With new Apple docuseries, Major League Soccer takes a page out of Formula One’s playbook
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As a British expat living in Los Angeles, Paul Martin found the thing he missed most about home was soccer.
“If I’m walking across a park and I see two people playing, I’ll stop and watch it,” the documentary film producer said.
So the idea of making a documentary about a soccer league wasn’t a hard sell. The challenge was finding the right league. The English Premier League, which Martin grew up with, was far too buttoned-up to allow his cameras the access they needed. And he’d been led to believe Major League Soccer, the first-division league that played in his adopted homeland, wasn’t much of a step up from those two guys playing in the park.
Not only was the reality far different, Martin found, but MLS was eager to have that story told. The result was the eight-part docuseries “Onside: Major League Soccer,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+.
“Internationally there is a sniffiness about the MLS. Like, ‘It’s football, but it’s not quite the football we know,’” Martin said. “What’s great about the show is that it shows that it’s actually pretty damn close to the Premier League. The players’ skill levels are going up every year.”
Now the league, which said it began discussing a documentary with Martin more than five years ago, is hoping MLS fans enjoy it too.
Following Major League Baseball, MLS becomes the second major sports league to strike a deal with Apple.
“We’re always trying to figure out new ways to connect both our existing fans to the sport and to the league, but also ways to attract new fans,” said Sola Winley, the MLS executive vice president overseeing the project. “This opportunity is perfect. Access that fans generally wouldn’t see about Major League Soccer is the way for fans to get closer to our game.”
Martin and Box to Box Films, which he co-founded with Oscar-winning producer James Gay-Rees, have done that before. The Emmy-winning series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” beginning its seventh season next month on Netflix, has been widely credited with re-popularizing open-wheel auto racing in the U.S.
“The audience was an aging audience that was literally dying off,” said Robert Clarke, the president and CEO of Clarke-Works, a motorsport consulting business, and a former executive at Honda Performance Development. “[Racing] series are starting to understand and appreciate that they have to be more to the fans than just running cars around circles on the racetrack.”
MLS, which opens its 30th season this weekend, is already experiencing record growth. Buoyed by the presence of Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest player in soccer history, the league drew more than 11.45 million regular-season fans last season, averaging 23,234 a game. And it figures to get an additional boost next year when the World Cup is played in the U.S. for just the second time.
But that popularity has not carried over to Apple TV+, which is entering the third season of a 10-year, $2.5-billion contract to stream every MLS regular-season and playoff game. Both Apple and MLS have been extremely guarded with audience numbers, but league commissioner Don Garber said approximately 1 million cumulative viewers tuned in for the league’s 14 games on many weekends last season. That works out to about 71,000 per match.
Martin’s docuseries, which will take Apple TV+ viewers behind the scenes with many of the league’s teams and players for the 2024 season, could change that.
“These kinds of docuseries that are based around teams and athletes and leagues are definitely creating brand awareness and creating interest because it’s storytelling,” said Joseph Recupero, a former sports documentary filmmaker who is now an associate professor in the sports media program at Toronto Metropolitan University. “You always need that crossover appeal for something to become really popular.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, which kept most people homebound and canceled live sports for a time, ushered in a golden age of sports documentaries, Recupero said, with “The Last Dance,” the 10-part Netflix-ESPN collaboration on Michael Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls, averaging 6.71 million viewers.
“People who never would have watched sports documentaries before were now gravitating over into this area because it was the one place to fill their appetite,” he said. “And it kind of took off. Documentaries and docuseries like ‘Formula One,’ that wouldn’t have had as big of an audience before.”
Platforms like Netflix and Apple TV+ are the perfect venue for narrative sports documentaries. For example, 35% of MLS fans are between 18 and 29, the demographic that most heavily watches streaming content.
“In 10 years I don’t know if we’ll even have these conventional broadcasters in sports,” Recupero said. “Sports will have gravitated all to streaming.”
Martin, who considers himself an entertainer and storyteller above all else, is certainly benefiting from that. In “Onside” he tells a nuanced tale of MLS and its personalities by spending quality time with the likes of Galaxy midfielder Riqui Puig, FC Cincinnati defender Matt Miazga and Philadelphia Union teenager Cavan Sullivan, who made his MLS debut last July, more than two months before his 15th birthday.
Capturing that fly-on-the-wall perspective took some work, especially at first.
“You have maybe half a day where everyone’s very conscious of the camera. You have to stop players kind of giving you the thumbs up,” Martin said. “You do get to that point [where they stop being so aware of the camera], particularly in sports, because what you realize is the day job — the winning of the MLS Cup or the winning of the Monaco Grand Prix — is far more important to those people than your documentary.”
With scripted series ‘Senna,’ Netflix — already home to popular F1 docuseries ‘Drive to Survive’ — deepens its relationship with the world’s most prestigious racing championship.
Most of the game footage was provided by MLS and IMG, who have partnered to produce the live match and studio programming Apple TV+ streams on MLS Season Pass. That freed Martin’s small crew of about a half-dozen to capture what happened away from the field.
“It’s such a great opportunity as a soccer fan to really be able to get in the dressing rooms, get in the boardrooms, really see what goes on,” said Martin, who also made documentaries about soccer superstars Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo as well as the World Surf League.
“Once MLS had done their 10-year deal with Apple, it just made a ton of sense, using this as a way to show a different perspective,” he continued. “So it became a collaborative effort of ‘What could this show be? What could it look like?’”
Now that the question has been answered, Winley, the MLS executive vice president, said the league will be monitoring feedback about the project while planning for a second series of episodes next winter.
“The stories can continue,” he said. “It’s rare that any production company would come into this with the hope of it being one season. So we’re hoping that it’s going to be a multi-season process. And I believe Apple is hoping the same.”
It sure beats watching two guys kick a ball in a park.
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