MLS try to capitalize on World Cup

To try to capitalise on the surge in interest from the World Cup, Major League Soccer has launched its largest-ever marketing campaign called “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here”, featuring MLS stars past and present, including Lionel Messi and David Beckham. It aims to convert America’s growing legion of football fans into loyal followers of the country’s top professional league as its season resumes on July 16. 

MLS, which launched in 1996 as a condition of the US’s bid to host the 1994 World Cup, faces a pivotal moment. The arrival of Messi at Inter Miami in 2023 drew unprecedented attention to the league. Even before the World Cup, viewership and match attendance increased in recent seasons.

 As part of efforts to build on this momentum, the league is shifting to a summer-to-spring calendar in 2027 to align with the international football schedule. Currently its season runs from late February to early December. This change, alongside roster rule tweaks, aims to integrate MLS better with the global player transfer market. 

Don Garber, 68, is widely viewed as the chief architect of US football. He sits on the board of US Soccer and has served as MLS commissioner since 1999. He steered the young league through a near bankruptcy in 2001. Under his leadership, MLS has expanded from 10 to 30 teams and built 26 football-specific stadiums.

Club owners have invested more than $11bn in football infrastructure in North America since the league’s inception. This laid the foundation for the US’s 2026 World Cup bid, as 12 MLS clubs hosted national teams at their facilities for the tournament. Eighteen of the world’s 50 most valuable football clubs now compete in MLS, according to Sportico, more than in any other league.

The MLS has no promotion or relegation, protecting clubs from the financial catastrophe of losing top-flight status. Through a multibillion-dollar deal with Apple signed in 2022, MLS became the first sports league to put all of its games on a single streaming platform.

 “This [the US] is the golden market for soccer globally. Fifa [is] seeing this with massive, unprecedented attendances, unprecedented revenues,” Garber told the Financial Times. One of the US market’s particular strengths is the “high-end” hospitality and engagement with fans “in ways that the rest of the global football world doesn’t necessarily either pay the same amount of attention to, or have it [as] part of their culture of attending a game”, he added.

On the pitch there are challenges, however. MLS still lags behind Europe’s top leagues and contends with the perception that it is a retirement home for the continent’s ageing stars. In recent weeks, 37-year-old former Bundesliga legend Robert Lewandowski and 35-year-old Frenchman Antoine Griezmann have signed to play in Chicago and Orlando respectively. 

Another early World Cup exit has forced a fresh round of soul-searching over what is preventing the US from becoming an elite men’s football country. Many point to the high cost of playing youth football in America, where annual fees for amateur clubs run into the thousands of dollars and have largely confined the sport to affluent suburbs.

Garber acknowledged these issues, telling the Pink ‘Un that the US needed “more access for more players” and to “solve this concept of pay-to-play”. MLS has overhauled its development model in recent years, with the launch of MLS Next in 2020 as the top youth football development programme in North America.

 Players in MLS club academies do not pay to participate but Garber said such changes to the development model “take a generation to deliver”. In April, private equity firm KKR made a strategic investment in MLS Next Pro, the reserve league for MLS clubs which serves as a bridge between the academies and first teams.

As part of a joint venture, KKR plans to move MLS-affiliated Next Pro teams into new markets, with the aim of building brands and supporting local stadium development. “More than 100 cities across the US and Canada don’t have a professional soccer club, despite strong interest from communities and local leaders,” KKR partner Ted Oberwager told the FT.

Despite MLS’s best efforts, American fans could still gravitate towards top European leagues, which are more accessible than ever on US television and streaming platforms. After becoming a World Cup sensation in the US, Haaland could pull his newfound American audience back to his English Premier League side, Manchester City. But Garber is confident that greater support for European clubs in the US won’t come at the expense of the MLS.