Major League Soccer has a problem.

On the eve of its 20th season, America's latest incarnation of a fully professional soccer league has drawn a steep growth curve, overcoming towering obstacles and attaining viability heretofore unknown to stateside pro soccer.

Of late, attendance has trended upward, most all the teams have made real inroads in their home markets and just about the entire U.S. men's national team plays at home again. The number of clubs is growing, expansion fees have soared to $100 million and state-of-the-art stadiums have become the rule rather than the exception.

But that one finicky problem persists.

Television ratings.

For as long as the league has been around, they have been a problem. Some progress has been made. The numbers have gone from sometimes microscopic – towards the end of 2008, when the old Fox Soccer Channel first began getting ratings, it averaged just 30,000 for the last four MLS games of the season – to mostly perceptible with the naked eye. But they remain intolerably low.

Last season, the league averaged 240,000 viewers per game on ESPN, 142,000 on NBC and NBCSN and 223,000 on Unimas. Over the last decade or so, no real progress has been made. ESPN's MLS national broadcast ratings have hovered between 220,000 and 311,000 in that time. And while NBC did a laudable job with its production values and posted numbers that doubled FOX Soccer Channel's best year ever – 70,000 – the numbers plainly aren't economically sustainable. That company, after all, decided not even to enter a bid when the MLS rights came up last spring even though it has a sports-specific channel to program.

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Instead, FOX resumed the rights – for its newish FOX Sports 1 and 2 channels – in partnership with ESPN. Univision bought in as well to bring the total in annual rights fees to a reported $90 million through 2022. The old deals were apparently good for under $30 million per year, so MLS trumpeted the new broadcast contracts as a major achievement.

While it's a tad more than the $83.33 million NBC pays for the Premier League, it should be noted here that, as before, those MLS rights include the USMNT home games, which are much more popular than MLS. So it's still rather hard to say how much the league's rights are really worth. To an extent, the USMNT rights – where there might be some money to be made – were held hostage by MLS, a loss-leader, since you couldn't get the former without the latter, giving the league considerably more leverage.

Anyway, when it comes to the broadcast rights pie – the primary driver of revenue in any league – MLS isn't even getting a slice of it. It's getting crumbs. Or the residue on the cake knife.

The NFL receives over $5 billion a year and will do so through 2021. The NBA follows with $2.66 billion until 2025. Major League Baseball gets $1.5 billion from now to the end of 2021 (not counting the immensely valuable local broadcast rights), and the NHL collects $200 million through 2021.

The discrepancy lays entirely in the ratings – the only truth in the television game. There's no sense comparing MLS to the NFL juggernaut, which regularly draws 20 million viewers a game. That's the NFL, after all, probably the most popular television product in American history. But even the NHL, which lags well behind the NBA and Major League Baseball in its ratings – both of whom had disappointing seasons from a TV standpoint last year, yet still drew well over a million viewers for every game – averaged more than half a million pairs of eyeballs for its regular season and 1.44 million for its playoffs, numbers MLS can only dream of right now.

But it isn’t merely the competition from other sports that’s eating into the league’s market share. It’s soccer itself.

A simple cable package in the U.S. brings a wealth of top-tier soccer. NBC has the Premier League. FOX has the Champions League and, soon, the World Cup for both men and women. A raft of channels from south of the border will offer up Mexican soccer. Get yourself BeIN Sports, which is slightly trickier, and Spanish, Italian and French soccer will be yours. And find Gol TV, if you can, and you can add South American and German soccer (although the latter will move to FOX next season). When BeIN finds greater distribution, which seems a matter of time, every major league in the world will be easily accessible.

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