Relationships with your broadcast partners are important for any sports league. When you don’t have the reach of the NFL or the NBA, those relationships take on added significance. That is why the MLS has turned to ESPN to help facilitate its return to action.
According to a report from The Athletic’s Stan Stejskal, the league is going to rely on the full might of the Walt Disney company to get back to work.
The plan calls for sending all 26 soccer clubs to Walt Disney World for a proposed tournament played at the resort’s ESPN Wide World of Sports complex. Teams would also be housed at the Coronado Springs Resort.
“Sources said that the league views working with Disney and ESPN as the easiest way to return to play,” Stejskal writes. “If it goes to Orlando, MLS would essentially be operating under Disney’s roof. The company owns the resort that would house the league, the facility where teams would play and the network that would broadcast many of the matches.”
If everything goes according to plan, the clubs would use the month of June to train. That would be followed by a tournament that would run through the end of July and guarantee each club plays at least five matches. Four matches would be played per day with no fans would be in the stands.
With Disney having so much control, it stands to reason most of the matches would be broadcast by ESPN. That could cause conflicts with the club’s individual local broadcast deals. Stejskal writes that multiple clubs have “mentioned possible extended pre- and post-game shows and other ancillary programming on local networks as a way to begin to make good on their contracts.”
A tournament like this would be a major investment for Major League Soccer, but while the short-term goal is to get back to work in 2020, the long-term goal has to do with TV rights negotiations in 2022, when the league’s current deals expire. Clubs have been told not to sign local rights deals that run beyond 2022. That likely signals an intention to package MLS rights in national packages, similar to England’s Premier League or the NFL, and having ESPN and Disney as partners in that effort could turn intentions into reality.
Currently, the MLS has national deals with ESPN, FOX, and Univision that were signed in 2015. Over the course of those eight year deals, the 26 MLS clubs will split $720 million. The goal of centralized national TV rights deals would be to grow revenue as the league expands to 30 clubs by 2022 and to strengthen the position of the MLS as the United States, Canada, and Mexico prepare for share hosting responsibilities of FIFA’s World Cup in 2026.
