Ben StraussJul 25, 2026, 07:28 AM ETCloseBen Strauss is a senior reporter focused on sports business.
NEW YORK -- Sprinkled throughout the Major League Soccer headquarters in midtown Manhattan are monuments to what the league has built -- literally.
More than two dozen hard hats sit on two shelves outside commissioner Don Garber's office, with logos from teams like Austin FC and FC Cincinnati. A red shovel inside his office that bears the Chicago Fire FC logo rests in a corner. Garber says he has more shovels, one for each of the stadiums the league's teams have built or renovated: 27 in all.
"We've been busy," Garber said on a recent afternoon.
The stadiums speak to the staying power of MLS, a league that at times has been a novelty (remember those shootouts?) and at others on life support; the league almost folded in 2001, and a year later six of the league's 10 teams were owned by one man. Now it is a 30-team league bringing in $2.5 billion in revenue. Lionel Messi plays for Inter Miami.
The old joke is that soccer has been the sport of the future here for a generation. When David Beckham arrived at MLS in 2007, Sports Illustrated ran a headline on the cover: "Will He Change the Fate of American Soccer?"
This World Cup, though, really has been something different. In the United States, more than 50 million people watched the men's national team lose to Belgium in the round of 16. "I never thought a round-of-16 World Cup game could get TV ratings like the NFL conference championship games," Garber said. More than 60 million watched the final, the most ever for a soccer telecast.
In recent weeks, the league dropped tens of millions of dollars on an ad campaign with this tag line: "Thanks, world. We'll take it from here." It has appeared on TV and across digital platforms and marks the largest marketing outlay in its history, the league said. During the World Cup, teams threw watch parties that drew tens of thousands of people and thousands more took teams up on free ticket promotions. MLS is touting that its 45 players on World Cup rosters played more than 8,000 minutes (the most of any league outside Europe's top five) and that it's flipping its schedule in 2027 to match that of the international leagues.
But as the soccer world retreats from the U.S., the paradox of Major League Soccer remains. Sportico estimated the league has 18 of the top 50 most valuable soccer franchises in the world, with several eclipsing $1 billion (Inter Miami is the most valuable MLS team at $1.45 billion. Real Madrid sits atop the list at $7.7 billion).
But it's also the 10th-highest-quality league in the world, according to Global Football Rankings. Its key sources of growth have been through expansion fees and building new stadiums, both of which are finite resources, and the league at some point will need to find revenue somewhere else.
MLS, then, finds itself at a crossroads: Is the path forward to be a real estate holding company that fills stadiums and offers a great game-day experience, similar in some ways to minor league baseball? Or should it buck its own history and lay out more cash for better players in search of a richer media rights deal? And, fundamentally, are those two options -- better cash flow and better soccer -- diametrically opposed?
Six league executives told ESPN they are furiously debating these questions, knowing there is risk either way: Investing does not bring sure returns, but staying the course could risk those precious valuations and losing the American soccer market to someone else.
Inside the league offices, Garber remains eternally bullish. At an event at MLS headquarters ahead of the World Cup final, he told a group of some 250 reporters, "I'd rather be us than any other soccer league in the world."
Garber, 68, took the MLS commissioner's job in 1999 after a career working in marketing in the NFL, where he rose to lead the international division. His brother, he recalled, made fun of him for leaving the NFL for the backwaters of soccer. When Garber first started, someone sent him a "Soccer for Dummies" book. (He read it.) "Robert Kraft asked me, 'What do you know about soccer?' He and Lamar Hunt were talking to me," Garber said of the New England Patriots owner and the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs. "I said, 'Very little.' And both of them said, 'That's OK.'"
He recalled these details while sitting in his office inside MLS' glitzy new headquarters. A quarterfinal between France and Morocco played on a big-screen TV in front of him. Garber spent the tournament traveling the country, something of an ambassador for the United States and for soccer. He wrote weekly notes to FIFA president Gianni Infantino lauding the tournament. He met Paris Hilton. "She's a big, big soccer fan," he said.
Garber will step down as commissioner at the end of 2027, but his journey makes for a good window into MLS and its unique place in sports. The league was launched as a condition of the United States hosting the World Cup in 1994 -- as a single-entity business, which means team owners each own a piece of the league and players are contracted by the league rather than by individual teams. (The clubs still pay player salaries.)
This was done to ensure cooperation among owners and financial stability. There would be no relegation, unlike in other major soccer leagues. Funded in part by NFL luminaries like Kraft and Hunt, the league hewed closely to two pillars of the NFL ethos -- parity among clubs and a strict salary cap.
That strategy has, in many ways, been good business for early investors. The real estate investments have been buttressed by Garber's idea to launch a marketing arm that owns the commercial rights to the Mexican national team's appearances in the United States as well as the ticketing, media and merchandise of Concacaf competitions such as the Gold Cup.
A "designated player" provision in the salary cap, meanwhile, allowed teams to spend extra to bring in megawatt (albeit late-career) stars like David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and now Messi to MLS.
Lately, teams' valuations and expansion fees have exploded. Valuations are more than 20 times higher than in 2008, according to Forbes, partly riding a wave of growth across all American sports. Just since FIFA awarded this year's men's World Cup jointly to the United States in 2018, the league has added seven teams. Between 2006 and 2012, the average expansion fee was less than $30 million, according to the book "Soccernomics"; San Diego FC, the league's 30th team, which began play in 2025, paid $500 million.
"The reason 18 of 50 are most valuable is because we do business right," said Tom Penn, San Diego FC's CEO. "We have a closed system, which is smart, and a salary cap, which is collectively bargained. No one has that; we truly cooperate as an enterprise. The Premier League doesn't have their owners all at the table. They are just competing. It's a race to the bottom when it comes to profitability."'
To Penn's point: accounting firm Deloitte recently found that pretax losses among top-flight Premier League clubs rose from £135 million (about $180 million) in the 2023-24 season to £948 million (about $1.3 billion) in 2024-25, driven largely by player spending.
Ask Garber what excites him most about the future of the league, and his first point is a version of demographics is destiny. The average age of MLS fans (39) is the youngest of the top men's leagues in the U.S., according to data MLS provided to ESPN from sports research firm Vision Insights Decoder. It also has the biggest percentage of Hispanic fans (28%), according to the data, the demographic most responsible for population growth in the U.S.
"You can go to an Ecuador game and you might be seeing people that are coming from Ecuador, the country, but you're also seeing people that are coming from Queens," Garber, a Queens native, said. "And we live in this incredible fabric of different nationalities, and all of them were given the opportunity to celebrate, and that's not necessarily where the spirit of our country has been."
Asked if that was a political statement, Garber smiled. He didn't say anything.
Since 2019, MLS has added seven new teams that paid collectively about $1.5 billion in expansion fees. Now it must justify those prices. High-end hospitality offerings and sponsorships can be helpful to boost revenue, but executive after executive told ESPN the path to real growth must come one way: through broadcast revenue.
MLS had a difficult rights negotiation last time they hit the market. Without robust interest from traditional networks, the league signed a deal with Apple TV in 2022 for $250 million annually over 10 years. (MLS covers production, which substantially eats into that fee.) Watching games required either a paid subscription to Apple or a separate one for MLS, which made finding Messi (and others) an onerous process for any casual fan. This season, fans just need an Apple TV subscription to watch matches, but the sides agreed to end the deal after the 2029 season. (Apple did not reply to a request for comment.)
Owners have discussed a desire for a new rights fee in the $400 million to $500 million range, which would in effect triple the money teams are getting from Apple, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
That, of course, is easier said than done. Stefan Szymanski, the co-author of the book "Soccernomics," said: "There is no major sports league in the world that does not rely primarily on broadcast revenues, and Major League Soccer has pitiful broadcast revenues. How do you become a major broadcast player in the world of sports? The answer is you have the world's best talent."
According to "Soccernomics," an analysis of data from Transfermarkt, which tracks the value of players on the global market, shows the average MLS player had a value of 1.7 million euros ($1.9 million) in 2024. That ranked MLS 14th in global soccer, according to the analysis. On average, the player values for the Premier League and La Liga were six times larger; Italy's Serie A was five times larger; and Germany's Bundesliga and France's Ligue 1 were around four times larger, the analysis shows. MLS was behind Mexico's Liga MX and about 30 percent below the Saudi Pro and Belgian Jupiler Leagues. Even England's second division, the Championship, and the Dutch Eredivisie had values more than 50% higher.
"MLS is dominated by NFL ideology at the ownership level," said one person involved in league business, noting the NFL doesn't have to compete with other leagues for talent. "The quality of the player pool could go down by 25% and it would have no impact on an NFL team's valuation. The quality of play doesn't matter. That's just not true in a global sport."
The current salary cap is around $6.4 million per team but allows for additional spending. Most teams' payrolls sit between $13 million and $20 million; Inter Miami's is $46 million. Multiple stakeholders said the league is sifting through proposals that would put in a simpler cap and floor system that could range anywhere from $15 million to $30 million, with additional flexibility for star players. (The MLS Players Association declined comment for this story.)
CEO of New York City Football Club Brad Sims suggested the league needed just a handful of teams to aggressively push spending to benefit the whole league, similar to the top-heavy leagues of Europe. "If we had six Inter Miami's, I think the media rights discussions are different," he said. (One executive said that at a recent ownership committee meeting, owners discussed the merits of super teams.)
There are wide gulfs among owners on how aggressively to loosen spending, multiple league stakeholders told ESPN, with fault lines between early owners who have watched their investments grow dramatically, and others who bought in more recently. One hurdle, multiple executives said, is most teams are not currently profitable,.
Some executives said they are hopeful changes are in place by the end of the year.
"I expect significant changes to the roster investment model, which will be simplified and improve the product," said Merritt Paulson, a co-owner of the Portland Timbers. "We're going to make changes to build on roster strength and depth, which is the one area we've lagged. I couldn't be more bullish."
Still, the idea that more spending on players is a silver bullet can leave Garber exasperated.
"Everybody wants everybody to just go spend more money," Garber said. "But there are teams [around the world] that have been relegated because they couldn't pay their bills. There are teams that have lost the ability to participate in the transfer windows because they couldn't pay their bills. How's that working for a fan?"
Garber cited a 2024 case in which Atlanta United FC sold Argentina national team member Thiago Almada to the Brazilian club Botafogo for a reported fee of $21 million. Botafogo missed payments for the fee; Atlanta took the case to FIFA, which ruled in its favor. Botafogo appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which sided with FIFA, and Botafogo was banned from participating in three transfer windows.
"They weren't managing their balance sheet, and we have still not been paid," Garber said. "I think that's irresponsible and unacceptable. That will never happen in MLS."
A common refrain across social media and podcasts during the World Cup was sports fans professing a newfound interest in soccer -- and then asking for an introduction to a Premier League team.
Asked whether that conversation was frustrating, Garber said: "You're trying to get me to say that they bother me, but no. Because when I see somebody posting on social media... 'Hey, I'm looking for a club.' I know, eventually, they're going to come to their home team because we're going to be able to deliver an experience for them live, which is where the game is at its best."
MLS has internal data that shows 68% of American soccer fans root for more than one team. Other analyses show the complications of soccer fandom. Ampere Analysis, a media analytics firm, found that 13% of U.S. sports fans follow at least one of the Premier League, Liga MX and MLS. But more than half of U.S. Premier League fans (53%) do not follow the other two leagues. A third of MLS fans and a quarter of Liga MX fans do not follow the other two leagues, the data show.
Competition for the American soccer fan is intensifying. La Liga recently opened a North American office and seeks to stage a match in the U.S. The Champions League hired an American company to handle its media rights, and UEFA, the governing body for European soccer, has floated playing Champions League games in the U.S. Liga MX remains, based on per-game viewership, the most watched soccer league in the U.S. and is attracting American investment. And the Premier League, the dominant global soccer force that already has the U.S. media deal MLS wants, is coming to throw watch parties across the country next season.
"The hope would be that Americans get a taste for great world soccer this summer but not enough discernment to notice the soccer being put on in America -- except Lionel Messi -- isn't being played by world-class soccer players," said Andy Schwarz, an economist at the firm OSKR. "They need demand for soccer to grow so people start to appreciate soccer more, but not enough to notice the great players aren't here. It's a Goldilocks situation."
Schwarz added: "The valuations have baked in a probability of that happening that is well above my pessimistic view. They could get rid of the salary cap and start spending like the Premier League, but I'm not sure how that generates positive cash flows, either."
One lawyer who advises private wealth funds on sports investments and has seen several prospectuses for MLS teams went further: "I advise all my clients to stay away from MLS," they said. "It's the worst investment they could make in sports."
Teams are trying to combat that criticism in different ways, including through the infrastructure investments they've already made. Brian Bilello, New England Revolution's president, told ESPN that he has heard about rave reviews from players regarding the facilities they encountered during the World Cup.
One intriguing path forward is in San Diego, where the club has invested $150 million in infrastructure around player development, including a residential youth academy that started with one class and is adding two more. The team has a partnership with sister operations in Denmark, Egypt and Ghana.
"You're going to see some outgoing transfers," Penn, the CEO, said. It's evidence that MLS wants to make developing better soccer players a bigger part of its business model.
Ultimately, the best case for MLS is its greatest advantage: the United States sporting economy.
"Undeniably, if you look at where they've come from and take a step back, what MLS has achieved is pretty impressive," said Paul Harris, an advisor on franchise transactions with accounting firm KPMG. "It's established as a global soccer platform and a viable employment base for players. And the U.S. is extremely good at maximizing access to agents and media and the coaching that comes with. It's far and away better than the other leagues in the world."
He added: "What they need to solve for is how do they grow their platform at a faster percentage than La Liga or Premier League? I think it's more of a longer-term journey."
Source: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49434125/mls-capitalize-world-cup-don-garber-commissioner