Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #356: TV talk! New deals for USSF & MLS, John Ourand helps us sort through it

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

The era of HBO Max, TNT, Telemundo, Universo and Peacock is upon us with the U.S. women taking on New Zealand tonight under the new TV deals. Also, Major League Soccer embarks on a historic 10-year deal with Apple. John Ourand, a reporter for the Sports Business Journal and co-host of Marchand and Ourand Sports Media Podcast, joins Belz to help us understand what's going on, how it compares to what's happening in other sports, and what it means for soccer's bargaining power in America.John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ourand_SBJHis podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-marchand-and-ourand-sports-media-podcast/id1587364692----Support Scuffed on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scuffed Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the SCuff podcast, where we talk about U.S. soccer. New TV deals are going into effect this year for U.S. soccer and major league soccer, something that's really upon us, and that we haven't discussed much on this podcast. U.S. men's and women's national team games that aren't overseen by Kanka Kaff will be broadcast over the air on TNT or TBS, unless they're broadcast only on HBO Max. All MLS games will be carried on a special streaming package from Apple. joining us to help make sense of all of this is John Orrand, a veteran media reporter for the Sports Business Journal and has been covering the media since the 1990s. He lives in the world of TV deals and streaming. Welcome to scuff John and thank you for your time. I'm trying to make sense of all this, Adam.

So this will be fun. This will be a fun conversation. And we should shout out our mutual friend, Paul Douglas, who connected us. Let's go Terps. Absolutely. First question, MLS is, like I said, going fully behind the Apple Paywall in U.S. soccer is going to go about 50% behind the HBO paywall. Could you give us a sense of how common this is in sports right now?

You know, MLS's deal, I don't like to talk, they're both totally separate deals. I don't like to talk about them together. Okay, fair enough. But MLS's deal is a really unique deal. Look, there is an unmistakable trend in the means. media business about all programming, leaving traditional linear television, and going to streaming. And so if you look at it from the entertainment side, that has almost totally fully happened. People go to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV Plus, Paramount Plus, you name it.

And they binge watch various series and very few people stay to watch procedurals on television. where you get one episode per week and you have to wait the next week for old people do that right I'm old and I don't even do that and um but you know sports and more than just sports live event programming is the one genre that is keeping um the the the cable bundle but traditional television in business because people need to see it live and you have these big meat. media companies like Disney, Fox, Paramount, Comcasts that understand the value of live sports and are paying a significant amount of money for it. At Sports Business Journal, we just had the top 100 television shows from 2022, all of television.

And back when I was a teenager, it would have been filled with sitcoms and, you know, some police procedurals. 82 of that 100 was filled with NFL games and another like another 15 I think only three weren't sports and one of that was the state of the union so sports sports is hugely hugely important to the traditional television ecosystem but what's happening at the same time is that these streamers also see a value in sports and they're they're starting to sort a nibble at sports. So you see the NFL, they did a deal with Amazon. And so Amazon's NFL Thursday Night Football was exclusively streamed on Amazon this year. The NHL did a deal with ESPN and with

Turner. And much of its programming is streamed on ESPN Plus, a streaming service that's owned by ESPN. So you're seeing this a lot. the Big Ten just did a deal. And part of that deal ensures that Peacock NBC's on streaming service has a part of it. So what makes- So there will be like Big Ten football games that you can't get over the air that you have to get. Yeah. And unfortunately, we started talking about the Terps.

Unfortunately for the Terps, it's mainly going to be their games, I think. You're not going to see a lot of Ohio State Michigan games on Peacock, but you are probably going to see Maryland versus Indiana over there. It's sort of a way to draw those people over there. And that's what's really unique about the MLS deal, is that MLS has decided that they weren't going to go half measures over into Apple. They were going to go and take everything over there. So they came back and did a small deal with Fox.

So if you're a casual MLS fan, you still will be able to see a game a week or something along those lines on traditional broadcast television. But they took everything over to Apple, and they were able to take everything over to Apple because one of the things that Don Garber did that was really smart was he told the local teams, you know, you can do local TV deals, but they all have to end at a certain date so that when we go to the market, that we have a complete package of our national deals and our local deals. Same thing with international rights. They all had that end at a certain time. And what made MLS really attractive to Apple is that it's not just a U.S.-centric deal. So if they did a deal

with ESPN or with Fox, it's just for the U.S. market. With Apple, this is one deal that is immediately global and goes worldwide. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, how much of a risk is it? for MLS. Like if, if, if, if, if, if, if,

if, if, if, if, if, if, that's going to be, that's going to be, that's going to be bad, right?

And, you know, I, Adam, I'm, I'm in the minority here. I, I, I, I think it's a very low risk, uh,

for, for, for MLS. Um, I've been, I've been, uh, covering MLS, uh, you know,

for, since like, 2006, you know, I live in the DC market. Like, I guess the DC United, Our glory years are in the mid-90s, right?

Yep. They haven't turned. MLS has not become a significant television draw in that 30 years. The, you know, where you take a look at the NFL ratings over that span have climbed significantly. Basketball ratings have, that was around the Jordan era, so they're pretty flat with that, but they're younger and, and more affluent, all over the place you're seeing ratings go through the roof. With MLS, they got stuck at this one area. We have 25 years of MLS TV ratings, and there's not a lot of growth there.

I think it's relatively low risk to say, why don't we go with Apple? And it's not like going with Fubo TV or a really sort of niche service. How many people do you know that don't own an iPhone? And we're going to go and maybe this will be what ends up, you know, really propelling the sport. MLS always, MLS and NHL more than anybody, they always talk about how their fans are more technically savvy than other leagues. And that's one of the selling points that they use, especially when they go out to sell to advertising. If that's the case, maybe this will work. I think that it's a, it still is a risky move.

but in my view of this, it's really an acceptable risk to make to see whether or not that it could work. Although, to be perfectly honest, if ESPN and Fox had promised the same amount of money that Apple had promised to them, then they certainly would have stuck with traditional TVs, you know, as opposed to going this route. But they didn't. They got the money and they got a potential to see their viewers become younger, become more tech savvy and to be more affluent, which is something all the leagues want because that's how they can sell their ads. So what does it say about

if they couldn't get the same amount of money from Fox and ESPN as they're getting from Apple, what does it say about their bargaining position? I mean, I guess we just discussed how the ratings of Major League Soccer have been flat for a long time. How do you see their bargaining position and watching all this play out?

They were in a tough bargaining position. Despite what I said about all the TV networks wanting to get live sports or live programming, NBC is very happy with the English Premier League. Yeah, as they should be, I think. Yeah, it's sort of something that they're identified with. They own the whole thing. They like it. CBS and Paramount Plus, they've been making some inroads, I think, into soccer, but there was something

sort of about the domestic league that, you know, they did have the NWSL as well. You know, they were not serious bidders early on on MLS. And Fox and ESPN, they just kept looking at the ratings and MLS wanted or they needed a step on increase. I mean, in some respects, they deserve that increase. But Fox and the ESPN looked at it and we're like, you know, you're not bringing in the number of viewers that make for that increase. But if they take this and go as one huge package and go to Apple, and this is Apple's first foray into the sports business,

which means that it has to pay a little bit more than if it were. an established place to watch sports. You know, that's sort of where the money came. And, you know, Apple's going to take a, they're, this is a little more than a test, I think, but I'm generally viewing it as a test to see whether or not sports are something that can be sticky, which is another way of saying, like, you know, you can get consumers in there. They're going to watch the one match. and then maybe go through and watch, you know, whatever shows are Ted Lassow,

you know, whatever shows, other shows are on Apple TV Plus. What are the other good shows on Apple TV Plus? It's the one with Jennifer Aniston, not the newsroom, the morning show. That's one. Okay. Yeah, yeah. They had a great one. We worked.

It was a, I forget what it was called, but it was a four-episode series on the rise and fall of re uh we work oh okay highly recommended okay so recommended i forgot the title you wrote recently that major league baseball is this is kind of a paragraph low in a story about um about something else but contemplating the idea of producing its games itself and distributing them directly to broadcasters and they're not doing that right now but there's like sort of this the collapse of the regional sports networks that's going on. Can you kind of give us the, I don't know, $2 primer on that? And then I want to connect it to MLS, but we'll get to that in a second, I guess.

Okay, because I'll resist connecting it to MLS at first. Regional sports networks are the local sports channels that are on cable and satellite systems. So here in D.C., I watch stuff on Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, Masson, or, NBC Sports Washington. And they are the most costly channels on cable systems. And so cable operators and satellite distributors pay upwards of like $5 per subscriber per month for the RSN, depending on where the RSN is. And what's happening in the business in total is because of the rise of Netflix and

and Paramount Plus and all these other streamers, you're seeing a lot of cord cutting, where people that are not big sports fans are cutting the cord and just not using cable. So that money, that revenue that's coming into regional sports networks is taking a nosedive. While at the same time, the rights fees that they pay to, particularly ML Major League Baseball and NBA teams,

teams, also NHL teams, continues to go up. You know, they had built in a lot of these contracts, you know, 7 to 10% annual increases in what those rights fees are. And so that, that's just a scenario that has to end at some point. And so, just let me, let me jump in and say the regional sports networks would have included like Fox Sports Midwest or Fox Sports. Exactly. Yeah.

Right. And then Bali sports, those. Exactly. So where I was going is that Fox Sports, they had to sell the Fox Sports. It's 21 Fox Sports Nets. It was bought by Disney. And then Disney turned around and sold them to a company called Sinclair, which owns a lot of local broadcast channels. And Sinclair bought those RSNs three years ago, maybe, two or three years ago. I forget exactly when for, let's say, $10 billion. They're worth about $2 billion right now. They've lost that much in value. And they're being crushed with, you know, eight billion or more in debt with creditors circling around to try to get them. Those properties are particularly distressed, much more so than the NBC ones or the ones

that are a couple that are owned by Warner Brothers Discovery. Okay. And so trying to figure out how to get those RSM. and it's not even those RSNs, but those local rights healthy is one of the big issues facing all of the leagues. Because they still see a lot of value in local rights. It's just the way that they had been doing it for the past 30 years, these RSNs, that looks to as I've run its course. Okay. Well, so I guess it was in that context that you were, you briefly discussed the possibility of Major League Baseball sometime in the future.

producing their own broadcast and distributing them directly to the to who who would they be distributing them directly? So most likely

that they would sell some maybe to a you know the CW or UPN or some like local broadcast affiliate or they could just instead of the RSN just go to

Xfinity and say you know instead of that RSN why don't you just buy these games and then you can have access to out of market package and all these other games as well. Okay.

Well, so I guess the reason it made me think of the MLS of MLS is because my understanding is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that part of the pitch to Apple from MLS was we will, we will produce our own broadcasts and basically all Apple has to do is provide the platform for the streaming, right? Is that pretty much? Yeah, MLS Productions has to. had to on a dime, turn around and create entire productions for each one of its teams. So how's that going? Well, they did announce recently, you know, a bunch of announcers and analysts.

It's been a total slog. It's hard. It's hard to do it for one team, much less, you know, the entire lead. But they, I guess Seth Bacon, is the executive in MLS that's overseeing this. The last time I checked in, which was a couple of weeks ago, everything seemed to be progressing to be on time. But this is really important because one of the things,

Apple right now has done, did a small deal with Major League Baseball, where it had Friday night baseball games. And those games for baseball fans got totally panned because they tried to, you know, they didn't cater to hardcore fans who would sit around watching on a Friday night. They tried to make it, uh, to draw in, you know, non-fans or super casual fans, which didn't satisfy anybody. Right. But the one thing that they did that everybody loved, the picture was sublime. It was, like, I don't know how they, they made the picture just

look so good. Huh. And so there's a, they have a, Apple has a very, Apple has a very high, high bar in terms of video quality that I'm sure they're going to make the MLS sort of jump through in order to maintain that view of video. Interesting. So that'll be good. The whole idea with the regional sports networks doesn't really affect MLS that much. I don't know off the top of my head, but I think it was only three, maybe four MLS teams that actually got a rights fee locally from regional sports network. Is that right?

And there were, you know, I can tell you like here in DC, the DC United Games would get hash marks. It was very hard to build it. Even when we had Wayne Rooney on the field, it was just very hard to build an audience that way. What does that phrase mean hash marks? What does that mean? Oh, that just means nobody was watching it. The zero with a hash going through it.

Got it. Got it. This is big media terminology. I'm happy to be learning it. So it shouldn't have much of an effect on. Well, it certainly won't have any effect on what's going on. Okay. All right.

Well, moving over to U.S. soccer a little bit. This is a question from, I'm going to read some questions from listeners because they've been submitted. Bob Morocco and Montana asks, based on what you know about it, how commercially reason were the terms of the old soccer United marketing contract with the soccer federation. The guarantee and the revenue sharing once that was hit. Was there anything about that that was atypical for the sector, as far as you know? Just the fact that soccer United Marketing sort of ran everything was atypical.

And I think we're seeing something similar now in the NCAA where they sell the NCAA men's basketball tournament and make a boatload from CBS and TNT. And then they package sort of everything else. And now like women's basketball wants to come out from that. And, you know, because they think that they can make their own significant rights fee. And then you have, you know, softball or the college world series that it's like, well, why are we grouped in with swimming and wrestling and lacrosse? And, you know, that doesn't necessarily make sense.

And so if you're U.S. soccer, they took a look at the landscape that we talked about already. And we're like, well, it would really behoove us if we just controlled and owned our own rights moving forward. And I think that the ultimate number that they got is, you know, proves that that strategy was pretty good. because I'm not sure that, look, their timing was really good in terms of the established networks paying a lot of money for rights to try to keep people. Like, they saw that completely. Their timing, though, with the World Cup coming, you know, to North America, and U.S. soccer games basically meaning nothing for how long now, eight more years, just about, you know, it makes the timing a little bit off.

So I think the fact that they got the deal that they got from Turner or from Warner Brothers, I thought that was money-wise, a really good deal. Is it just so people know, 200 million over eight years, 25 million a year? I think I should have shared this with you before we started talking, but I went through the 990s of U.S. soccer. It's basically impossible to find this information in a clear format. But if my math is correct, they were getting 27.8 million a year from soccer United marketing.

But that included like all the non-Nike sponsorship revenue. So it's not just the TV deal. So it's hard to know how much. Yeah. And they're going to sell sponsorships and things along those lines as well. I mean, I don't think it was a clear-cut huge deal. But given the difficulties about the schedule and about the U.S. soccer games moving forward, I thought that that was about as good a deal as they could have wanted.

That's a really good point. Like none of the games that matter for the teams are going to be on this part of this deal over the next eight years. Yeah. And also what is interesting is. is that they sold up, you know, they sold it to HBO Max was going to play a really big part of this. And HBO Max was a service that was, you know, there was a lot of buzz around it, you know, the sort of secession or the White Lotus or all these sort of hit shows that go along with it. And there was this, there was a belief that it was really going to grow.

Well, now David Zaslov over at Warner Brothers Discovery has sort of put the, pump the brakes a little bit on growing HBO Max and possibly folding it into Discovery Plus moving forward, which I don't know. I haven't looked into this enough to determine whether or not I think that's a good deal or not. Potentially, you could be reaching more viewers as Discovery Plus as opposed to, you know, this streaming service off a premium channel. So there's still a lot of moving parts between what we're going to see, you know, know, this week when the U.S. women, I guess, are going to have the first game on Tuesday night. Yeah, tonight.

Yeah, to, you know, six months from now. So that's something to keep your eye on. Yeah, HBO and HBO Max, I guess you're just talking about the growth of that platform or the buzz that, the buzz that was around it. From what I can tell, 73.8 million global subscribers combined with 46.8 million of those based in the U.S. that was in 2021. I assume it's hard to sit hard to know, but do you have any idea how many of those 46.8 million are actually using HBO Max? No. And how many of them are AT&T wireless subscribers that just sort of like, you know, fit in there.

That's, that's, so you're able to get the subscriber numbers. We have no clue about usage or anything like that. Okay. So it could, I mean, to put it in like sort of, uh, maybe perhaps uncharitable terms. it could be like these games happening on HBO Max, like the one tonight in New Zealand that the women are playing. Like, there could be like nobody watching that. I don't know.

I think, look, I told you before we started taping, I'm a casual soccer fan. I'm hardly a hardcore. I love watching the U.S. men and women play. And so it is a destination and people will find it because if they know the game is going on. That's the big problem right now is with so many services out there, is with another sort of industry term, discoverability.

And just having people figure out how to get to that game is sort of the big problem that, not just U.S. soccer, but all the leagues are sort of suffering with. Yeah, I think that's what sort of the people who really care about soccer, who are not casual fans who want to grow the game, would say, hey, we need these games to be over the air so that people can sort of stumble on them and become fans. Now, I don't know how realistic that is as an actual mechanism for building interest in the game.

See, I'm going to suggest one thing, because I have heard that. And I was like, what are we doing on this little service? I mean, would it be better to be on ESPN, which caters solely to sports fans? And so how much are you really growing the game there? Maybe it will get a bigger rating. Or is it better to be associated with HBO Max, which is going to get, you know, my wife and daughter, potentially, like sampling the game or at least having it marketed to them because they'll be on there looking for an entertainment program.

It's been the age-old question about, you know, the NBA on TNT. Does that draw in a different level of fan than the NBA on ESPN, which is really just kind of hardcore sports fans? Does it? It does. I believe that there are more women that would be watching, you know, on TNT. And it's, it just enables more people to sample it. You fall asleep to everybody loves Raymond and boom, there's a wake up and there's. Right. No, I can see the argument for TNT and TBS. I mean, even over, even over like FS1. Yeah, ESPN was probably a bad example because like that, that covers casual sports fan.

If you're on FS1, you're a hardcore fan, right? Right, right. And the audience is a little smaller than the audience for like a TNT, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, much. So just today, U.S. soccer announced that it agreed to a four-year deal with Telemundo Univoso for Spanish language coverage. So this is about half, you know, half of the term of the deal with Turner and HBO. They're not revealing the financials.

I actually checked with the Federation today. So I'm curious, what do you, like, from what you know of these things, if the Warner Brothers deal is $200 million for eight years, what are we looking at for a four-year deal for Spanish language coverage? I really don't want to speculate. I'd love to, but I have no clue. I do want to say, though, that the Spanish language rights, if you take a look at what Telemundo has done, you know,

they got the World Cup rights. Yep. They now have U.S. soccer rights. They have, uh, is it Chivas? They have the rights to like the most popular Mexican league team. Wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. So for the longest time, Spanish language soccer in America, uh, what was, was not

Telemundo. Um, it was Univision. But, uh, but, but they, they are really making themselves a competitor in the soccer space. and it's like selling a house. If you have more than one person bidding on a house, the price goes up. You have two Spanish language networks that are really bidding up the Spanish language rights. So, again, I have no idea what the number is, and I'm not going to speculate. But I think the market is ripe for the rights fees to be up because you have two interested parties.

Right. And Univision had the rights up until, you know, this new deal. Again, it's a weird, it's a weird sale because there are no big games. They're no must-see games. That's a good point. Yeah. And we had, we've had, we had a guy from Teudayne on the podcast a couple months ago. He's kind of a friend, Miquely Janone.

He argues, and I think he's right, that the audience for the Spanish line, The Spanish language audience for at least the men's national team, I don't know if it's true for the women, is much, is bigger typically than the audience on English language television. Oh, it'll be impossible for us to figure out because streamers don't, you know,

there's no Nielsen that counts streamers. Right. Amazon's Thursday night football, notwithstanding. But I would bet you because it's over the air, Telemundo, in addition to, I'm sure it's being streamed on Peacock as well.

Peacock, yep. Yeah, versus just HBO Max. I would bet you that that would end up getting more men or women. I know you don't want to speculate on the dollar figure, but like is it, are we talking like a fraction of what the English language rights are or roughly similar? Again, I mean, this is why I don't want to speculate. So like in because in the traditional U.S. focus sports like football or like, American football, I should say on this. Right, right. I get it. All right, good, good. Or basketball. It's a fraction.

Soccer and the amount of Hispanic speakers that watch soccer, like, I don't know whether that's a fraction or whether it's more than that. I just, I wish I could tell you. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I won't keep pressing the point. Again, in other sports, it's a fraction. I don't know. I don't know with soccer. Okay. Okay. Phil Sock in Philadelphia asks, how much in your view of a stake, so going back to the MLS deal, how much of a stake in your view does Apple have in making this work? Or is it all the onus on Major League Soccer? You know, the first question was from Montana, which is where I met my wife. And the second question is from Philly, where my son is now living. So this is, I like these.

I think that is the, if I was an MLS fan, that would be my biggest concern is that, look, there's a stake in Apple wanting to make this work for obvious reasons. I mean, it's a, the $250 million is a drop in the bucket to Apple, but it's, you know, it's still a significant amount of money. And if they can make, if they can recreate how we consume sports, that fits totally within what Apple does. And they've done it with music. They're doing it with entertainment programming. And it fits. my worry for MLS is that if they if there are not enough after one year they don't see enough

engagement and I'm not sure what engagement means I'm not sure if it's the same viewership metrics that TV networks use or if it's you know people that come in and then sample other things within Apple's like you know ecosystem or whatever engagement means right will they tire of it because it's it is like a really small part of uh i mean a really infinitesimally small part of what apple does and if it takes too much effort to create too much i could see them tiring it of of it after a year or two uh and that and that would be my concern for mLS and then they'd be but then they'd be stuck with it for the next eight nine years yeah and then and then write it off then then you see how let how my how big apple is as a company that it's like

Like, oh, well, you know, that didn't work. Let's just, you know, let's move forward. Let's see. More buildings and food in Indianapolis. That's not his real name. I have no connection to Indianapolis. This is a, dang it. What does ESPN's failure to obtain U.S. rights for the Premier League or the Champions

League, so Paramount's the one who has the Champions League, say about the way they view and value the sports role in America? of what of soccer you think yeah um because ESPN because i mean let me add a little context ESPN used to be sort of the standard bear for soccer yeah it's it's so funny one of the things that that always surprises me in uh in covering the business of media is how all it takes is to get one person who's a fan uh overseeing a network and then and then all of a sudden you double down on that. And ESPN had John Skipper. Right. And he was a, you know, he ran programming and then he ran the network. And he is an unabashedly big soccer fan. And so he made big bets on soccer. And in fact, I think you can point back to John Skipper back was it, 2012 was that the World Cup? What was it? The one in South Africa. 2010. 2010.

Yeah, and they blew that out. We've not, I mean, we have never seen a World Cup like that, presented to America like that. He brought the Premier League over. He paid, he paid MLS like a significant increase in a rights fee when they had to come back. He left. ESPN, the people that ESPN still valued all of those properties. The problem is that Fox came in and took the World Cup. And then NBC came in.

It took the English Premier League and then just extended with the English Premier League. And so ESPN was stuck with, they had sort of MLS, but they didn't have anything to sort of pair MLS with. And I think that that I think that was a bit of a problem. And if I were a current ESPN executive, I would take great umbrage to that question because they would say that, you know, they have La Liga on ESPN Plus and they have the German league on ESPN Plus. And they have a lot of really big time international leagues that are, that have the ESPN brand It's true.

It's just that they're not on ESPN. They're just not on ESPN, the linear TV network or certainly. Actually, as ABC carried, I was about to say, and certainly ABC, but I think they've carried us. Yeah, surely they put Real Madrid, Barcelona on over the year. I mean, I watch everything on streaming. I'm a cord. I'm a cord cut-e, I guess. When did you cut the cord?

Long time ago. I can't even remember. See, because I use, you know, because we have a podcast where we talk about all this stuff, and I use soccer. I hate streaming. I hate everything about it because it's like we used to get everything in one nice little bundle in a cable package. And I use soccer as the example. If you're a true soccer fan and you watch all this stuff, how many different subscriptions do you have? ESPN Plus, Paramount Plus, Peacock, HBO Max now.

Yep. I mean, I kind of have all of them anyway, but yeah, Paramount Plus, I would never have gotten without Champions League. ESPN Plus, that's sort of a must have at this point. What else is there? And you know why you soccer fans are screwed is because Paramount and ESPN and NBC all have figured out that soccer fans are cut of a different cloth and they will pay. to go to get it. And they will have no problem bringing on those services. And so,

whereas I'd love to see them all within one bundle, for the time being, they're going to be on different services because the Champions League is a, as I said, it's a sticky rights deal. It brings people to Paramount Plus. ESPN has figured out those European soccer leagues that it has gets people subscribing to ESPN Plus. they've told me that soccer, I've heard this across network, soccer is one of the top two sports in terms of attracting new streaming subscribers. Interesting. Yeah, I believe it.

I mean, people want to, and partly it's because people feel grateful, at least I do, that even these games are available in some way, you know, 15, 20 years ago. How do you watch, how do you watch La Liga regular season game? I mean, how do you watch a just normal league a game? There wasn't a way. And even if it costs seven bucks a month, that's all right. You know, so this is another question you may not be able to answer, but I want to fire it at you anyway.

Of that $250 million that MLS is getting per year from Apple, what's a realistic estimate for how much of that is going to be eaten up by the production? Production costs, yeah. Yes. I, again, I hate to say that I don't have, I can't give you a specific number, but I can tell you that production, and especially the type of production that they're doing, which is going across the league, costs a lot of money. And so it's, it will eat into that. I mean, I, it's not like half of 250. Okay. It's more of a fraction of that. But it, but it's going to be a significant outlay of, of, um, of their rights fee. But then again, they also have other things on the other side. If this grows, they have back-end rights to where they can get paid a little bit more than that as well. Right.

Yeah, I mean, it makes a big difference if it's, because we were arguing about this on the Discord earlier. If it ends up costing them, you know, $125 million, that's probably, which would be half. That's probably acceptable compared to like the previous deal. deal with some with Sarky United marketing in terms of like a step up for getting it up to like, you know, 175 million. It starts to look a little shakier. So it's up to Don Garber to, you know, limit production costs, I guess. But then Apple doesn't want to limit those production costs.

So it's a, you know, it's a tough road to hoe. We've talked about this in various ways as we've gone along. But Paul in Annapolis, I think someone you know asks, MLS especially seems to be making a long-term bet on streaming as the soccer audience in the U.S. is younger than most major sports. But does that feel in conflict with trying to expand the sport to the more casual audience that may just watch the World Cup or the men's national team or the women's national team? Yeah. And I would just tell Paul, like, how would you, how would Paul suggest that we expand MLS to get the casual fans? ESPN has been putting more games on ABC.

You know, Fox has been putting games on their broadcast. channel. Like, there's no better way in media to expand the game than to, you know, put, put your games on broadcast television. It's the biggest platform that there is. But MLS ratings have stayed flat. Like, they're just not, the casual fans have sampled it and just aren't, they haven't said no, they haven't said that they don't like MLS.

They just don't like the MLS broadcasts. They don't like the telecasts. So is it conceivable that fans with iPhones, everybody has an iPhone, will all of a sudden watch it in a different way, that it will pick up different fans, that it could be a way. If you want to draw in casual fans, one way I would want to do that is with a global company like Apple that is in everybody's pocket right now.

And I'm talking to you from a MacBook Pro, for goodness sakes. You know, so it's risky. I'm not pretending that this is like, it's totally set. But I think it's an acceptable risk in my opinion. Okay. I think that's it. I think we covered it. Any closing thoughts?

You didn't ask me about the NWSL, which I was prepared for. Oh, I didn't. Which is, they have. They have moved on. They had an exclusive negotiating window with CBS. They moved on from CBS. Similar to MLS, they have all their rights, are the international rights, local rights, and national rights,

all up right now. If Apple is serious about MLS and serious about sort of catering to this soccer fan, I could see that as a place where the NWSL will end up. I think one of the issues that the NWSL is going to have is they want to see a pretty significant rights fee increase. And I think CBS and all of these other networks, they have a scorecard, the rating scorecard. And so they, you know, they're for-profit businesses. So they might want to help soccer grow.

But it's like at some point, it's like, well, you're, your ratings aren't to where they aren't worth what you're asking for uh for for us could they be worth the apple on streaming i think i think that that's a a destination that i that's a that's a story that uh that i'm watching and it's something in i have an annual predictions column i put that in one of my predictions that they would end up doing that nwsl will end up with apple as well yeah interesting yeah that makes sense when when will that have to be decided by it's coming out at some point this year. I'm probably within the next few months.

So NWSL is going to be with CBS through the end of 23? Through the end of the, yeah, the NWSL season. Okay. All right. Shame on me for not asking about that. Thank you, John. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, had fun doing it. I should tell people your podcast is it Marchand. Marchand and Oran Sports Media podcast. It rhymes. Yeah. I know. We call it Nammo. Marchand is at the New York Post.

You're at Sports Business Journal. It looks good from the clips I've seen on Twitter. So check that out. I'll put John's Twitter handle in the show notes. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.