San Diego FC paid a record $500 million just to join a league where the biggest media deal in MLS history has a revenue-sharing clause that multiple team executives expect to never, ever activate. So what exactly are people buying? The answer, increasingly, is vibes backed by a subscriber threshold that insiders believe is structurally unreachable — and a valuation bubble that only holds together as long as nobody stress-tests the underlying numbers.
The Apple TV deal — $2.5 billion over 10 years, signed in 2022 and heralded as a transformational moment for the sport in North America — contains a revenue-sharing clause tied to Apple TV+ subscriber growth. The problem: as of early 2025, multiple MLS team executives told Sportico they expect that threshold to never be reached. Not "probably won't." Never. The league's marquee media arrangement, the one that was supposed to rewrite the economics of American soccer, has a headline number and a fine-print punchline. CNBC broke down how that deal set the tone for streaming companies chasing live sports rights more broadly:
That context matters because the Apple deal is load-bearing infrastructure for every franchise valuation written since 2022. Average MLS franchise values hit $767 million in 2026, up 39% since 2021. LAFC generates roughly $150 million in annual revenue, which produces a valuation-to-revenue multiple somewhere between 8x and 10x. Real Madrid — Real Madrid — trades at 5.8x. The implicit argument is that MLS is a growth asset priced on future media upside. But if the media upside has a dead clause at its center, that argument needs a second look.
The Gap Inside the Gap
League-wide MLS sponsorship revenue hit $716 million, which sounds like a healthy ecosystem until you map the internal distribution. Vancouver Whitecaps posted just $47 million in total revenue. San Diego FC paid $500 million to enter that same ecosystem — an expansion fee that implies a return timeline stretching well past the point where most financial models would demand an exit. The spread between top-line league numbers and bottom-tier club reality is not a rounding error. It's a structural fault line that billion-dollar headline valuations are actively obscuring. When the average valuation is $767 million and one of your member clubs is pulling $47 million in annual revenue, the average is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The Joe Pomp Show ran the numbers on whether MLS's Apple arrangement was ever the deal it was marketed as — worth watching before you take any ownership group's growth projections at face value:
What the Buy Actually Is
None of this means MLS franchises are worthless. Real estate tied to soccer-specific stadiums, local sponsorship floors, and the genuine long-term demographic tailwinds of Latino population growth in US markets are all tangible. The league has locked in salary cap discipline that European clubs would trade significant assets for. Ownership groups are not, in the main, naive. What they are buying is optionality — the right to benefit if MLS cracks a mainstream American audience before the Apple deal expires in 2032. That bet is rational. It is also, by the admission of the people closest to the media contract, a bet on an outcome they do not expect to materialize on the terms originally advertised.
For anyone still unclear on exactly what MLS Season Pass is and what subscribers are actually being asked to pay for — the product at the center of all of this — Stories With MJ walked through the features and pricing at launch:
Watch the next round of expansion fee negotiations. If a new market pays above $500 million without the Apple subscriber clause being renegotiated or disclosed differently, that's the signal that valuation momentum has fully decoupled from operational reality. At that point, the question stops being whether the math works and starts being who is left holding it when it doesn't.