This will be Year Three of Major League Soccer streaming matches exclusively on AppleTV, and the league announced numerous changes to broadcasts and their availability for 2025.
Some things aren't changing: You still need to subscribe to MLS Season Pass for access to every MLS match played in 2025, which all come free of local blackout restrictions. The prices to subscribe are still the same, $14.99 per month during the season or $99 for the full season, with Apple TV+ subscribers given reduced prices of $12.99 per month or $79 per season – and with MLS season-ticket holders still getting a subscription included gratis with their season ticket.
Changes are being made elsewhere, though, with MLS reportedly focused on making its streaming product on Apple more accessible and more appealing to more casual followers of the league and sport.
From a new primetime showpiece fixture on Sunday nights to structural changes to how matches are broadcast, there's a lot to cover, so let's run through the biggest things new with MLS Season Pass on AppleTV for the 2025 season.
1. Sunday Night Soccer
The grabbiest change for 2025 is less about the streaming platform and more about how MLS schedules its matches. There's now going to be a featured match of the week, "Sunday Night Soccer," which stands alone in Sunday primetime and gets pre- and post-match shows, a regular trio of announcers, and will "spotlight the league’s most compelling matchups," according to the MLS statement about its creation.
Since the first season on Apple in 2023, the overwhelming majority of MLS regular season matches kicked off around the same time, Saturday nights at 7:30 PM in each local market. That will still be true, but Sunday Night Soccer arrives in 2025 as the league's attempt at creating a showcase, must-see primetime match with all the trimmings given to comparable games in other American sports like football and baseball.
Jake Zivin and Taylor Twellman will be on English-language play-by-play for Sunday Night Soccer, continuing in their roles as Apple's "first-choice" announcing team after frequently being on the call for Lionel Messi's matches since his summer 2023 arrival. They'll be joined by Andrew Wiebe, with the longtime MLS analyst, reporter, and host (RIP Extratime) leaving the broadcast studio to serve as sideline reporter.
NYCFC is not scheduled, as of now, to appear on Sunday Night Soccer this season, though the schedule of featured Sunday matches only goes up to September 7 – conveniently right around when the NFL season begins and the hugely popular Sunday Night Football game returns. Messi and Inter Miami are scheduled to feature five times on the new Sunday showcase, the most by any team, which should shock no one.
2. New broadcast HQ, remote broadcasts
These changes might not be obvious while watching matches but they still represent huge shifts behind the scenes. MLS Productions, the league's media and broadcast arm, is leaving the studio space it has called home in East Harlem since the 2023 debut of MLS on Apple. The league will move its production and studio operation to a new state-of-the-art facility owned by WWE in Stamford, Connecticut. That's part of a multi-year agreement between MLS and IMG to have IMG continue to produce live MLS match and studio productions.
Also, Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that MLS plans to start having some of its AppleTV announcers call matches remotely, meaning not watching at the stadium but instead relying on a feed and TV monitor. This has grown increasingly common for soccer broadcasts, but is controversial among broadcasters and fans and might present challenges when done for MLS games. Good luck figuring out what's going on with a tight offside decision at Citi Field if you're broadcasting from the studio in Stamford.
3. More ways in: Xfinity, DirecTV, T-Mobile
There was handwringing aplenty about MLS viewership in the wake of some very low TV ratings numbers for the MLS Cup Final broadcast on Fox in December, with the championship game's ratings dropping by nearly 50% from 2023 to 2024.
There's zero transparency around how many people actually subscribe to MLS Season Pass on Apple, nor is there transparency around how many viewers tune in live to watch matches, be they behind the Season Pass paywall or free for anyone to stream through Apple. Yet MLS is taking multiple steps to get its games and its streaming subscription in front of more eyeballs.
The free full-season trial subscription to MLS Season Pass that was available to T-Mobile subscribers in 2023 is back in 2025 after it was not offered in 2024. The league is also returning to the land of cable boxes after it announced a deal with Comcast's Xfinity that will let the cable provider's customers sign up for Season Pass directly through Xfinity, while also offering access to live MLS matches right through the cable TV interface. Xfinity cable customers are also getting free access all season to MLS 360, the league's NFL RedZone-style whiparound show that airs on Saturday nights while the bulk of the league's games are being played.
Similar MLS entry points arrive for DirecTV subscribers, as the satellite provider will now let its users sign up for MLS Season Pass through their TVs, with MLS matches also included in the DirecTV channel guide to encourage more people to watch and/or subscribe. DirecTV is also making Season Pass free from February 22 to March 1, giving customers a taste at the season's start to try to get them to fork over the full season subscription fee.
Will the changes matter?
Expanding the list of possible points of entry for MLS matches can only help the league if the goal is to get more people tuned in and then subscribed to MLS on Apple. No one knows exactly what the current subscriber and viewer base for MLS on Apple really looks like, but it's clear from the steps they're taking that the league and its broadcast partner think the numbers need to improve.
Sunday Night Soccer sounds great on paper, and one of its best side-effects is that it brings some staggering of kickoff days and times to what had become an overly Saturday-night-centric MLS schedule. The league is now guaranteeing a primetime match on Sunday, but it's also generally spreading more of its games over to Sunday.
As of now there are six Sunday MLS triple-headers scheduled throughout the season, and NYCFC is included in a few of those – they've moved three Sunday home kickoff times from 5 pm to 3 pm ET in part to accommodate the arrival of Sunday Night Soccer. Less Saturday-night-at-7:30 pm schedule uniformity might be for the better, especially if the league is looking for more chances to capture people's attention rather than putting almost all their eggs into the Saturday night basket.
MLS and Apple have only been doing this for two seasons out of a 10-year, $2.5 billion exclusive streaming agreement, but a lot will be different here in the third year. The league and Apple will now be hoping their adjustments for 2025 translate to more viewers and more subscribers.
Andrew Leigh
