Feedzy Read More This originally appeared in Tuesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here to be the first to know everything happening in the sports media world.Whenever the World Cup rolls around, the conversation in American sports media inevitably turns to what the tournament will mean for soccer’s long-term future in this country. Will this be the moment the sport finally breaks through? Will the casual fans who tune in for a few weeks become permanent converts? It’s a version of the same debate we’ve had for decades, and it tends to feel more legitimate every four years, because the numbers genuinely keep getting better.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThis year, the conversation feels different for obvious reasons. The tournament is being played here, in NFL stadiums, in the middle of summer, when there’s essentially nothing else going on. Fox is airing 70 matches on broadcast television and streaming many more free on Tubi. Telemundo, which reported record advertiser demand, is delivering more than 700 hours of coverage across all 104 games. The 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France drew 25.8 million combined English and Spanish viewers despite being played in Qatar in December, directly competing with the NFL. Doing those numbers in the U.S. in June, with marquee matchups in prime time, seems like a low bar to clear.All of which raises a question that doesn’t have a comfortable answer: if tens of millions of Americans fall in love with soccer over the next five weeks, where do they go to watch more of it once the tournament ends? Because the most logical answer — MLS, the domestic professional league specifically designed and marketed as the long-term home of American soccer — is on Apple TV, which, per Nielsen’s The Gauge data, gets about as much total viewing time as AMC+. It’s not where casual sports fans go on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not where a newly converted World Cup viewer is going to stumble across an Inter Miami or LAFC game.This was always going to be the awkward part of MLS’s Apple deal, which the league signed in 2022 for 10 years and $2.5 billion, giving Apple exclusive global rights to every match. The pitch at the time was that this was a visionary leap into the future of sports media, and that the World Cup would supercharge interest in the league right as it was becoming more accessible than ever on a global platform. What actually happened is that MLS spent its first three years under Apple charging fans $99 a year for MLS Season Pass, limiting its linear TV presence to just 34 matches on Fox and FS1, and watching the viewership data come back consistently underwhelming, all while Lionel Messi was being Lionel Messi. Not a single other major American sports league has followed MLS’s lead and moved the majority of its games to a single streaming platform since the deal was announced.