(Image courtesy of MLS)
eMLS, the e-sports league of Major League Soccer, returns in mid-January with its biggest prize purse ever, hoping to build on World Cup fervor, good showings by young U.S. and Canadian men’s national teams, and a ground-breaking MLS media deal with Apple
AAPL
“We have a real opportunity to capture that interest and bring it back to eMLS and MLS,” said David Bruce, MLS’ vice president of brand and integrated marketing. “And with the 2026 World Cup being (hosted jointly) in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, there’s just an amazing window when we think about supercharging our business and lifting our business.”
The eMLS matches will start more than a month before the parent league’s IRL teams return to the pitch, helping tide over fans through what would otherwise be a gap in attention for the increasingly popular North American league after the World Cup concludes in Qatar later this month.
eMLS matches are played on Electronic Arts’ hugely popular FIFA 23 video-game franchise. The top two players from the season automatically qualify for EA’s international FIFA tournament, with a stake in the record prize purse of $100,000. The No. 3 and 4 players qualify for the play-in rounds of the international competition.
The season will feature three rounds of tournament play, Series 1 (Jan. 24 – Jan. 29, in New York City), Series 2 (Feb. 7 – Feb. 12, New York), and the eMLS Cup (March 11 and 12, at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas).
Matches and other content will be featured on the YouTube and Twitch sites for each participating MLS franchise and their player. The announcing and social-media content team will feature content creator Kacey “Kacee” Anderson, play-by-play announcer Dan Gaskin, commentator Mike Labelle and sideline reporter Susannah Collins. Main bracket matchups will be available on twitch.tv/mls.
The LA Galaxy, Atlanta United (including this year’s champ Paulo Neto), and New York FC each have multiple players on their eMLS franchise. In all, 26 franchises have an eMLS player. The six-year-old e-sports league has lined up a number of notable sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Door Dash
DASH
The parent MLS concluded its 2022 season a month ago, in extraordinary fashion, with a penalty kick shootout to decide the championship game that required a backup goalie, who once played for the opposing team, to save the championship for the Los Angeles Football Club. The league enjoyed record attendance in 2022, more than 10 million, walloping the pre-pandemic 2019 mark of 8.6 million.
A recent Morning Consult survey found that U.S. soccer fans are younger than followers of any other major sport, with half of them under the age of 40, according to Puck.
Even more promising for MLS’s long-term future is the potential of its recently signed 10-year, $2.5 billion media deal with Apple that covers all aspects of the league’s video rights, including streaming, mobile, in-market and out, and in North America and beyond.
The deal is a first of its kind, potentially transformative for MLS at a time when U.S. media companies are spending heavily on video rights for top international soccer leagues in England, Italy, Spain, Mexico, the UEFA European club championships, and more.
Comcast
CMCSA
“They are a huge megaphone,” Bruce said of the Apple deal and its potential for MLS and eMLS. “For our story and our product, they’ve got a huge distribution platform. We have a global deal (that’s) a first in sports. So we’ve got the backing of this huge brand that, typically, when they do something, they do it really, really well. And they’ve got an ecosystem and a reach and have more subscribers than any brand on the planet.”
