Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Major League Soccer will be the next major U.S. professional sports league. Well, that time has arrived. After decades of financial projections and capital calls, Major League Soccer and its 30 teams officially kicked off the league’s 30th (and one of its most important seasons ever) this past weekend.

Lionel Messi’s decision to join MLS in 2023 gets all the headlines, rightfully so. His Inter Miami squad now leads the league with $190 million in annual revenue, and the David Beckham-owned club went from a $600 million valuation before Messi’s arrival to being valued at $1.2 billion today — second only to Los Angeles FC at $1.28 billion.

Inter Miami Annual Revenue

• 2023: $55 million

• 2024: $190 million (+245%)

Inter Miami Valuation

• 2023: $600 million

• 2025: $1.2 billion (+100%)

Similar to the impact his boss had on the LA Galaxy in the late 2000s, Messi has been Inter Miami’s golden goose. Miami’s ownership group spent years trying to convince the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner to join their club, eventually putting together one of the most unique contracts in sports history to land one of the sport’s all-time greats.

Inter Miami offered Messi the largest contract in MLS history at $20 million-plus annually and an option to purchase equity in the club. However, the deal wouldn’t have been possible without a group effort. The league’s streaming partner, Apple TV, is giving Messi a revenue share from all new MLS Season Pass subscribers and Adidas even writes a profit-sharing check to Messi each year based on his MLS jersey sales.

Inter Miami knows Messi will only be in town for a few years, so they have gotten aggressive in maximizing the return on investment. This includes smaller things, like making the team more competitive by signing some of his former FC Barcelona teammates. But it also includes larger things, like signing a new stadium sponsorship deal with JP Morgan Chase and a preseason tour last year with stops in El Salvador, Dallas, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Japan, covering 23,000 miles in just three weeks.

Inter Miami isn’t the only MLS club benefitting from Messi’s arrival. The Chicago Fire, for instance, sold out Soldier Field — yes, where the Chicago Bears play — for their match against Inter Miami in 2023. Messi didn’t even play because of an injury, but that one gamestill generated about 55% of the Fire’s ticket revenue for the season.

This level of exposure is to be expected. David Beckham knows better than anyone else how one player can supercharge a league and a team, and it is no coincidence that every MLS team is now begging the league for more home games against Inter Miami.

But while Lionel Messi probably deserves even more credit than he has received, MLS has also quietly built a really strong (and growing) business behind his 2023 arrival.

Major League Soccer had 12.1 million fans attend matches last season. That includes 2 matches with 70,000+ fans, 8 with 60,000+ fans, 10 with 50,000+ fans, and 31 with at least 40,000+ fans. Even crazier, MLS is now the world’s second-most attended soccer league, right behind the Premier League (14.6 million fans) but ahead of the Bundesliga (12 million fans), Serie A (11.7 million fans), and La Liga (10.7 million fans).

This is an incredibly positive sign for the growing league. Similar to what Major League Baseball has become over the last decade, MLS is a regional sport. Individual clubs do a great job in the community building up fanbases, which, in turn, led to 213 sellouts last year and MLS stadiums averaging a record 94% capacity last season.

This heightened demand allowed MLS to add its 30th club, San Diego FC. A sign of the times, San Diego’s ownership group paid a $500 million expansion fee — an MLS record and significantly higher than the $325 million David Tepper paid in Charlotte.

Inter Miami is an outlier with $50 million in operating income last year, but about half of the league’s teams are now profitable or close to being profitable. That includes Los Angeles FC, Atlanta United FC, and D.C. United, who are all bringing in at least $10 million in annual operating income, according to Forbes’s latest MLS valuation report.

MLS Clubs By Annual Operating Income

1. Inter Miami: $50 million

2. Los Angeles FC: $12 million

3. Atlanta United FC: $10 million

4. D.C. United: $10 million

5. New England Revolution: $5 million

These numbers are even more impressive when you consider that they aren’t solely driven by TV money, like the NFL or NBA. MLS clubs only receive seven figures annually in TV payments from the league office, yet Sportico estimates that the league’s 29 teams generated $2.2 billion in revenue last season, or $77 million per club.

For comparison’s sake, the NFL writes each team a $400 million national revenue check at the end of each season. This payment includes all the money generated from the league’s TV deals and covers a team’s entire salary cap before accounting for a single dollar of local revenue, like sponsorships, concessions, parking, and more.

MLS is playing an entirely different game than the NFL, literally and figuratively. But the fact that some MLS clubs are turning a profit with TV money accounting for less than 10% of their overall annual income is a data point that’s become hard to ignore.

Many people see sports as a sexy investment given franchise returns across the NFL and NBA, but MLS is essentially the opposite. The league’s longest-tenured owners have poured hundreds of millions into their clubs over the years, many spending decades convincing limited partners to give them more money before the tides turn.

Well, the tides have officially turned. Many sports media pundits criticized MLS when it announced a 10-year, $2.5 billion deal with Apple TV in 2022. The money was great, nearly tripling the value of MLS’s broadcasting rights. However, the concern was that a streaming-exclusive deal would stunt the growth of a league that was desperately trying to grow. If no one can find your games, it’s impossible to attract new viewers.

Apple TV doesn’t release viewership or subscriber numbers for MLS Season Pass, but you have to imagine Lionel Messi’s arrival puts them ahead of internal expectations. He frequently promotes the signup link to his 500 million followers on Instagram.

More importantly, though, it’s starting to look like MLS was ahead of its time. MLS fans watch an average of 65 minutes per match on Apple TV. The streaming service has increased distribution by allowing Comcast Xfinity and DirecTV customers to subscribe to MLS Season Pass directly through their TV providers, and every U.S. professional sports league has now added a streaming component to their TV deals.

This partnership is a good deal for Apple because it’s a relatively cheap way to own an entire sports league, with MLS covering all of the league’s production costs. Messi also made MLS more global, like Apple’s wide range of products and services, giving the streaming platform a ton of content while also reducing overall platform churn.

On the other hand, MLS gets an all-in-one home for its content. Apple promotes the league in its app store and on Apple Music, putting the league front and center to the 2.35 billion people worldwide who own Apple devices. Apple TV gets to create additional content around the league, like the eight-part docuseries they released last Friday. The partnership also solves the one issue all sports fans complain about, discoverability, as MLS fans no longer have to look up where games will be broadcast.

MLS still has a long way to go before it’s considered one of the top five soccer leagues in the world from a pure quality standpoint. Most rankings have the league just inside the top 10. However, I’m not sure that matters nearly as much as others do.

MLS operates on a fundamentally different model than any other soccer league. The closed-end structure means there is no fear of relegation. Add a salary cap to control costs, and it’s no surprise that MLS clubs are now trading at more than 9x revenue.

That’s a higher revenue multiple than the NFL, NHL, WNBA, and MLB and roughly double the premium investors pay for similar clubs in Europe. This is how a club like LAFC ($1.28 billion) can be worth more than West Ham United ($1.1 billion), Inter Milan ($1 billion), and Aston Villa ($800 million) despite a much smaller TV audience.

The next two years will be crucial for MLS. Lionel Messi will eventually ride off into the sunset, but the FIFA Club World Cup is coming this summer, and the FIFA Men’s World Cup will be here in 2026, with 75% of the matches played in the United States.

MLS owners and investors have spent a decade preparing for this moment. After fighting and clawing its way into the broader sports conversation, MLS has firmly cemented itself within the top four or five major U.S. professional sports leagues. Now, it’s time to see how much higher they can climb.

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