MLS head shares confusing Season Pass viewership numbers

Apple tends to be pretty tight-lipped when it comes to viewership data. But in a midseason press conference earlier today, Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber offered a rare (but puzzling) update on how MLS Season Pass has been performing in 2025.

According to Garber (via Sports Business Journal), matches are averaging 120,000 unique viewers per game, a figure he said represents a 50% increase compared to last year.

Interestingly, he said the jump is not necessarily due to the Apple TV+ deal but rather to a broader distribution push that has made games available through Comcast’s Xfinity, DirecTV, and even EA Sports.

But what does ‘unique viewers’ mean?

The use of unique viewers as a performance metric puzzled journalists, as the data is not directly comparable to the industry standard average-minute audience for sports broadcasts.

Pressed on that point, Garber reportedly said:

“We’re not putting on one or two games on a Saturday and then the next game on a Saturday or a handful of games regionally on a Sunday. Other leagues have a game of the week, or the game of the night, or Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV. All of our games, for the most part, are on Saturday, all up against each other (…) so, when you have 120,000 unique viewers across that, that’s a lot of people. Aggregate all that, depending on what week it is, we’ve got over a million people that are unique viewers to a match.”

That didn’t exactly help, as it’s still unclear whether the 120,000 figure applies to each individual match, or if it is an average across the full slate of Saturday night games. How much of a match someone has to actually watch to count as a ‘unique viewer’ was also left unspecified.

Still, a Sports Business Journal source claimed that the overall average is being boosted by Sunday Night Soccer, the weekly standalone match that receives additional promotion from Apple.

Finally, Graber said that MLS and Apple “believe we need to start sharing more information,” and that he’ll do just that during the next press conference, scheduled for December.

The MLS Season Pass is currently available at 50% off on Apple TV+.

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