Inside Apple’s Big Major League Soccer Bet

Anyone walking through the halls of The Studios at WWE in Stamford, Connecticut on Oct. 18 would have been forgiven for thinking it was a national holiday.

The greeting of the moment was “Happy Decision Day,” and you would hear it walking through the halls as producers, graphic designers and crew made their way across the sprawling facility. Decorations were abundant in cubicles, offices and green rooms, and snack carts were set up around almost every quarter.

There was a lot of soccer still to play.

For Major League Soccer, Decision Day is one of the most important days of the season, aside from the MLS Cup championship match. Technically the final day of the regular season, it is when all the MLS teams play games simultaneously, the final spots for the playoffs are decided, home field advantage is determined, and players get one last chance to make their case for award recognition.

And the MLS facility in Stamford is the hub, with control rooms and studios not only delivering all the games to fans, but MLS 360the league’s whip-around studio show, as well. And Decision Day is when MLS 360 really shines.

“It’s organized chaos, like this is a chaotic show, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, because we can’t predict what’s going to happen,” says Kevin Egan, one of the show’s hosts. “It’s eight games, 90 minutes throughout, a lot on the line, and we’ve got to be traffic cops while editorializing throughout.”

The WWE’s new Stamford headquarters is in a building that once housed a UBS trading floor. Conveniently, says Seth Bacon, executive vp of media for MLS, the same pipes that allowed for lightning-fast trades are perfect for delivering ultra high-definition video. When the WWE decided to open its studios to outside programming, the facility was turnkey. The only thing MLS needed to do was coordinate schedules.

“If we can coordinate schedules and get staff in, we have the facilities that we need, and then it’s a long-term deal, it’s three years,” Bacon says, walking through the halls of the facility toward the MLS 360 studio. “That gives us a lot more stability and sort of certainty in what we need to produce. So that gives us the ability to produce, not only on the weekends but mid-weeks, more content.”

MLS, alongside their partners IMG (which, like the WWE are now part of TKO Group Holdings), have built what IMG senior vp Stephen Cook calls a “football factory in America.”

“One of the challenges we face is that football, or soccer as it’s known over here, isn’t always at the top of people’s CVs in terms of what they know,” Cook says, sitting in a balloon-clad green room. “So to be able to create a young team starting from the bottom up, and be able to develop their skill sets and give them all of the tools they need in a fantastic facility like this, is what really convinced me that this was the place I needed to be.”

“Getting that virtual studio going and into that building in Stamford has made our jobs much easier to do,” says Royce Dickerson, the head of sports production for Apple TV. “We’ve become a lot more efficient in the way we produce our content, but working with them every day, my team with Seth’s team, it’s been a fun partnership, and we’ve learned a lot about our customers and their customers along the way, and we’re going to continue to iterate and innovate around our learnings.”

The MLS 360 studio is not exactly what it seems on TV. As has become increasingly common for TV production, the studio itself is something of a mirage: Walls and floors are green screen, only the desk, the anchors and analysts are real.

As Decision Day kicked off and MLS 360 showed live coverage of a match, former MLS star turned analyst Dax McCarty pointed at one of the dozens of screens within view of the host desk: He spotted a goal from the Seattle Sounders, playing against NYC FC. Seconds later, a “key play alert” graphic appeared, Egan teed up the highlight, and the control room funneled the goal to viewers at home.

“I can sit here and have a conversation with you for an hour about MLS and about all my hottest takes and about all my beliefs, and it’s easy, it’s like we’re two guys at a bar having a conversation,” McCarty says of the pressure he faces as an analyst. “As soon as that light turns on with the camera, and you have a producer in your ear telling you you have 30 seconds, telling you to wrap your point up, telling you that you need to go to break or that you need to throw it to another analyst. It’s easy to get, for lack of a better word, discombobulated out there. I would equate it to a game, where you’re in these really high leverage, high pressure moments, and you have to be mentally at your sharpest and at your best.”

This year’s MLS Decision Day, as it happened, took place at a critical moment for Apple’s sports ambitions. The day before, Apple unveiled a long-term $750 million deal for US rights to Formula 1, it’s the most significant deal since the 10-year, $2.5 billion MLS agreement a few years earlier, and a signal that Apple is serious about sports, provided it can get the rights it wants.

“One of the things that we wanted to do if we were going to offer some level of sports is to be able to do it in a way that is what I think sports fans want, which is easy access, available, same location, same place,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vp of services, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter about his company’s goals in the sports space. “You know exactly where to get it, where it’s coming from, all of the complexities that you deal with in sports and watching going away. And I think for fans that of F1 it’s going to be incredibly easy. It’s going to offer capabilities that they’ve never had before.”

This year all of the MLS playoff games will be in front of the paywall, a move “that’s going to only draw more eyes to the product, to help it grow a little bit more as we push to the end of the season,” Dickerson says.

“What we’ve learned is fans are loving having everything in one spot, being able to know where the matches are every Saturday, or if they play on a random Wednesday, like they do six times a year, having no blackouts are things that we’ve learned that fans really love,” Dickerson adds. “You can watch your team wherever you are, no matter what. There’s no RSN kind of blackouts. But on the technical side, the innovation side, what I go back to constantly is what our video quality is on Apple TV, from Friday Night Baseball to MLS, we think it is second to none in that space, and providing the customers and fans.”

Apple recently used new iPhones to broadcast a Friday Night Baseball game, and Bacon says that he has had conversations about how best to use Apple tech in future MLS broadcasts (Apple Vision Pro also recently debuted its first ever live games in conjunction with the Los Angeles Lakers). Apple may be in the TV business, but it also wants to get its hardware some play too.

For MLS specifically, the playoffs come ahead of next year’s FIFA World Cup, which will be held in the US, Canada and Mexico, giving enormous exposure to the game, and as MLS Spanish-language host Ramses Sandoval notes, “we’re in the era of Lionel Messi.” Messi, arguably the greatest player in the world, signed a new contract with Inter Miami this week that will keep him on the team through 2028.

“That helps us so much,” Sandoval says. “Anybody who tells you that it doesn’t, they’d be lying to you.”

As Decision Day progressed, the goals came fast and furious, playoff berths were clinched, and home field advantage was secured. But for MLS, and for Apple’s larger sports ambitions, it was also the start of something bigger. The new MLS facility will mean more programming and higher production quality, and the addition of F1 means a year-round sports schedule.

Combined with Apple’s moves to make Apple TV available via Amazon, a bundle deal with Peacock, and other maneuvers, the streaming service seems ready to rev up its ambitions, and MLS may stand to benefit by being along for that ride.