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Whenever the World Cup rolls around, the conversation in American sports media inevitably turns to what the tournament will mean for soccer’s long-term future in this country. Will this be the moment the sport finally breaks through? Will the casual fans who tune in for a few weeks become permanent converts? It’s a version of the same debate we’ve had for decades, and it tends to feel more legitimate every four years, because the numbers genuinely keep getting better.

This year, the conversation feels different for obvious reasons. The tournament is being played here, in NFL stadiums, in the middle of summer, when there’s essentially nothing else going on. Fox is airing 70 matches on broadcast television and streaming many more free on Tubi. Telemundo, which reported record advertiser demand, is delivering more than 700 hours of coverage across all 104 games. The 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France drew 25.8 million combined English and Spanish viewers despite being played in Qatar in December, directly competing with the NFL. Doing those numbers in the U.S. in June, with marquee matchups in prime time, seems like a low bar to clear.

All of which raises a question that doesn’t have a comfortable answer: if tens of millions of Americans fall in love with soccer over the next five weeks, where do they go to watch more of it once the tournament ends? Because the most logical answer — MLS, the domestic professional league specifically designed and marketed as the long-term home of American soccer — is on Apple TV, which, per Nielsen’s The Gauge data, gets about as much total viewing time as AMC+. It’s not where casual sports fans go on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not where a newly converted World Cup viewer is going to stumble across an Inter Miami or LAFC game.

This was always going to be the awkward part of MLS’s Apple deal, which the league signed in 2022 for 10 years and $2.5 billion, giving Apple exclusive global rights to every match. The pitch at the time was that this was a visionary leap into the future of sports media, and that the World Cup would supercharge interest in the league right as it was becoming more accessible than ever on a global platform. What actually happened is that MLS spent its first three years under Apple charging fans $99 a year for MLS Season Pass, limiting its linear TV presence to just 34 matches on Fox and FS1, and watching the viewership data come back consistently underwhelming, all while Lionel Messi was being Lionel Messi. Not a single other major American sports league has followed MLS’s lead and moved the majority of its games to a single streaming platform since the deal was announced. As has been previously noted, MLS served less as a trendsetter and more as a cautionary tale.

Don Garber has now more or less said as much publicly, telling Andrew Marchand that the league was “way early” on the streaming-exclusive model. That admission came alongside a renegotiated deal last fall that scrapped the Season Pass and shortened the agreement from 10 years to seven, expiring after 2029 instead of 2032. Games are now free for any Apple TV subscriber, which is a genuine improvement, and opening weekend this season saw a 59% year-over-year increase in viewership. But as Landon Donovan pointed out in an appearance last week, removing the paywall only helps people who are already inside the Apple ecosystem, but does nothing for the much larger group of Americans who don’t subscribe to Apple TV and aren’t going to go find it because they watched a great USMNT game on Fox.

“I don’t think MLS is mature enough yet to go away from the NBCs and the Foxes and ABCs and the linear television,” Donovan said. “I think we still need that exposure. Even the NFL still does it — they’re smart enough to know they need the big media engines to help keep promoting their sport.”

The frustrating part is that the infrastructure problems aren’t new information to anyone inside the league. In an anonymous survey of MLS executives conducted by The Athletic last year, one GM said the league needed to “end the deal with Apple” because it was “bad for fans.” Another GM said, “The reason why people don’t watch now is as simple as you can watch anything all over the world. If you want basketball, no offense to MLS, but are you going to turn on the Serbian league? You’re not. You’re going to watch the best product.”

When the Premier League is on NBC, Liga MX is on Univision, and Champions League is on CBS, MLS asking people to seek out a separate streaming app was always going to be a difficult sell. Doing it during the three years leading up to the biggest soccer event in American history only made it worse.

None of this means MLS is in trouble, exactly. The Apple deal ends in 2029, which gives the league another shot at the market under much better circumstances than the first time around. The league is also transitioning to a European-style summer-to-spring calendar, which should make its playoff schedule more competitive with other leagues and stop forcing MLS Cup to compete with NFL Sunday. And the World Cup will almost certainly drive genuine interest in the sport, benefiting everyone who broadcasts soccer in this country, including Apple.

But the specific question — whether the momentum from this summer can actually translate into durable MLS growth — is harder to answer optimistically when the league’s games are on a platform that most of the people watching the World Cup right now don’t use and aren’t going to start using because of a tournament on Fox. The mechanism for converting World Cup enthusiasm into MLS viewership basically doesn’t exist in 2026, and that’s going to be a lot more obvious over the next five weeks than it’s been at any point in the last four years.

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