Apple is still keeping secret how many — or few — people watch its MLS telecasts

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — The people in power at Major League Soccer and Apple will try to tell you that all was sunshine and roses in the TV partnership’s first year.

“Every metric that we’ve had, we exceeded,” Seth Bacon, MLS’s executive vice president of media, said at the league’s media day festival on Thursday. “From a subscription standpoint, we blew by, more than doubled, what we thought would happen. And we met a lot of those goals even before [Lionel] Messi got here.”

But ask how many roses there are in the garden, and the tune changes. MLS and Apple remain as stingy as ever about revealing any specifics about how many people watched games on their platform last year.

“It’s something that we continue to work with Apple and all our partners [on], to make sure we understand them,” Bacon said. “But it’s a different language that we have to speak now than when you’re dealing with linear [TV] and Nielsen.”

» READ MORE: Behind the scenes at Apple and MLS’ studios, where every Saturday is ‘like the Olympics’

That last sentence actually did reveal something, even if the language was industry-speak.

Nielsen is the longstanding measurer of TV viewership, collecting data independently of the networks. But there’s no independent measurer of streaming viewership.

Some platforms publish audience data themselves, as NBC and ESPN long have. Amazon hired Nielsen to measure its Thursday night NFL audiences on Prime Video. Apple has kept silent.

So it’s not possible for an outsider to prove Bacon’s assertions that “we got way younger as an audience,” and “we had people watching longer than they did on linear television.”

The only thing resembling data that anyone had given out before Thursday came from Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services. Cue said at last November’s Soccerex business conference that “we’ve had more than a million viewers to watch the biggest games this season.”

Cue also notably said “nobody expected that,” which raised some eyebrows. The last MLS Cup final before Apple’s deal started, 2022′s Union-LAFC epic, drew 2.155 million viewers just in the United States. So one million viewers seems like a low bar for a global telecast on a big brand’s platform, even if it’s a subscription streaming package.

» READ MORE: In 2022, Philadelphia helped MLS Cup draw its biggest U.S. TV audience in 25 years

Bacon said something related to that Thursday that was accurate, even if it still came without any numbers attached.

“It’s actual people that we know are watching, and have taken actions to be very deliberate with the way that they engage with our sport,” he said. “And that’s encouraging.”

Now if someone would just say how many of those people there are.

MLS hired a new executive producer, Ignacio Garcia, a former general manager of ESPN Deportes’ studio shows. Multiple sources also said that Shaw Brown, whom production giant IMG hired to be the Apple/MLS coordinating producer last year, is out of that job.

Brown has long been one of the top soccer broadcast producers in the United States, with many years of experience at ESPN, NBC, Fox, and Telemundo. He’s the lead producer of U.S. men’s and women’s national team games on TNT and its sibling channels.

Garcia is not a direct replacement for Brown, and IMG is still involved with much of the on-site production work for MLS games. But Brown’s absence will be noticed in the soccer media world.

» READ MORE: Former Union broadcaster Danny Higginbotham remains a familiar voice with Apple TV

As for on-camera matters, expect this year’s roster of telecasters to be announced in a few weeks. Bacon offered good news that all the English and Spanish crews will call games from stadiums this year, after rumors last year that some would work off monitors in studios.

“We have a huge production infrastructure and strategy that we put together, and we are not looking at how we scale back on that plan or investment,” he said. “We’re looking at how we make things better and build upon what we had in 2023.”

There might be a scaling-back of French telecasts, though. Last year, MLS offered them for all three Canadian teams, and this year it might be for just CF Montréal. That was first reported Tuesday by Montreal-based outlet Dans Les Coulisses, and Bacon didn’t deny it.

“We’re working through all the plans, we’re going to give you guys updates on all that, but Montreal for sure is going to have no change to the way that they’re covered,” he said.

There was one other piece of concrete Apple news Thursday, and it was well-received. Box to Box, the production company that created Netflix’s big hit Drive to Survive series on Formula 1 racing, will spend this year doing an eight-part, behind-the-scenes series on MLS.

» READ MORE: MLS media day: Julián Carranza is still a Union player, but might not be for much longer

Even better, it won’t just be about Lionel Messi.

“I think people really want to know more of the stories, and get to know the coaches, the players, the crop of young American players that’s coming through and going on to the world stage,” Box to Box co-founder Paul Martin said. “I think that there’s a real curiosity about the league and the sport here from the rest of the world. And I think our show can help take people on the inside, into the dressing rooms, into the airplanes as they go and travel around the country.”

With the number of young Americans coming through the Union’s ranks, fans should hope the series visits Chester for a while.

Fans should also hope Box to Box can keep up its track record of not shying away from tough coverage. Though MLS has editorial oversight of Apple’s game telecasts and studio shows, Bacon hinted — though he didn’t say outright — that Box to Box will have free reign.

“Box to Box has had some of the most successful sports docuseries in the world, and our intention is not to mess with the formula that’s made those shows successful,” he said.