The North American Soccer League breathed its last in October 1984. Earlier that year, during the Super Bowl, Apple ushered in the age of personal computing with its famously Orwellian commercial spot. Thirty-eight years down the road, these two streams — one sporting, the other technical — have crossed once again.

On June 14, 2022, Major League Soccer — the spawn of NASL — announced it will exclusively stream every MLS match live, via a dedicated app on the Apple TV platform, starting with the 2023 season. While the 10-year deal is a financial boon to MLS, it also signals the dawn of another new age. Apple also offers Major League Baseball games on Fridays. It is rumored to be going after NFL Sunday Ticket. But never has a major sport thrown its lot entirely in with a streaming service, to the exclusion of legacy broadcast networks.

The back cover of Generation Zero leads with a few statements of fact: “By the late 1980s, American soccer had solidified its reputation as a global joke of long-standing, a sporting oxymoron akin to Jamaican bobsledding… Soccer on TV? Post-1984, only the indoor variety could be found there: late at night, after competitive lumberjacking.” ABC had actually stopped broadcasting anything but the season-ending Soccer Bowl after 1980, citing poor ratings. For 12 years, until the launch of Major League Soccer in 1996, there was no domestic league soccer to be found anywhere on U.S. television. At all.

Oh my, how things have changed. At a minimum, Apple TV will stream some 450 MLS matches in 2023. It will do so for a minimum of $250 million, annually, a figure that dwarfed bids from cable outlets ESPN and FS1, which have typically broadcast approximately 65 MLS matches each season, combined. What’s more, that 250 LARGE is a minimum figure. MLS will also share in subscription revenues above a certain threshold. At a minimum, each franchise will receive $7 million annually, compared to current TV rights payout of $2.5 million.

The narrative thrust of Generation Zero, which goes on sale July 15, fairly well screams, Soccer has come a long way in America, baby! And everything we associate with this progress stems from the U.S. qualifying for the World Cup in 1990. Few developments better buttress that argument than this Apple deal, which leaves behind the legacy TV model and aligns MLS with one of the world’s most respected brands, while providing more money and exposure to all 29 franchises.

And yet, the MLS/Apple partnership does something else important: It usefully obscures and potentially moots the league’s dirty little secret: ratings for MLS broadcasts have consistently been somewhat abysmal.

A few numbers: ESPN reported that the 2021 MLS Cup on ABC averaged 1.14 million viewers, peaking at 1.6 million viewers, delivering the fifth-most watched audience for an MLS Cup on a Disney-owned network since 1999. For the 2021 regular season, MLS averaged 276,000 viewers for each of its 31 regular-season games across ESPN channels, including ABC. That’s up from the average 233,000 viewers in 2020. Fox/FS1 reported similar numbers, while Spanish-language Univision did an average of 284,000 per match in 2021.

When placed in perspective, however, these figures are pedestrian. NBA regular season games on ESPN, for example, averaged 1.3 million viewers during 2021-22. A more niche sport, the 2022 Formula 1 World Championship, can still boast a per-event, season average of 1.353 million viewers.

In announcing this deal, Apple referred to MLS as “the fastest-growing soccer league in the world, more than doubling in size to 29 clubs over the last 15 years.” That is another fact, and those 29 clubs post great numbers at the gate. In terms of total attendance, MLS is the sixth largest futbol league on the planet.

The new Apple deal, which runs through 2032, conveniently and effectively cloaks this ratings issue, and may just kill it outright, by moving the whole sport-viewing paradigm toward streaming/subscriptions, and away from any reliance on the traditional foundation of advertising/ratings. MLS live and on-demand content will be available to anyone with internet access across all devices where the app can be found, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV 4K, and Apple TV HD; Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, TCL, VIZIO, and other smart TVs; Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices; PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; and Comcast Xfinity. Fans can also watch on tv.apple.com.

This new reality is what Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, means when he says, “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.” In other words, Apple will not be selling viewers any soap. Indeed, it doesn’t matter how many viewers there are (and how much soap they might need).

Downsides and questions do remain. Cost is first and foremost. MLS streaming via Apple will be included as part of MLS full-season ticket packages, but will everyone else pay, say, $5.95 month to watch matches via some app, when so few bother to tune in now on terrestrial TV — for free? There is no more prestigious, savvy brand than Apple. It exudes a style that consumers want to associate with. Many of the shows currently on offer at Apple TV+ are superb: the puzzlingly popular and soccer-centric Ted Lasso, of course, but I can personally vouch for Pachinko, For All Mankind, Slow Horses and Severance. However, it’s hard to see at this early stage precisely how Apple’s style will rub off on MLS. The league will be producing these telecasts, not the folks in Cupertino.

What’s more, local broadcasts produced by individual MLS franchises — something we Americans have come to expect from professional sports franchises of all stripes, starting in the 1970s — go away under this deal. Full stop. Those ratings were even more modest, but this decision is another leap of faith on the part of Major League Soccer. The NFL and NBA have experimented with offering their games via Amazon Prime and Hulu, among others, but never to the exclusion of traditional broadcast partners. MLS isn’t just charting a bold new course. In less than a year, it will usher in a new age in American sports television.