Larry Berg will have plenty of things on his to-do list when he officially starts as the league’s commissioner in January
As Larry Berg fielded his first wave of questions as MLS commissioner-elect, he tried to make clear his ambitious vision to take the league to another level. Until a question about the league’s broadcasting plans came up, that is. To his right sat Don Garber, whose 28-year tenure in the role will conclude at year’s end.
“Well, as the incoming commissioner, I’m allowed to kick it to the current commissioner to answer that question,” Berg said with a laugh as he briefly reclined in his chair at the league’s headquarters in Manhattan. “Only for a few months,” Garber said.
To follow MLS is to following a sprawling soccer league as well as a self-proclaimed “challenger brand”. Every action is contextualized by MLS’s ongoing search for greater relevance and respect. On 1 January, that project will be Berg’s to helm – and there are plenty of items on his to-do list.
Berg will eventually be looked to for answers about what MLS will do when its current pact with Apple concludes after the 2028-29 season.
From the beginning, MLS’s streaming deal with Apple looked like a gamble, netting an initial $250m per year to partner with one of the most trusted innovators in any arena, albeit one that had limited experience broadcasting sports and whose adoption was (and remains) not nearly as widespread as more traditional networks. Now in their fourth year together, the platform’s offering of ancillary content beyond matches and occasional pregame shows has nearly run dry altogether. Multiple sources throughout the landscape have acknowledged the decrease in cameras at MLS matches compared to the first year in 2023.
Evidence of how the audience is responding to their partnership is scarce. In July 2025, Garber said MLS broadcasts were “averaging 120,000 unique viewers per” game, a rare bit of hard data in an era where streamers obscure specifics of their viewership. While MLS will never command comparable interest to a World Cup, the fact the 2026 installment set multiple records for soccer viewership is a reminder that there are plenty more eyeballs to be won.
It’s impossible to underemphasize the importance of media rights deals. They represent a significant chunk of any sports league’s revenue stream, which is shared among the teams. A wimpy broadcast deal can complicate the path ahead for even the greatest of leagues: Ligue 1 has learned that the hard way. MLS can’t afford to take a step back, but is another streaming-only solution its best option?
Berg’s candidacy was boosted by his work leading the sporting and competition committee, with Garber affirming he was hand-picked well before showing aspirations to become a commissioner. It’s a powerful board which works to gradually evolve MLS’s roster rules to improve the standard of play. On Tuesday, he wasn’t shy about stating his ambitions.
“Look, we have a lot to do. Obviously, the foundation’s terrific, but I think it all starts with quality on the field,” Berg said. “Everyone wants to take advantage of this rocket fuel from the World Cup, but they have different views of how to do so. … It’s my job to take all these things in and come up with a plan going forward. And sometimes it’s just a question of being a little bit creative.”
The current framework isn’t lacking for creativity, a charitable way to describe much-maligned rules like discovery rights and strict squad designations. Those mechanisms have limited more ambitious teams’ abilities to spend across their entire rosters as they’d wish, while aspiring “selling teams” can only reinvest so much of their transfer windfalls into the next wave of talent.
The league’s upcoming calendar switch will put it on the same player transfer schedule as the world’s other top leagues, so owners have already begun talks about how to evolve the roster rulebook. The main case for “flipping” the calendar was led by sporting cues. Anything short of a radical reinvention in how MLS’s roster construction would make one wonder why the calendar was flipped in the first place.
Late in his availability, Berg alluded to needing to try to get more people aware of the Leagues Cup, the annual summer showcase tournament pitting MLS teams against foes from Liga MX. Its broadening into a proper competition coincided with MLS’s deal with Apple, and four years have done little to make it a must-watch.
If there’s still a benefit for MLS to take from the Leagues Cup, still largely being played on a lopsided field with most games in MLS venues, it’s to test its mettle against Liga MX’s best. An MLS team has reached the final of the region’s top competition, the Concacaf Champions Cup, every year since 2022, bucking a longtime trend of outright Mexican dominance. Still, the balance of squads usually leaves MLS’s best at a disadvantage compared to giants like Monterrey, Club América, Chivas and others.
This all scales beyond North America, too, as Conmebol president Alejandro Domínguez has left the door ajar for future Libertadores participation from MLS and Liga MX sides. But with MLS’s restrictions to squad-building, it’s difficult to see even one of their best sides contending with the likes of River Plate, Palmeiras, or Flamengo.