In a country where the Big Four leagues demand so much attention, some decision makers feared that the World Cup in the United States could be a threat to other sports.
Major League Baseball, however, appears to have treated the tournament as an opportunity, not an obstacle.
Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, by far. About 1.5 billion people are estimated to have watched the final in New Jersey last Sunday, where Spain beat a woeful Argentina. But in truth, North American franchise sports are eons ahead of it in terms of how they commercialise their product.
The World Cup, therefore, was seen as proving ground for FIFA to show how they could monetise soccer like Americans do – the organisation creamed billions of dollars from the secondary ticketing market, introduced ‘hydration breaks’ to smuggle in more TV adverts, and sold everything that wasn’t nailed down, from $1m corporate hospitality suites to patches of the actual turf on which the final was played.
Most supporters, particularly those from Europe and South America, were scandalized by how nakedly commercial the tournament was. But financially, with FIFA projecting record revenues of $15bn for their current financial cycle, it is hard to argue that it was anything other than a riotous success.
And the latest behind-the-scenes details have shed some light on how MLB has shared in that success.
MLB worked with FIFA to maximise World Cup benefit
Of course, MLB is currently gripped by its own governance issues, with owners trying to introduce a hard salary cap of $245m and facing huge pushback from players and agents.
But the Scotland fans who piled into Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox were probably blissfully unaware of that, and many of them are said to have developed a fondness for baseball during their trip to the United States to watch the World Cup, where they failed to make it out of the group.
On 14 June, the Red Sox even organised Scottish Heritage Day, and the World Cup final was shown on the jumbotron and Yankees Stadium a month later.
And a new report from Sports Business Journal details how MLB have actively capitalised on the World Cup in the US.
“Whether it’s MLBx: 3-on-3 or something else, for us to take some of the findings and insights that we are hopefully going to gather coming out of the World Cup of where we’ve seen fanbases leaning in in specific markets to see where that could help drive or inform some of (our) thinking,” MLB’s chief marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler told the outlet.
“Why would we not want to capitalize on the audience that is here in our clubs’ backyards to really leverage that and target those fans to experience what it means to be at a baseball game?”
“Our clubs have been really nimble.”
Also detailed in the report was how MLB began discussion with FIFA two years ago about how best to work together to avoid conflicts in the season, allowing teams to work to capitalise on the World Cup rather than cannibalize its audience.
FIFA and MLB also worked together on ticket sales, promoting each others’ gamedays through adverts on their respective ticketing platforms. Similarly, on the TV front, MLB capitalised on lead-ins from big-ticket World Cup matches.
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