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Messi-USWNT Duel Is a Ratings Win Despite Apple TV Numbers

anthony crupi
·4 min read
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Friday night was a real doozy for American soccer fans, as Lionel Messi’s debut with Inter Miami overlapped with the U.S. national team’s thumping of Vietnam in its 2023 Women’s World Cup opener. And while obsessives had to toggle between screens to keep up with all the action, a glance at the TV numbers would suggest that Sophia Smith & Co. were a far bigger draw.

In dispatching with their overmatched Group E opponent by a 3-0 margin, the defending world champs scared up 6.26 million viewers across Fox and Telemundo, with the English-language broadcaster accounting for 84% of those deliveries. This marked the second-highest TV turnout for a Group Stage WWC match, trailing only the U.S.-Chile showdown on June 16, 2019 (5.41 million). Worth noting: The ratings from four years ago do not include out-of-home impressions notched in bars, restaurants and other public venues.

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Opposite the FIFA opener, Messi entered the Cruz Azul-Inter Miami Leagues Cup match in the 54th minute. Forty minutes later, the seven-time Balloon d’Or winner scored the winning goal on a free kick that sent the crowd of 22,000—a happy horde that included the likes of LeBron James and Serena Williams—into a frenzy. The number of people who watched Messi’s shot hit the back of the net from outside the stadium, however, is all but impossible to quantify.

The metaphorical walls around Apple TV’s equally metaphorical garden are very high, and there’s an awful lot of broken glass and concertina wire littered around the top. (Again: metaphors.) To say that Apple keeps its performance metrics under wraps is to traffic in understatement; in fact, even David Beckham’s 30% ownership stake in Inter Miami isn’t sufficient to earn the former free-kick master a peek at his team’s streaming numbers.

Given that MLS’ 10-year, $2.5 billion rights deal with Apple TV is structured around an incentive-oriented revenue-sharing scheme, the lack of transparency seems like a bit of a stumbling block for the league’s owners. That said, media metrics aren’t the only game in town for MLS, which throughout its TV-first era struggled to draw an audience commensurate with that of Liga MX and the English Premier League. According to Logitix, the average ticket price for Inter Miami’s July 21 match was $39.81 a pop before Messi joined the club, and $342.28 after the signing.

While the Apple TV numbers almost certainly will never come to light—if Becks isn’t getting a peek, there’s little chance anyone else is getting their grubby little meat hooks on that data—the Spanish-language deliveries courtesy of Univision’s simulcast were impressive. Per Nielsen, Messi’s MLS debut averaged 1.75 million viewers via the linear-TV network, making it the league’s biggest single-network audience since Freddy Adu’s bow with D.C. United in April 2004 scared up 1.97 million viewers on ABC.

Still, even if we were to extrapolate a best-case scenario for the Apple TV deliveries—which were limited to between 650,000 to 750,000 MLS Season Pass subscribers—Messi’s big splashdown in South Florida didn’t steal much thunder from the USWNT. Again, as with all Apple-related data, the number of Season Pass subs is effectively impossible to substantiate, and even the most generous estimates don’t factor in the number of T-Mobile customers who’ve been comped the $99 annual fee. (Also getting free access to the Apple TV MLS feed are league season-ticket holders.)

All told, Messi’s first appearance in flamingo pink was electrifying, and as demonstrated by the Univision deliveries, an awful lot of people were paying attention. Since Messi’s parabolic goal slipped past the keeper, 54.6 million Twitter/X users have eyeballed MLS’s uploaded clip. As digital media commands an ever-firmer grip on our collective attention spans—in June, streaming accounted for a record-high 38% of all U.S. “TV” usage—our metrics for determining relative success are in need of a rethink.

At the same time, it may be advisable to cool it with all the hype regarding the impact Messi is certain to have on our national consciousness. That song’s been playing non-stop for the better part of the last 50 years, or at least as far back as 1975, when Pelé first arrived in New York. Until the conspicuously myopic, ferociously partisan U.S. sports fan can lay claim to something like a home-grown Lionel Messi, soccer’s long-awaited coronation will remain in the realm of the hypothetical.

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