Landon Donovan has a simple theory: MLS owners are going to sit in their own stadiums during the World Cup, watch 80,000 fans lose their minds, and immediately start writing checks.
"They're going to look at it and say, 'Oh my god, look at this. I want this,'" Donovan told Front Office Sports. The argument is straightforward — exposure breeds ambition, and ambition (in ownership circles) usually ends in transfer fees. Whether that translates into actually signing players at the peak of their powers, rather than winding down from it, is the question MLS has been dodging for 30 years.
The perception problem is real
Donovan was unusually blunt about the league's image. "The problem is the perception still remains that the league is what it was before." He's right, and it's a stubborn one. MLS has genuinely improved — younger players, more tactical sophistication, competitive parity — but it's fighting against a decade of highlight packages built around 38-year-old Thierry Henry jogging through a snowstorm in Montreal.
The Messi effect at Inter Miami helped shift some of that. But one transcendent signing doesn't rewrite the league's reputation. It just gives people a reason to look up from their phones for a summer.
On the Apple TV deal — the one that buried MLS behind a second paywall and quietly strangled its casual viewership — Donovan was measured but clear. He relayed commissioner Don Garber's own post-mortem: "Putting it behind a second paywall proved to be the wrong idea." That's a rare admission from a league office. The NFL still airs games on NBC and Fox for a reason, and MLS hasn't earned the right to go full streaming yet. Casual fans don't seek out sports — they stumble into them on linear TV and get hooked.
USMNT and where the real money might be going
Donovan thinks the U.S. should not just escape their World Cup group — they should win it. From there, he sees a realistic path to the quarterfinals before hitting the "big boys." That's not blind optimism; the draw and home-crowd advantage make it defensible. A deep USMNT run would be rocket fuel for everything he's predicting about owner spending.
Away from MLS entirely, Donovan flagged the NWSL as the sharpest investment in American sports right now — "still relatively inexpensive" with a trajectory that mirrors where MLS was a decade ago. For anyone thinking about where growth edges actually live in U.S. soccer, that's the more interesting signal buried in this conversation.
His own investment in Lincoln City — via a connection to San Diego Padres minority owner Harvey Jabara — is a footnote, but a telling one. Even Donovan, the face of American soccer's MLS era, is putting money into the English pyramid. Make of that what you will.
