Heard folks buzzing about MLS TV numbers jumping around lately and figured, why not dig in myself? Grabbed a cold one and fired up the laptop ready to see some clear charts telling the whole story. Yeah, right.
The ‘Easy Button’ Fail
First stop: those big TV rating report websites everybody links. Sounded perfect – just type in “MLS ratings”, hit enter, and boom. Nope. Latest stuff was like 3 months old! Figured maybe I just picked wrong sites. Tried another one… and another one. Still got ancient history. Felt like the internet decided MLS ratings stopped mattering last season.
Next thought: the league’s own news page. They gotta brag if numbers are good, right? Poked around forever. Found tons of game recaps, player signings, hype videos… but straight talk on TV viewers? Zip. Zilch. Nada. More frustrated than a fan after a missed penalty call.
Getting My Hands Dirty
Okay, scratch ‘easy’. Time to actually hunt. Realized those fancy reports probably just scrape data from the ratings company feeds anyway. But getting direct feeds? Ha! Costs serious money, looked way over my head just for a hobby blog check.
Panic mode creeping in. How do people even know this stuff? My first idea:
- Twitter Searches: Threw “#MLS ratings” into the search bar. Sorted by ‘Latest’. Mostly found fans yelling at their cable company for blackouts or arguing if Messi boosted numbers. No hard facts. Just noise.
- Journalists & Insiders: Tracked down a few sports business reporters who specialize in this stuff. Followed them. Refreshed their feeds constantly. Learned more about NHL ad revenue than MLS ratings most days. Got lucky sometimes spotting a tweet mentioning a specific game’s number.
- Reddit Threads: Lurked in r/MLS and r/sportsbiz. Found some decent speculation threads, but also wild guesses parroted as fact. You see a guy say “Yeah saw a report saying viewership up 200%!” and you think… buddy, did you actually see that report?
This felt like doing a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Bits of info here and there, but impossible to see the whole picture. Scraped for hours. Nothing usable.
The Ugly Spreadsheet Savior
Gave up trying to find someone else’s clean answer. If I wanted the trend, I had to build it myself. Ugly time.
- Targeted Trawling: Went back to those journalists. Searched their names PLUS “MLS” PLUS “ratings” on Twitter. Scrolled back month by month. Found some gems! Tweets like “Per Nielsen, SEAvPOR pulled 325k viewers on ESPN2, similar to last year’s comparable slot.” Yes! Hard numbers!
- News Alerts: Finally remembered Google Alerts exist. Set up a new one for “Major League Soccer” ratings. Crossed fingers.
- Screenshot Everything: Every time I saw a tweet or short mention with a concrete number, I’d snag a screenshot and dump it in a messy folder called “MLS Ratings Scraps”. Trust nothing to memory.
Ended up with a mountain of little fact crumbs. Saturday numbers here, a midweek special there. Finally opened Google Sheets. Started punching numbers in manually. Game date. Teams. Network. The precious number. Felt like a caveman chipping rock.
The Bigger Picture (Finally)
Once maybe 10-12 games worth of numbers were in, added a simple line graph. Seeing the dots on a timeline made it click.
- The Spike: Clear as day! Big early season numbers, especially some Saturday games and those big rivalries. Looked healthy.
- The Dip: Right around mid-summer, the line started heading south for a bunch of matches, especially midweek. Fewer tweets bragging about numbers too. Hmmm.
- The Messi Factor: Noticed his games weren’t automatically hitting huge numbers later. Sometimes yes, sometimes just… average. Def not a simple “Messi = massive ratings boost” rule.
It wasn’t perfect. Gaps everywhere. But seeing the dots and connecting them myself? Showed the bigger trend way better than reading ten opinions.
The Verdict
It’s a pain, honestly. No central spot tells the story clearly without serious delay or needing a corporate bank account.
- Social media tracking (Twitter especially) is exhausting but weirdly necessary.
- Building your own crappy spreadsheet with scraps of data is slower than molasses, but it actually works.
- Forget finding weekly reports easily. It’s about catching drops in the stream whenever they pop up.
Feels less like researching and more like detective work. Not smarter than a toaster, just stubborn. Saw the trend myself only because I refused to give up digging.
