’ll tell you is that we had 30 different productions this year. Think about that. Different announcing teams, different trucks, different above the line, talent below the line. The inefficiencies of that and the lack of being able to create a consistent product from a quality perspective to a global audience just made no sense to us. So yes, we made that commitment to produce those games.
We want to be able to control the look and feel of our games, how they’re presented to fans, and then partner with a company that will elevate that in ways that we could never dream of. And I think you’ve seen some of that with [Apple’s] early days with baseball. The best days are really ahead for us sitting down with Apple and their innovative approach to technology, fan engagement, customer engagement. So lots of opportunity there.
PSW: Another thing that stuck out about this deal is that the English and the Spanish-language rights are packaged together, whereas in the past, MLS has done these deals separately. Why did it make sense to tie them together in this particular deal?
Cue: We wouldn’t have done it any other way. It’s not English and Spanish, it’s around the world. We want to do this everywhere. And so English and Spanish are obviously the first and the biggest ones, we’ve also got French in Canada. From our side it’s about every game everywhere. And language is a part of that.
Garber: We’re rethinking the way we go about presenting our content and our games to our fans. You think about in the years to come, what will that look like? We want to be able to be local on a global basis.
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