Apple finally breaks its silence on how MLS Season Pass has performed in its first year

It’s always been fairly easy to find out what Major League Soccer thinks of its 10-year, $250 million-plus per season worldwide broadcast deal with Apple. For that much money and that much potential exposure, the league has always been thrilled.

But until now, it’s been impossible to find out what Apple thinks. The company never likes to talk much on the record, whether about its sports broadcasts or its next iPhone. That has led to constant rumors wondering whether Apple is pleased with things so far, or not — including directly conflicting reports at times amid the swirl of social media.

This week, Apple finally let its guard down. Eddy Cue, the company’s senior vice president of services, gave the first on-the-record remarks from anyone at Apple in months.

“I’m very proud and happy with what we’ve accomplished so far, but I am sure that the best is yet to come,” Cue said in a videoconference with media outlets including The Inquirer. “It’s been a great few months for such a quick turnaround. So I’m incredibly proud of everyone on our team, everyone in the league — the teams, players, and owners have been instrumental in making this a huge success to start the season.”

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Cue took no questions after a statement that lasted just over three minutes. So there was no opportunity to ask him about anything else — especially a report by The Athletic in early March that Apple has an opt-out clause in the deal if undisclosed subscriber targets aren’t met.

Nor did Cue say anything about how many people have paid for MLS Season Pass, though he acknowledged aloud that he wasn’t going to. But if his statement wasn’t too much on an overall scale, it wasn’t nothing either.

“We’re in year one of a 10-year partnership, so this is just the beginning, but we’re off to a great start with subscriptions and viewership,” he said. “We don’t share specific subscription numbers, but I can tell you we’re certainly doing much better than we had forecasted.”

Cue thanked the public for its feedback — there has been plenty of it, good and bad — and noted he has heard from people within the league, too.

“I get a lot of great feedback from users,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of fun texting with owners and players on the weekends, giving me real-time feedback and ideas on how to make Season Pass even better, and we’re listening.”

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With MLS nearing the midway point of its regular season, Cue said Apple will soon launch a half-season pricing plan for Season Pass for the rest of the year at $49, or $39 if you already pay for the main Apple TV service.

The MLS package includes the rest of the regular season, the playoffs, and the Leagues Cup tournament between MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX. Every game is on Apple’s platform, even those on traditional TV through Fox or Univision channels. And they are all broadcast worldwide, except for the Leagues Cup in Mexico.

“We think it’s a great time to go after a new set of fans,” Cue said. “We continue to work closely with the players, the teams to get more visibility, and social [content], and just doing more things together.”

There is some outside proof of that: many MLS teams have hired multimedia creators this year to fulfill Apple’s requests to have content beyond just game days.

“Our number one goal when we started this was to make sure that in year one, we’ve got all the MLS fans that were out there to feel like and see that we really care deeply about the game that they love, and the teams that they love,” Cue said.