16 video games are remaining within the Main League Soccer common season, but it surely’s already hit a significant attendance milestone.
11 million fans have handed by way of MLS ticket gates in 2024, making this the best-attended MLS season within the league’s 28-year historical past.
Per-game attendance has stabilized throughout the league, too. An average of 23,240 fans attended every MLS match in 2024 whereas headlining clashes like Kansas Metropolis versus Miami and LAFC versus the LA Galaxy drew greater than 70,000 spectators apiece.
It is tempting to credit score Lionel Messi for this leap; his arrival created a wave of curiosity in MLS and he featured in a number of of the best-attended matches of the 2024 season. However the “Messi impact” is only a small a part of the story.
Messi’s 2023 MLS debut was preceded by sweeping modifications throughout the MLS media panorama. The league signed a 10-year cope with Apple that standardized league protection throughout all geographies. Gone are the times of spotty, hyper-local protection; Apple and MLS make sure that all groups obtain constant, skilled airtime all through the season on MLS Season Cross.
Earlier than the Apple deal, MLS protection was closely influenced by native conflicts, and groups would see their kickoff instances switched round as a consequence of occasions exterior their management. A workforce just like the Columbus Crew, for example, may kick off at 12:30 p.m. on one Saturday and 1:45 p.m. the subsequent, and the dearth of predictability saved informal followers away on sport days.
On this post-Apple world, nonetheless, all the pieces is standardized and constant. Video games kick off in predetermined time slots and infrequently get pushed for different occasions.
The Apple deal is the true hero behind MLS’s development. With out it, MLS would not have the ability to set these attendance information … and it would not have been capable of signal Messi, both, as a result of his MLS wage features a profit-sharing settlement with Apple’s MLS Season Cross product.
MLS has gone from energy to energy in recent times, and this new season-wide attendance report of 11 million followers is proof. (It is not far off the NFL’s regular-season attendance record of 18.9 million.) However for the entire noise surrounding on-field offers like Lionel Messi’s, it is the off-field ones that helped the league soar.
