"We proved that we are a soccer nation over the last month." That's outgoing MLS Commissioner Don Garber, and he's not just blowing smoke on his way out the door.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup ran through the United States like a commercial freight train — packed stadiums, strong TV numbers, mainstream attention that American football hasn't consistently commanded before. The U.S. men's team got knocked out in the round of 16 by Belgium, but the tournament itself did exactly what the league needed it to do: validate football's place in the American sports conversation.
The billion-dollar clubs are already here
Five MLS clubs — Inter Miami, Los Angeles FC, LA Galaxy, Atlanta United, and New York City FC — are now valued above $1 billion according to Forbes. That's nowhere near the top of European football, but it puts them level with a chunk of established Premier League sides. The gap is closing, not widening.
Garber's confidence also has a hard commercial logic behind it. Apple's current broadcasting deal is worth roughly $250 million per year through 2029. League executives are already targeting the next contract at $400–500 million annually — a figure that would start genuinely encroaching on the Premier League's U.S. broadcast revenue.
Lionel Messi's arrival at Inter Miami in 2023 rewired how the world perceived MLS overnight. Global eyeballs, sold-out stadiums, kit sales. But Messi won't play forever, and the league knows it can't build a long-term commercial empire on one man's sunset tour. The World Cup gives them something more durable to work with — a generation of American fans who watched football in their own backyard and liked what they saw.
The 1994 template, thirty years on
MLS was born from the momentum of the 1994 World Cup, and league officials are explicitly chasing that same effect now. If the post-1994 wave built a league from scratch, a post-2026 wave — with infrastructure, billion-dollar valuations, and a global streaming deal already in place — could do considerably more damage to the old European order.
Whether MLS ever genuinely surpasses the Premier League in total value is a long-term bet with a lot of moving parts. But Garber's assertion that the U.S. is now "the most valuable commercial market in the world" for soccer isn't bravado. It's a number that broadcasters and sponsors are already starting to price in.
