As the final minutes ticked away in a disappointing 4-1 loss to Belgium on July 6 that knocked the U.S. men’s national team out of the World Cup, Fox play-by-play announcer John Strong made a direct plea to his television audience of 30 million Americans.
“If you’ve enjoyed what you’re seeing, well, support your local team,” Strong said from Seattle’s Lumen Field, packed with a sellout crowd of 66,925—more than double the average attendance of 31,000 across the Seattle Sounders’ first six Major League Soccer games this season at the same stadium. “This doesn’t have to be the last soccer you watch for the last four years. It’s a beautiful sport.”
Often an afterthought both among top-tier global soccer leagues and in the U.S. professional sports scene, MLS has long viewed this summer’s World Cup on U.S. soil as an inflection point for a new phase of growth, with help from Lionel Messi, the biggest star in the league’s history. On Sunday, the 39-year-old superstar will lead Argentina into the World Cup final against Spain while seeking to lock up the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer. On Wednesday, Messi’s Inter Miami will restart its season after MLS’s seven-week World Cup break.
League executives are confident the flurry of interest in soccer drummed up by this summer’s tournament will pay long-term dividends, just as the 1994 World Cup—also hosted by the U.S.—led to the creation of MLS in the first place. All 30 of the league’s clubs reportedly invested at least $500,000 in an advertising campaign that began this week with the tagline “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here,” and 22 teams are offering “first match on us” promotions, dangling free tickets to try to hook new fans.
“The World Cup can help build initial stages of fandom and awareness, and it’s our job to then convert that into habits day in and day out,” says Camilo Durana, MLS’s chief business officer. “I don’t think it’ll be something that’s simple to measure in the near term.”
What has been easy to track is the growth in MLS teams’ valuations. Earlier this year, Sporting Kansas City—playing in one of the smallest markets in major North American sports—sold for roughly $700 million, and the league’s 30 franchises are now worth $731 million on average, up from $185 million a decade ago. MLS is also home to seven of the world’s 30 most valuable soccer teams, with Inter Miami, at $1.35 billion, topping two NHL teams and narrowly trailing a handful of MLB franchises.
At the same time, some bankers and investors around the sport believe MLS’s valuations have grown too fast to be justified by franchises’ fundamentals. Much as the U.S. national team continues to have high hopes of a deep World Cup run every four years only to hit a wall in the Round of 16, these experts are left wondering if MLS will perpetually be waiting to take its next leap forward.
“A lot of the Americans I speak to are priced out of the domestic market,” says Alexander Jarvis, the founder of Blackbridge Sports, a soccer M&A advisory firm. “I think the people who made loads of money in this business were in it 10 to 20 years ago.”
A major tailwind for MLS has been the skyrocketing interest in sports ownership more broadly. The increasing demand has pushed average valuations to $7.1 billion in the NFL and $5.4 billion in the NBA, leaving investors who don’t necessarily have the net worths to buy into those sports searching for cheaper alternatives. However, with Forbes valuing five MLS clubs at $1 billion or more, the league doesn’t look like the deal it once was.
Room To Improve: Attendance at Lumen Field averaged 31,000 across the Seattle Sounders’ first six MLS games this season—less than half the stadium’s capacity.
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It’s not just a matter of absolute dollars, either. Sports teams are generally valued on multiples of revenue, and MLS’s average valuation of $731 million is 8.9 times the trailing season’s estimated average revenue. Although that figure lags behind the NBA’s 12.9x average multiple and the NFL’s 10.7x, it is in line with the NHL’s 8.9x and ahead of MLB’s 7x, setting up expectations for major revenue growth. It is also an outlier in the world of men’s soccer, outpacing top European teams such as the Premier League’s Manchester United (8.3x) and La Liga’s Real Madrid (7.5x) and towering over the multiples for smaller clubs and leagues.
“If I was an investor, I think Europe’s more interesting because you can buy some teams for, like, one or two times revenue, which you just can’t do in America,” Jarvis says.
To be fair, MLS’s business has been on the upswing, most of all at Inter Miami, which nearly quadrupled its revenue from an estimated $56 million in 2022, the year before Messi’s arrival, to a league-leading $200 million last season.
“People assumed Lionel Messi would come here to retire—he’s done the exact opposite,” MLS’s Durana says of the star forward, who in October extended his contract with Inter Miami through the 2028 season. “He’s competed at the highest level. He doesn’t like to be subbed. You see what he’s doing in the World Cup, and that’s been through multiple years of preparation in Major League Soccer.”
MLS further bolstered its talent pool with LAFC’s signing of Son Heung-min last year, prying the celebrated South Korean forward from the English Premier League’s Tottenham Hotspur, and with recent deals for Antoine Griezmann, who left Atlético Madrid for Orlando City, and Robert Lewandowski, who moved from FC Barcelona to the Chicago Fire. (Sporting KC, now under the ownership of billionaire Peter Mallouk, is currently rumored to be courting Egyptian winger Mohamed Salah, who is departing Liverpool.) The league is also hopeful that an upcoming schedule change—shifting from a February-to-December calendar to soccer’s global standard, running from July to May, starting in 2027-28—will make it easier to sign players from other leagues and leave the summer open for international competitions.
“Messi is a once-in-a-lifetime-type player, so it’s hard to think of that equivalent person who could have that much of an impact on the league, but I think that there are very good players that want to follow him,” says Bret Myers, a sports business professor at Villanova and former consultant for three MLS teams. “One thing we have going for us is people coming over and having a quality of life that’s hard to match in other places.”
MLS has grown in more literal ways as well, adding 12 expansion teams over the last 11 years—seven of which rank among the league’s ten most valuable clubs, including San Diego FC, which paid a record $500 million expansion fee to begin play as MLS’s 30th team last year. And MLS clubs have built nine new soccer-specific stadiums since 2018, most recently Inter Miami’s 26,700-seat Nu Stadium, which opened this spring, with New York City FC set to move out of Yankee Stadium and into a new home field in Queens next summer.
The modern venues allow MLS teams to capitalize on increasingly important lines of business, such as premium seating, and—along with top-notch training complexes—offer a contrast with European soccer, where facilities are often several decades old and may be difficult to renovate or replace because of local building regulations and red tape.
MLS has other advantages over overseas leagues, above all the absence of a relegation system, which can tank revenue for any club that falls down the country’s soccer pyramid. That additional risk tends to tamp down prices for European teams that hit the market.
On the other hand, MLS franchises lag behind their European counterparts in terms of revenue—with even middle-of-the-pack Premier League clubs like Everton and Fulham exceeding $250 million annually—and many are still struggling to establish a fan base. Attendance averaged about 22,000 in MLS last year and over the first three months of this season, down from a record 23,300 in 2024, Messi’s first full season in the U.S. Even the league leader—Atlanta United FC, averaging 37,600 this season—is filling barely half of the stands at 71,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which also hosts the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons.
Tough Bounce: Sebastian Berhalter’s Vancouver Whitecaps have been for sale since 2024. Team CEO Axel Schuster lamented in January that “no one is interested in buying even 1% of this club” in its current situation.
Elizabeth Ruiz Ruiz/Getty Images
TV viewership hasn’t been much better. Midway through the 2025 season, commissioner Don Garber revealed that MLS games on Apple TV were averaging 120,000 unique viewers, up 50% from 2024 but held back by a “double paywall” model that required fans to subscribe to both Apple TV and MLS Season Pass. (For the full regular season, including matches on U.S. and Canadian linear television, the league averaged 3.7 million gross live match viewers per week.) This year, aiming to draw a larger audience, MLS made all games available on the standard Apple TV subscription, and while the league has not broken out the streaming numbers, total live viewership is up to 7.9 million weekly—a little more than 500,000 per game.
In another recent change, MLS moved up the end date of the Apple TV deal by three and a half years, to 2029, prompting questions of what is next. In an April interview with the podcast The Main Event with Andrew Marchand, Garber said that the direct-to-consumer subscription model is the future of sports consumption but that MLS was “way early on it” when it signed the Apple pact in 2022 for a reported $2.5 billion over ten years.
“I think MLS would admit that the Apple partnership did not meet their expectations initially,” says one sports investment banker who has worked on MLS transactions and requested anonymity to avoid losing business with the league. “There’s a significant opportunity on the renewal in 2029 to correct that and put the league back on the right path.”
Still, while many major North American sports leagues have continued to see their broadcast rights rise in value—in contrast with many European leagues that have been forced to accept stagnating or even declining fees—many media analysts wonder how much money networks will have left over for leagues like MLS as they simultaneously renegotiate with the NFL and MLB, among other sports.
“I don’t think we’re ready to talk about the next media rights,” Durana says. “We’re with Apple today, and we’re happy.”
With the uncertain growth prospects, some bargain-minded investors believe they might get more bang for their buck in a different North American soccer league. Mexico’s Liga MX draws similar attendance and U.S. TV viewership to MLS and is believed to be more profitable in many cases, with 19 of MLS’s 30 teams having lost money on an operating basis in 2025, according to Forbes estimates. Last year, an American-led group bought Querétaro FC for more than $120 million, and Atlas FC changed hands in April for a reported $250 million—about $200 million less than the valuations of MLS’s cheapest teams.
One of those financial cellar dwellers—the Vancouver Whitecaps, recently valued by Forbes at $445 million—has been for sale since 2024, and team CEO Axel Schuster lamented in January that “no one is interested in buying even 1% of this club” in its current situation in Vancouver. A group led by Grant Gustavson, the son of billionaire Tamara Gustavson, submitted a bid in April to buy the team and relocate it to Las Vegas, although that would take a potential expansion market off the table for MLS.
Billionaire John Fisher also put the San Jose Earthquakes on the market last summer, with no news of a bidder yet for a franchise Forbes values at $550 million. Any buyer would likely need to invest heavily in revamping or replacing San Jose’s PayPal Park, an 18,000-seat stadium that doesn’t have as many premium amenities as its peers.
The sales of both clubs will go a long way toward defining the league’s financial floor. The longer they stay up for sale, perceptions will only grow that the league’s valuation bubble may have hit its limit.