USA’s World Cup Runneth Over

 

Good morning and happy Sunday.

The L in take the L, in this case, stood for Liège waffle.

The meaning was the same. The United States men’s national soccer team was unceremoniously shown the door from this year’s World Cup last week by a superior Belgian squad. But not before putting its name in the record books.

By stirring up more interest among Americans in the beautiful game than ever before, the US men’s national soccer team’s run to the Round of 16 is likely to have a significant downstream economic impact on broadcasters and high-flying (or high-heading) investors.

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MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

Major League Soccer Snatches Victory From World Cup Despite US Team’s Loss

Photo illustration by Connor Lin / The Daily Upside, Photos by Shaina Benhiyoun, Weston Hancock, Erica Denhoff, IMAGO/JOERAN STEINSIEK, and Kenya Sumiyoshi via Newscom

The World Cup has given backers who campaigned to hold it in the US just what they wanted: Spectators in the world’s largest economy, where soccer takes a backseat to gridiron football, are showing up.

While the US team’s 4-1 loss to Belgium on Monday was shrouded in political controversy and ended in a one-sided drubbing, it was the most-viewed soccer telecast in US history.

Preliminary figures from Fox, which holds the English-language broadcasting rights to the World Cup in the US, show 30 million viewers tuned in. Another 12 million watched the Spanish-language broadcast on Comcast’s Telemundo network and Peacock streaming service.

That combined total viewership of 42 million obliterated the previous record, which the US soccer team set just days earlier when 36 million people in the US watched them beat Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It also meant the US national team drew more viewers than the New York Knicks’ title-clinching win in game five of the NBA Finals last month and the deciding game seven of last year’s World Series between the champion Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays.

“We’re seeing numbers for some of these matches that we don’t see for anything but the NFL,” Michael Mulvihill, president of insight and analytics at Fox Sports, told Variety.

He added that, while US matches “out-delivered expectations,” the “more surprising” development at this World Cup has been millions of US viewers tuning in to games without marquee stars or top nations. A Scotland-Haiti game, which was pitted against the NBA Finals, drew 6 million US viewers for Fox, and a game between Uruguay (population: 3.5 million) and Cabo Verde (population: 500,000) drew 6.2 million. In other words, while fevered support of the US men’s team was real, so is a broader excitement about the sport of soccer itself.

This is also reflected by the fact that the US team is not the only one that broke records in America. Telemundo said that its broadcast of Mexico’s loss to England on Sunday drew over 23 million US viewers, making it the most-watched Spanish-language soccer broadcast in US history. It also highlights the multicultural appeal of the most global sport in a melting pot nation.

Fighting for (Broadcast) Rights

Naturally, broadcasting executives have watched these ratings roll wearing novelty dollar-sign sunglasses, or so we’d like to imagine.

In any case, the success of this year’s World Cup for Fox means the network will almost certainly have to fend off a host of challengers who want future tournaments on their airwaves.

Already, ESPN-owner Disney, Alphabet’s YouTube and streaming giant Netflix are considering taking on Fox for the right to the 2030 and 2034 World Cup, CNBC reported last week. Executives are committed to spending $1.5 billion to $2 billion for US broadcasting rights per tournament, the network said, which would far exceed the $485 million Fox paid for English-language US broadcast rights and the $600 million Telemundo paid for Spanish-language US rights.

And that’s just the World Cup.

When the US last hosted the tournament in 1994, the country pledged in advance to FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, that it would start a competitive domestic league to replace the North American Soccer League, which collapsed in 1985.

That’s how Major League Soccer (MLS) was born, albeit two years late in 1996 because launching a nationwide sports league is a complex logistical nightmare. What started with 10 teams is now 30.

Thanks to some fortuitous timing, MLS may be able to swing its own improved rights deal off the back of the World Cup’s success.

Last year, Apple and MLS agreed to cut short a decade-long, $2.5 billion deal to broadcast every game on the Apple TV streaming service. Instead of ending in 2032, it will now finish three years early in 2029. Deals with Fox Sports and TelevisaUnivision to show select MLS games on traditional TV are also slated to end later this year.

That leaves MLS with the opportunity to negotiate on a high point. On top of the stellar World Cup ratings, its own viewership was on a tear leading up to the tournament. MLS reported a 62% year-over-year increase in viewership in the first three months of its 2026 season, averaging 7.9 million live-match viewers per week on streaming and TV broadcasts. The season is paused for most of the World Cup — meanwhile, a record 45 players from MLS teams were rostered for their home countries for the tournament, meaning a month of high-profile global publicity for its top talent.

Lawyers at elite Chicago law firm McDermott Will & Schulte say this could put MLS in a favorable position when it negotiates future broadcasting deals.

“Post-World Cup data may show media partners that American soccer demand is durable, monetizable, and valuable beyond a one-time tournament, improving MLS’s position heading into new media-rights negotiations with leading national media companies,” they wrote.

Soccer League Tables

Well-heeled (or well-cleeted) US investors have in recent years piled into ownership stakes in soccer teams around the world. The highest-profile investments, until now, have involved European teams. There’s evidence that homegrown investments could become equally appetizing.

Tom Brady owns a chunk of second-tier English soccer team Birmingham City, as part of a US consortium. LeBron James owns a 1% stake in Fenway Sports Group, which owns the top-tier English squad Liverpool. Kevin Durant is a minority owner in back-to-back UEFA Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain. Hollywood actors Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, meanwhile, have brought considerable fanfare to Wrexham AFC, the Welsh club they bought together in 2021.

And a consortium led by billionaire Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital owns the Premier League’s Chelsea, which they’ve managed so well that fans have taken to the streets of London to march and demand that the old owner come back.

Thankfully for them, results on the pitch don’t necessarily mean their investment isn’t appreciating. Analysts at Football Benchmark estimate that the aggregate value of the top 32 teams in European soccer reached €72.6 billion ($82.9 billion) this year, a 12% increase from 2025. Moreover, their aggregate value has nearly tripled since 2016.

But analysts at Deloitte warned this week, in their annual Review of Football Finance, that revenue growth across the Big Five soccer leagues in Europe — the Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1 — is slowing. They said some of Europe’s top leagues could even see club revenue plateau or decline in the next year. Pre-tax losses among Premier League teams, Deloitte estimated, climbed to £948 million ($1.3 billion) in 2024-2025 from £135 million ($181 million) in 2023-2024, driven by higher demands for spending.

Enter, once again, MLS, which by many metrics still has considerable room to grow. There’s the aforementioned prospect of a new media rights deal, which would immediately boost league revenue in the wake of surging US interest in soccer.

In its annual valuation of MLS clubs earlier this year, Sportico said the average club valuation has risen 39% since 2021 to $767 million this year. Five clubs — Inter Miami, Los Angeles FC, LA Galaxy, Atlanta United and New York City FC — are now valued at more than $1 billion.

And the number of MLS teams in Forbes’ ranking of the world’s 30 most valuable soccer teams is now seven, trailing only the Premier League’s 11.

Big Test for the Beautiful Game

While there’s still tremendous potential for growth — only 14% of US sports viewers watch soccer, according to S&P Global, compared to 51% for American football or 33% for basketball — potential MLS investors have hurdles to consider.

According to Forbes’ estimates, 19 out of 30 teams weren’t profitable in 2025, while the bottom teams in the league are barely growing in value (2% or less among six of the bottom seven last year).

That hasn’t scared off top investors.

Peter Mallouk, CEO of the Kansas City-area financial advisory Creative Planning, bought a controlling stake in the city’s MLS team at a valuation of $700 million earlier this year. A consortium led by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour was awarded an expansion MLS franchise in San Diego, which started playing last year. And Utah’s billionaire Miller family, which oversees a massive conglomerate spanning real estate, construction, healthcare and entertainment, last year bought Real Salt Lake.

“The World Cup may be MLS’s most important commercial test yet,” McDermott Will & Schulte lawyers wrote in their analysis. “A successful tournament will not automatically increase the league’s value, produce a richer media deal, or reshape the next CBA. But it could provide owners, players, sponsors, broadcasters, streamers and investors with better evidence of the size and quality of the American soccer opportunity.”

Written by Sean Craig

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