Apple just announced a deal to become the exclusive home of Major League Soccer. I think it tells us everything about how they’re going to handle NFL games in the future.

What you need to know about Apple’s strange new deal with Major League Soccer, and how it will affect future sports deals.

Soccer is, of course, an absolutely massive sport on planet Earth. And though it hasn’t historically been nearly as popular here in the United States, that’s been changing a lot over the last few decades. So I was pretty excited to see Apple announce today that they’d entered into a partnership to be the exclusive home of MLS games. Here’s the first paragraph of the press release:

Apple and Major League Soccer (MLS) today announced that the Apple TV app will be the exclusive destination to watch every single live MLS match beginning in 2023. This partnership is a historic first for a major professional sports league, and will allow fans around the world to watch all MLS, Leagues Cup,1 and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place — without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle.

Sounds pretty good right? But this is a very confusing paragraph. You’d be forgiven if you read that and thought that Apple TV+ is going to be the exclusive home for MLS games starting next year, but that’s not the case. The next little bit clarifies things… a bit:

From early 2023 through 2032, fans can get every live MLS match by subscribing to a new MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app.

And then later:

A broad selection of MLS and Leagues Cup matches, including some of the biggest matchups, will also be available at no additional cost to Apple TV+ subscribers, with a limited number of matches available for free.

So this will be a separate MLS streaming service that you’ll have to pay to subscribe to, but it will be available exclusively through the Apple TV app. Many games will be available to Apple TV+ subscribers at no additional cost, and a few games will be available for free even if you’re not an Apple TV+ subscriber.

A lot of this is confusing because Apple uses one term “Apple TV” to refer to a hardware device, an app, and a streaming service. I’m not sure what the solution is to that problem, but if it’s hard enough for regular Apple-watchers to parse through all this, it’s going to be really confusing to people who aren’t as dialed in to this topic.

But here’s the thing: I think this tells us everything about how Apple will eventually handle NFL Sunday Ticket. Back in April, I wrote about a rumor that Apple will become the new home for NFL Sunday Ticket once the NFL’s deal with DirecTV expires. To be clear, neither Apple nor the NFL have announced such a deal, so all we can do is speculate. But at the time one of my big questions was, would NFL Sunday Ticket games be available for no additional charge to all Apple TV+ subscribers, or would you need to sign up for an additional service? I think we now know the answer based on Apple’s deal with MLS.

I think you’ll still have to subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket separately from your Apple TV+ subscription, but that Apple TV+ users will get some games at no additional cost, and the Apple TV app will be the only place you’ll be able to stream games from the NFL Sunday Ticket service.

It’s all a bit confusing, but I think it actually sheds light on Apple’s future plans. Through the fog of confusion comes some clarity.

P.S. The timing of this announcement is especially fascinating to me, because just this past weekend I took my son to our first ever Major League Soccer game to watch our local Nashville SC. It was a fantastic experience. Nashville has a brand new soccer stadium that is the largest soccer-only stadium in the United States. It was so cool for my son to watch professional soccer players play the same game he plays.