How Apple expanded into sports since 2022, starting with the MLB, leading to an unusual deal to bring Messi to the MLS and share new subscriber revenue with him
In 2019, during an interview with Sports Illustrated, the Apple senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's sports entry has been a deliberate ladder: the 10-year MLS broadcasting deal reported at $250M+ per year followed the 2022 MLB partnership, both run out of Eddy Cue's services organization. The Messi arrangement is the rung that breaks the template — instead of paying a league for rights, Apple ties a single player's compensation to how many new Season Pass subscribers he drives.
That structure only makes sense against the gap the related coverage flags: Apple TV+ has almost no content built for non-English-speaking markets, and Messi is the fastest available fix. The revenue-share discussions reported in June, alongside the Messi docuseries announcement, show Apple treating one athlete as both programming and customer-acquisition channel.
First-order effects
- Messi's economics are now coupled to Apple TV+ conversion: every new Season Pass subscriber he attracts pays him directly, making him the first athlete whose salary scales with a streaming service's growth.
- Apple's services division, under Eddy Cue, gains a live test case for whether star power — not league rights alone — can move international subscriber numbers.
Second-order effects
- Other leagues and star players negotiating with Apple now have a precedent to cite: if Messi gets a cut of subscriber revenue, marquee athletes in future rights talks can demand performance-linked compensation rather than flat fees.
- Competing streamers bidding for sports rights face a new cost curve — the price of a star is no longer just salary, but a share of the subscription upside they generate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sports rights deals drift from fixed licensing fees toward shared-upside structures where leagues, teams, and individual players are paid as distribution partners — blurring the line between talent contract and equity stake in a platform.
- The Messi deal points to streaming services recruiting individual global stars as a workaround for thin local-language catalogs, letting one signing substitute for years of original-content investment in non-English markets.
The trend: Sports streaming is moving from leagues selling fixed rights to platforms structuring deals where individual stars share the subscriber revenue they generate.