MLS Season Pass

» see tv.apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The subscription was sold worldwide. The league was not. Apple held global rights and the Apple TV app takes money in Turkey the same as anywhere, so MLS Season Pass was buyable from Ankara for three seasons with nothing waiting behind the purchase. Turkish football attention goes to the Süper Lig and to whichever European league is on that night. Major League Soccer surfaces in the Turkish sports pages when a famous European player goes there to finish out his career, and otherwise it does not surface at all.

What Apple bought in June 2022 was unusual enough that people who do not watch soccer paid attention to it. MLS sold ten years of global over-the-top rights to a single company, with no territory carved out and no cable partner underneath. The name and the American price came on 16 November 2022, the service launched on 1 February 2023, and the season started on 25 February. Fourteen ninety-nine a month or ninety-nine dollars for the season, and in return every match in the league, live, in English and Spanish, with none of the regional blackouts that make American sports television the thing it is.

The absence of blackouts was the actual product. American sports television had spent decades building a system where your ability to watch your own city's team depended on your zip code and on whichever company held the regional rights that year, and the blackout rules existed to keep that machinery intact. MLS was small enough to walk away from it in one piece. Nobody bigger has done the same thing since, and after three seasons the experiment did not end because it failed on the field.

On 13 November 2025 Apple said that from 2026 every MLS match would stream for Apple TV subscribers at no extra cost, and that the standalone Season Pass would conclude at the end of the 2025 season. Its own support page, published six days later, put it plainly, that the standalone service would stop being offered as a separate subscription. Anyone who already paid for Apple TV or Apple One stopped being billed for it and had auto-renew switched off. Anyone who held only a Season Pass had their subscription converted into an Apple TV subscription in early 2026, at the same price or less. The 2025 season ended on 6 December, and that is the date it stopped being purchasable at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the messi spike ~

Lionel Messi signed with Inter Miami in the summer of 2023 and the subscription numbers moved immediately. The measurement firm Antenna counted 110,000 new American subscriptions around his debut match alone. Sports Business Journal reported that the service passed one million subscribers in July 2023, though that figure folded in the free subscriptions handed to T-Mobile customers and to club season ticket holders, so it is a ceiling rather than a count of people who paid.

The number worth sitting with came two years later. Speaking before the 2025 All-Star Game, commissioner Don Garber said Season Pass was averaging 120,000 viewers per match, which he presented as growth of more than fifty percent on the previous season, and which was also true at the same time as the million-subscriber headline. A million people had an entitlement and a hundred and twenty thousand watched any given game.

~ the amendment ~

One day after announcing the change, on 14 November 2025, Apple and MLS amended the contract. The ten-year term that was supposed to run through 2032 now ends after the 2028-29 season, and Apple will pay roughly fifty million dollars more through 2029 than the original terms called for. The deal got shorter and more expensive in the same signature.

Read against what Apple said publicly, that is the clearer account of what happened. A standalone sports subscription is a thing people cancel in November and resubscribe to in February, and a general entertainment tier with soccer inside it is not. From the 2026 season an Apple TV subscription also comes bundled into full-season ticket packages at MLS clubs, which turns the league's own ticket buyers into subscribers of the wider service rather than of a soccer product. The matches are all still there. The bill just says something else now.

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