Catanese: MLS Playoff Coverage is (Maybe) Benefitting Apple and That's About It

MLS and Apple imposing multiple layers of gatekeeping to their postseason coverage surely isn't helping get eyes on the league's pinnacle event.

Photo By J. Alexander Dolan

I didn’t exactly have a good lead-in for this post, it had been floating around in my head since the beginning of the playoffs. But, the shorter version was that I really, really don’t like the best of three series for the first round of the playoffs, nor the entire thing shoved behind the Apple Season Pass paywall among other issues.

With events like the NWSL and WNBA Playoffs having a meteoric rise on actual TV networks this year one would think that MLS would be pushing for multiple games on network and cable channels despite the seemingly overbearing exclusive Apple deal and previous meager viewership numbers on traditional TV. Not only does Apple want to hog Lionel Messi, I mean the playoffs, for themselves, but someone has decided to block off written coverage as well.

Imagine my surprise when I clicked on multiple MLS Soccer dot com articles yesterday only to find this message part way through.

This isn’t on some extra 5,000-word mega playoff preview or a 15-minute short feature video that one could argue qualifies as premium content. This is regular analysis stuff from Wiebe, BWP, and Kljestan that they’ve been doing all year, or at least I think it is. It’s all from the “Voices” section. Thank goodness the excellent Matt Doyle post-mortem series on the eliminated teams seems to be unscathed from this madness.

Now, I need to be clear that this is not a paywall but rather what appears to be an attempt to boost free MLS user account numbers. Your regular MLS Fantasy login or Apple account I think is enough to get past this nonsense but it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Also, yes, this site does have subscription backing, and we paywall articles, though I told Sam to keep this one free because irony or something.

There’s a subscribe button though. We’re not backed by a zillion dollar tech company with a $250 million dollar a year broadcasting deal that apparently isn’t generating the views or subscriptions Messi League Soccer was aiming for. Though with the distribution numbers of Season Pass under lock and key we’ll likely never know exactly how successful (or unsuccessful) this steaming venture has been.

Also, the $10 to stream the entire MLS Cup Playoffs is a pretty good deal for new customers. And it’s free with your Apple+ account if you watch unlimited Ted Lasso and whatnot already. That predatory full price and probably automatic unless you cancel season renewal for 2025…yeah, that needs to go. Every account suddenly having a full price auto-renewal is about the most anti-consumer thing you can have.

If your putting money you could be making ahead of making your product better…that mindset actually actively hurts your product in my opinion.

You’re killing the value of your product by thinking the average non-soccer fan or semi-interested local party is going to sign up for your newsletter or make an account to view regular articles. If this strategy worked than the online/digital newspaper sites would be making tons of money and not hemorrhaging staff and coverage for what seems like the last decade or two.

But wait, there’s more! Finding the schedules on MLS dot com for the entire three-week slate of first-round games was difficult and required scrolling through different weeks like this was the regular season but didn’t feature the potential Game 3 timeslots. It should never be easier to find your own league playoff schedule somewhere than your own website but there’s not a desktop/printer friendly version anywhere that I can find easily and I’m on MLS dot com a lot.

Series status online and in-game scorebugs was non-existent, so any casual viewer that may have stumbled into watching a game (or clicked on three different links to get to the playoff bracket online) who was winning the series, or even that a series was being played, unless the commentators mentioned it. How does a sports league and broadcast partner miss something so simple?

Then the playoff schedule itself for the first round is mostly horrid. Games going into PKs constantly blew through their timeslot by 15, 20, or even 30 minutes of the first half of the next game. It’s entirely possible that if you were watching Game 3 penalties between Orlando and Charlotte you missed the three quick first half goals in Miami and Atlanta.

I’m sure 3rd-seeded RSL and 2nd-seeded Columbus enjoyed their regular season reward of a Tuesday night playoff game before getting bounced in the second leg in penalties on the weekend away from home. But at least Riqui Puig and the Galaxy didn’t get the full 2021 Shield Revs treatment of 23 games off between games during the playoffs…it was just 22 days. See? Always preferential treatment for the big teams.

If the league is going to make the same mistakes it did three years ago then they deserve the absurdity that is trying to cram a three-match series into a stretch right before an international break. While I agree with the legends Tim Howard and Landon Donovan in so far that Jordi Alba had a “welcome to America” moment regarding his comments on the playoff format, the league’s excessive postseason tinkering feels almost NASCAR-esque in trying to fix something that isn’t broken and decreasing your viewership at the same time.

Are you going to regain the momentum and piqued interest you had from RBNY absolutely pressing Columbus over 180 minutes with a Hudson River Derby at Shea Stadium Citi Field? I hope so, it’s the best storyline you have for the entire Northeast audience and you’re actively blocking people from reading the article by a former player on one of the teams about said rivalry!

The league over congested its own schedule with Not SuperLiga 3.0 Leagues Cup and a weekend of absurd if needed Game 3’s. Figure it out, but this is a mess of their own doing as far as I’m concerned.

MLS needs to keep this simple, single game elimination bracket, reseed the rounds if you want, maybe a two-leg aggregate Conference Final to reward what are your four best teams left. But the idea that two-thirds of your league needs to make the playoffs and everyone but the 9 seeds get to have one guaranteed home game is ludicrous. You want a home game in November? Be a team fighting for the Shield in October.

Before the shenanigans of this login account walled whatever it is, the larger thought of this column was going to be what exactly is Apple offering MLS that is better than the old MLS Live.

Surely the production quality is much higher, and that’s a major aspect of this deal, but (what I assume to be cause it’s awful) mobile-based UI of the Apple site is borderline unnavigable especially once you are off the main page.

The full replays are at the bottom after rows of Vrioni and Gil highlights which again only targets mobile so that better be like 99% of viewers cause otherwise I’m stumped. As always smart phones are dumb and I’m going to be right about this, stop putting mobile UI in your web browser. I should not need a background app/page to load every time I want to look at a team or weekly schedule online or horizontal scrolling for things in browser.

Years ago the old MLS Live I think offered significantly more value than the current Apple version. The biggest boon for me on the old MLS Live format was the multi-season library of games and the ease of which I could navigate through major events like goals, cards, penalties, etc., with little time stamp markers indicating the minutes as well. I know no one cares about this and everything is geared towards quicker, social media-friendly highlights but I can assure you the number of times I’m logging into Season Pass to watch highlights is never. It’s always for the full matches because the highlights are easily elsewhere accessible without a login.

Being able to quickly go through the full 90 minute version of a game without having to constantly cross reference the box score for major events is how I absorbed a lot of game content years ago and it’s significantly harder to do that on Season Pass. The 5-7 minute highlight clips aren’t usually what I’m looking for when trying to analyze games as a lot of build-up is often cut out. Maybe a 15-20 minute condensed match should be offered as well?

Apple editing down the full replays to cut out a lot of the pre-game fluff and bumper ads is great, but not having game-specific post-game interviews tacked on to the highlights is a big miss. What’s the point of having a massive centralized crew of broadcasters for every game if there are no post-game interviews with players or coaches on the field to drive traffic back to Season Pass from social media hits? If the vast majority of content on Season Pass is also available off of it…how are you promoting your product properly?

If I think that now imagine what someone who isn’t invested in your league at all thinks when they see that signup prompt on most of the articles on your website.

I get Apple wanting to monopolize the coverage they’re bankrolling, but the best way to attract fans is to give them value for their money. 4K picture quality soccer games are great, but so is actual meaningful, exclusive team specific content and interviews midweek and pre/post game things that are exclusive to the Apple site.

But it certainly feels like Apple and MLS are attempting to over-capitalize on the short term Messi market. Understandable for sure, but how does keeping the majority of your playoffs of network or cable TV help the league five years from now? How does limiting access to your writer’s and presenter’s digital work turn those now non-existent readers and viewers into paying customers?

MLS is still in a position where it should be doing everything it can to promote and attract viewers of all kinds on as many platforms as possible. Having the entire first round on Apple without a chunk of games going on FOX or FS1 is a mistake. Broadcasting rules, blackouts, and all that be damned. If I’m paying $100 for a full season of games, I don’t care if that game is a national broadcast, I should be able to watch it from my computer.

Don Garber and Apple think that soccer and MLS being at the forefront of streaming and digital broadcasts is a worthy investment. Then they should be doing everything they can to put as many games in front of fans regardless of where and how they’re watching and putting forth a true, customer/fan-first experience worth the time and money those fans are shelling out. They should be the first league/broadcaster to unify their online and television broadcasts that often end up separated over multiple channels and services.

Not tricking their fans into purchasing a full 2025 subscription in November and stacking up user accounts on the league website during what should be the most accessible and best soccer the league has to offer this year.