Don Garber has been running Major League Soccer since 1999. He's watched it go from a fragile 10-team experiment to a 30-club operation with purpose-built stadiums, nine-figure valuations, and Lionel Messi. Now, with the World Cup generating the kind of ratings that rival NFL playoff games, he believes the window the league has spent 25 years preparing for has finally opened.
"The World Cup has over-delivered on everyone's expectations," Garber told The Financial Times. "It showed there's a huge market here."
The question — and Garber knows this better than anyone — is what MLS actually does with it.
MLS 3.0: What It Actually Means
The league's next phase isn't about adding more teams or signing the next designated player. Garber is calling it "MLS 3.0", and the core of it is competitive legitimacy. That starts with the calendar. MLS is ditching its February-to-December schedule, running a shortened sprint season in 2025 before transitioning to a summer-to-spring format that aligns with the rest of world football. It's a structural shift that affects transfer windows, player recruitment, and how the league fits into the global game.
New stadiums are coming in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Miami. Roster rules are being loosened so clubs can move faster in the transfer market. Robert Lewandowski is heading to Chicago Fire. Antoine Griezmann recently scored in a friendly. Garber says more World Cup players will follow.
For anyone tracking MLS futures or team valuations, the roster flexibility changes matter. Clubs that can actually compete in Concacaf's Champions Cup — and potentially the Club World Cup — become materially different propositions to those that couldn't. Eighteen MLS clubs already rank in the global top 50 by valuation. That number should move if the product on the pitch catches up.
The Messi Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Messi is 39. He's the leading scorer at this World Cup as of early July. Nobody's talking retirement right now, but Miami's front office clearly is — quietly. Garber insists the club has planned its business model for the post-Messi era, pointing to the new Nu Stadium, the "Herons" brand identity, and the Mas family's broader vision. The idea is that signing Messi proved Miami could attract elite talent; the next signature should be easier to justify to the next star's agent.
Whether that holds up is genuinely unclear. Inter Miami's Apple TV viewership numbers, merchandise sales, and global social following are all Messi-dependent in ways that can't be fully offset by brand strategy. If he walks away and the replacement is a solid but unspectacular 28-year-old, the drop-off in attention will be real.
On the Apple TV deal itself, Garber is candid. The original MLS Season Pass — a standalone subscription behind a separate paywall — didn't work. "We were talking to the same people: our superfans," he admitted. Since eliminating the separate subscription and folding MLS into the broader Apple TV offering alongside F1, viewership has risen sharply. The lesson: the league needed reach more than it needed a niche revenue stream.
The harder structural problem is player development. Pay-to-play youth football in the US remains a barrier that no amount of Messi mania fixes. Garber acknowledges it openly — entry costs for families, expensive travel, coaching fees — and points to MLS academy systems as free at the elite level. But the bottom of the pyramid still costs money, and that filters out talent before it ever gets seen. US Soccer's "US Way" framework is meant to create a coherent development pathway from recreational level up. Whether it works won't be visible for another decade.
"You're not going to launch a programme and five months later have a player starting for the national team," Garber said. "It's one foot in front of the other."
That's probably the most honest sentence in the entire interview.
