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In June, Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest soccer player of all time, announced his intentions to join Inter Miami CF, then the last-place team in Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference. In the month that it took for his deal to become official, some of the particulars that lured him to South Florida emerged—details that careful observers of the shifting business of sports took particular note of. Because, in addition to the reported $50-plus million deal with the club that includes an equity stake in the team, Messi had struck separate deals with some of the league’s corporate partners. The first was with Adidas—no stranger, of course, to big sports deals. The arrangement was said to offer Messi a share of any increase in the company's profits generated by his move to MLS—likely a windfall with the blush-pink number-10 jerseys soon to start flying off shelves. Another new Messi partner was perhaps more surprising: Apple, which last fall announced a 10-year deal worth a reported $2.5 billion deal to serve as MLS’s primary broadcast partner—and was now reportedly set to give Messi a percentage of the revenue generated from new subscriptions to MLS Season Pass, its broadcast package.
This was a mostly unprecedented arrangement, and perhaps a necessity of doing business with Messi, who had turned down a rumored billion-dollar offer to play in Saudi Arabia. It was also Apple’s biggest move yet into the big, burly business of sports—and served as notice that the most valuable company on earth was not just willing but eager to break with tradition in the process.
The man leading Apple’s push into the wild, lucrative world of live sports broadcasting is Eddy Cue. Cue has worked at Apple since 1989, and cuts an interesting figure at a company defined by its low-key, minimalist culture. He is plainspoken, and quick to joke. He is also an enormous sports fan, frequently popping up at the biggest games on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, he is the guy Apple has tasked with an increasingly important piece of its future: as the senior vice president of the company’s services division, his portfolio includes just about everything Apple sells that isn’t a piece of hardware. And that slice of the pie is growing: what was a $3 billion quarterly business in 2012 had grown, in the most recent fiscal quarter, to more than $21 billion. One-time purchases, it turns out, are great—but the lesson of Services, which includes subscription businesses like News, Music, TV, and Fitness, is that recurring revenue might be even better.
One critical part of Cue's portfolio is Apple TV+, the company’s entrant in the streaming wars. And in this war, sports have emerged as a vital weapon. In our ever-more-fractured entertainment landscape, live sports represent perhaps the last best way for distributors—both tech companies like Apple and cable stalwarts like ESPN—to convene a large, reliable audience. Per Nielsen, 94 of the 100 most-watched US TV broadcasts in 2022 were sporting events, with NFL accounting for 82 of those, and 19 of the top 20.
It is Cue’s belief that sports represents an enormous opportunity for the company—and that, with a few tried-and-true Apple tweaks, the right sport can be made to feel more like a rounded-edges, design-forward Apple product. “We spend a lot of money, a lot of time on finding the best unscripted drama in the world. That's what we try to create in some of our shows that we do for TV+,” he told me in the first of a few conversations this spring and summer. “Sports is that in spades. It's the greatest unscripted drama there is.”
And so Cue and Apple are methodically working their way into deals with leagues and broadcasters—a Major League Baseball deal here, a rumored Pac-12 offer there. Recently, the company has been rumored as a potential “strategic partner” for—or outright acquirer of—ESPN. “I think sports is something that is going to continue to grow in importance,” he told me, “but it's clear that the path that it's on now is not the right one. And so, what is it? That gave us an opportunity to participate, or to get in the game around it and see if we could shape the future of it. And we'll see. It's early, but I think the opportunity's there. Who's going to take it and what's it going to be? Not as clear.”
Cue’s job is to make sense of that opportunity. Apple, of course, doesn’t do much by half-measures. And as he explained over the course of our conversations, Cue is uniquely positioned to bring his own opinions, honed over a lifetime of watching and thinking about sports, to bear on the biggest stages imaginable. And everything, it seems, is up for grabs: Cue is interested in optimizing live sports for the age of streaming, whether that means radically changing how a game is broadcast—or inventing a novel contract structure that brings the GOAT to Apple’s broadcast.
Over the years, Cue told me, people have approached him about buying into various professional teams as a minority owner. He’s always declined. “My view around it has always been, look, I'm very lucky, but I don't have the capabilities to buy a sports team. And so owning a piece of it, to me, it's not a negative thing, but I would love to be able to run things and do things. That's not what a minority owner does,” he said. “I have friends that certainly have some of that, but it's not in the cards. And now it's worked out better.” Why bother with owning a piece of a team, after all, when you can reshape how an entire sport is consumed?
Over the years, Cue has joked that sports were the only thing he was “smarter than Steve” about (as in Jobs). And, with time, he’s become something like the company’s sports ambassador. Earlier this year, I clocked Cue at the Super Bowl in Arizona, in February, and then at the Miami Grand Prix, in May. At home, he’s got nine televisions arrayed in a grid, plus a digital ticker relaying scores—the sort of sports-viewing system you’d dream up if you were a wildly successful, sports-mad tech executive. He’s become a courtside fixture at Warriors games. His true love is the men’s basketball team at Duke, his alma mater. (In a funny way, that’s thanks to the changing tides of sports broadcasting, too: Cue, who grew up in Miami, didn’t know much about the school until 1978, when its hoops team played well enough to make it into the nationally televised portion of March Madness.)
At work, he was sometimes able to put his knowledge to use. Years ago, he was excited to cut a deal with the NBA to sell recordings of Finals games on the iTunes Store. More recently, he helped dream up Apple TV’s “Close Game” notification, the alert that tells you when you’re missing a closely contested finish. But for the most part, Cue’s day job only rarely intersected with his identity as a sports fan. This was thanks, in part, to the way Apple goes about things: the company famously gets into a new line of business on its own terms, and the world of live sports is particularly resistant to change.
That’s one of the reasons, Cue told me, why he never expected to get into business with Major League Soccer in the first place. There is basically one way to start airing sports, and it didn’t appeal to Cue, or to Apple. “If you try to do a deal with almost everything that's out there, it's doing the exact same deal that has existed for the last 20 years: Pick a sport, pick a set of games, and pick a region. And that's really all that's been out there. It's all the same,” he said. CBS pays the NFL to broadcast a handful of games on Sundays, while Amazon pays for sole possession of Thursday nights. “I knew we didn't want to do that,” Cue said. “I was positive: we're not going to get in the game of playing here if we have to play by those rules.” Beyond that, Cue was only interested in a deal that would allow Apple to influence “how to present [the game], deliver it, and use technology.” Apple wasn’t just looking for a sport to air—it wanted a sport that was open to being changed by Apple.
(There was also the bare fact that MLS didn’t exactly seem like an Apple product. “I can't say I was a rabid MLS fan,” Cue said. “I had seen some games. I knew my kids liked it more than I did. My first reaction would've been, it's not big enough for us. That was the mindset I had.”)
And he was wary of dealing with the sort of red tape that accompanies any incursion into a new industry. Back when he was launching the iTunes Store, he told me, he spent ages arguing with the record labels about the number of times users would be allowed to burn a song they had purchased to a CD. The labels wanted the number to be zero; Cue thought it should be effectively limitless. The negotiation landed on a number closer to zero than infinity, and though Cue would eventually collect enough data to prove his point, he was displeased with the way the rule served as “a stopper,” something that interfered with intuitive use of the product. The business of live sports, he felt, was full of stoppers.
But in 2021, Cue happened to be in Mexico while MLS commissioner Don Garber was there with one of the owners of the Seattle Sounders. They asked to get together for an hour to chat—typical globetrotting-executive stuff. “Next thing I know, we spent three hours talking together,” Cue said. “I walked away with more questions, but I was like, well, they're in a position unlike any other sport where they own all their rights, they own them all worldwide.” (MLS had told its teams not to sign new regional rights deals beyond 2022—meaning that when its national and global deals expired, it would be able to negotiate new deals for all three.)
The two sides traded proposals over the course of a year, chewing through the big questions, Garber told me: “What was Apple's view as to how they were going to enter the live sports business? And then from Apple's perspective, what kind of partner would we be? What kind of commitments would we make? How willing are we to think about our media dynamic in a different way, less about a rights agreement and more about a long-term partnership?”
Eventually, Apple and MLS hit upon a deal: Apple would pay $2.5 billion dollars, over 10 years, for the right to broadcast every MLS game to anyone around the world who bought into the subscription package. “For the first time in the history of sports, fans will be able to access everything from a major professional sports league in one place,” Cue said in the press release. “It’s a dream come true for MLS fans, soccer fans, and anyone who loves sports. No fragmentation, no frustration—just the flexibility to sign up for one convenient service that gives you everything MLS, anywhere and anytime you want to watch.”
Garber told me that he was impressed by the way Cue seemed to balance his needs as an Apple bigwig with the needs of sports fans, more generally—or at least manage to align them. When Cue met with the MLS ownership group, Garber said, he “talked about his passion for sport and how it is one of the most important things in his life—and how committed he was to try to change the way a distributor views its relationship with a sports property, to start with what does the fan want, and then how could we work together to deliver on that? And that's a very different perspective, because most—not all—media relationships are about filling a broad menu of offerings to fit into a schedule to fit into programming priorities.”
Both Cue and Garber were careful to describe the arrangement to me not just as a rights deal, but as a “partnership.” Indeed, it seems as if the league has been amenable to input from its broadcaster. And if you look closely, some of the changes Apple is cooking up with Major League Soccer might be seen as clues for how the company might approach further, bolder steps into reshaping the world of sports.
Perhaps the simplest—and most striking—change was one made to the broadcast schedule. During the 2022 season, MLS games aired on all days of the week, and at various times during the day. This year, Apple and MLS scheduled games for Saturdays and select Wednesdays, with every game starting at 7:30pm local time. That would make it easier for fans to know when to tune in—and make for the sort of compelling multiple-close-games scenario that happens most nights in every other major sport. “By the way,” Cue said, “this happens every night in baseball, it happens every night in basketball. That's kind of what we've done, but in even more condensed fashion.”
In MLS, Apple had found a partner willing to indulge (or perhaps unable to negotiate its way out of) a sort of experiment—an attempt to take a sport and Apple-ize it. “Remember, we're a product company, we're an innovation company, and we like to design things in a way that they're simple and intuitive and beautiful for people. And we always start the process with building a great product,” Oliver Schusser, one of Cue’s deputies, told me. Indeed, when you click into MLS Season Pass, you get something that looks like it came from Cupertino: it’s all sanded edges and full-bleed photos and minimal design.
It was surprising to hear how many bits of the presentation of a significant American sport could be changed, and seemingly with ease. “One thing I’ve loved is, I've had two owners that are on text messages with me every Sunday, giving me feedback,” Cue said. One of them asked why the league standings didn’t appear on the Apple TV app. “And I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe we're not doing that. That was last weekend, and it'll be there this weekend. Look, that was an easy one we could do. Some things are a little harder.”
Cue spoke to me frankly about the ways professional sports—beholden to broadcast needs, or merely organizational inertia—hurt their fans by refusing to change. He’s baffled, for instance, by baseball’s resistance to so-called robot umpires—and says that he’s told MLB commissioner Rob Manfred as much. “I told him to get rid of the umpires who are calling balls and strikes,” he said, bluntly, describing a meeting shortly after Manfred got the job in 2015. His opinion is rooted, naturally, in the confluence of his many years as a tech executive and even more as an obsessive sports watcher. “Everyone at home can see the box. They can see where exactly the pitch landed—and the fact that one time it was a ball, and one time it was a strike, and it's in the exact same place. And millions of people saw that! So everyone knows it's not right, but we're not going to fix that.” Manfred, he explained, shared the company line that the umpires are a part of the game—anachronistic, maybe, but essential. “No, they're not!” Cue said, mock-enraged. “The umpires are there to make sure the game is played by the rules. The rules say that the box is like this. It doesn't say the box moves around.”
The MLS deal, with its unprecedented level of influence, meant that Cue was in position to encourage some of these changes. “The reality is, everyone is seeing that sports is changing. From the fanbase perspective, if you don't change, you're going to get left behind,” he said. “Here, we have the advantage. We don't have the history.” In a few instances, though, he was chafing against the strictures of the way things are done. “Honestly,” he said, “we have to play by a lot of FIFA rules.” One of those rules, he shared, bars players from wearing headphones while warming up before games. I suggested, skeptically, that this was a tough break for a company perhaps interested in using its newest partner to help market its headphones. Cue was more concerned about a possible limit on the ways Apple and MLS might market the league’s stars. “Players need to be characters. They need to be celebs. That's part of sports, too,” he said. “It's not just what happens at the time they're playing, and how they prepare, and the music. It's a minor thing, it's not that important. But it's an example of at the level of which things are managed that seem crazy.”
He’s considered other, more substantive tweaks, too. “We can’t show the clock,” he said, resigned. In soccer, of course, only the referee knows exactly how much of the game’s 90 minutes remain—he’s the one tallying time stoppages, leaving the broadcaster to put its best approximation onscreen. It was compelling to imagine the alternative: a real-time countdown clock, ticking away as Messi makes one last charge upfield. Such a change, of course, would have significant knock-on effects. Messi’s first goal for Inter Miami, after all, came on a free kick in stoppage time, and wound up the final play of the match—a direct result of the referee’s sole responsibility for managing both the game and the clock.
One of the tricky things about working at Apple, Cue told me, is the way that its scale as a business can mess with your brain. “If you look at our numbers from the outside, whether it's revenues or profitability or the number of iPhones, the numbers can be really big. And so any new idea doesn't look big enough, because they tend to start pretty small,” he said. “And so your first reaction is potentially not to do them, because it's, like, Oh, it's not a big enough idea. But a lot of our biggest ideas, they didn't start off with, they're going to be this big.” This was the logic governing the MLS deal: start small, make a great product for MLS fans, learn a thing or two along the way.
One way to win over fans is to improve the on-field product. “We looked at it from the viewpoint that MLS was going to grow, and in order to grow, it has to have the best players,” Cue said. But he wasn’t sure how quickly that would happen. Until it became official, bringing Messi on board “felt like a Hail Mary,” he told me. You can’t, after all, draw up a business plan that reads: 1. Buy MLS rights. 2. Sign greatest player of all time. 3. Profit.
Of course, all that changed the moment that Messi signed with Inter Miami. “There's no question that we looked a lot smarter the day that Messi decided to come to MLS,” Cue told me in Washington, D.C., ahead of the league’s All-Star Game. “The reality of it is, I think Messi accelerates, both on a timeframe and number perspective, how much we can grow.”
Cue was quick to credit club managing owner Jorge Mas, who’s been attempting to deliver the Argentine to south Florida for years now, and MLS itself with getting the deal done. But, he conceded, “I think we had to be a big part of it. I just think us supporting MLS and getting behind it the way we did globally was a message that it's a big deal.” The fact that Apple had struck a separate deal with Messi for an Apple TV+ documentary project couldn’t have hurt, either. (They’ve since announced a second doc.) But it seems safe to say that Apple’s biggest contribution to Operation Messi was its willingness to blow up the playbook: the company’s contract with Messi, which reportedly grants him a cut of the money generated by new subscribers to MLS Season Pass, is roundly unprecedented in the sports world. (Cue declined to confirm the specifics of Messi’s agreement with Apple, beyond acknowledging that the player had indeed signed a deal, outside his MLS contract, with the tech giant.)
So far, things are going well enough. “We've been right at the TV numbers or slightly above, so we're pretty happy about that,” Cue told me in July, just before Messi’s debut. “People are tuning in and watching way longer than they were on TV. We still have huge opportunities to grow.”
Messi, who has absolutely scorched the competition in his 11 games with Inter Miami, attested to that. In August, Jorge Mas tweeted that Season Pass subscriptions had more than doubled since Messi joined the team, while Tim Cook credited Messi on Apple’s third-quarter earnings call with helping the company best its internal expectations for subscribers.
Still, Messi’s instant success also highlighted the uniqueness of the challenge facing Cue and Apple. “We've been given an incredible gift in that this can accelerate, but we still have to go execute,” he said. “You still have to go execute and leverage this—and then make sure you get the most out of this, because he isn't 25. He's not going to be here 10 years from now. If we do nothing else and he's gone in three years, pick whatever time period, you could easily go right back. So you've got to create the loyalty, the fan base, the excitement, all these things.”
It was a reminder that, for all Apple’s technological wizardry, and there is no shortage of it, the company’s MLS project will live or die on the strength of the product—and the product isn’t the delivery system, but the game itself. It is one thing to innovate around an American soccer match. It’s another thing still to make American soccer compelling. If anyone can do it, though, it will be number 10.
Of course, as Cue reminded me, the thing that makes sports such compelling television is the drama. “Somebody asked me, ‘Oh, are you worried that Messi is going to score two goals a game or whatever?’" Cue relayed to me, laughing. “I'm like, ‘No, if I was going to worry, I would be worried that he wouldn't score.’ I was like, ‘No, that would be awesome.’"
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