Sporting KC
How to Save Money on MLS Season Pass
If you are paying full price for MLS Season Pass you are doing it wrong. Let us help you save a little or a lot on watching soccer.
If you want to watch Major League Soccer and Sporting Kansas City in 2024, Apple’s MLS Season Pass is a must have. Sure, you can catch a stray game here or there on ESPN, FS1, FOX, ABC and so on, but all the games are on MLS Season Pass. No blackouts.
There are games each week not behind the paywall, but if you want to catch every single game from a team you support, or the entire league, this is your only option.
Plus, love it or hate it, the entirety of Leagues Cup with the Liga MX teams, is on Season Pass as well.
The $99.99 price point can be a tough pill to swallow for some fans. However, there is a quick way to save $20 off that price and it’s by having Apple TV+. More on ways to get that free below.
But first, remember if you are a season ticket member to any of the leagues 29 clubs, your MLS Season Pass is included in your membership. You already paid for it by buying tickets, contact your season ticket member rep if you are having troubles.
Is there a Free Trial?
No. You have to pay to unlock the full benefits of MLS Season Pass (or be a season ticket member). The “free trial” would be things like MLS 360, the whip around show that desperately needs to learn from the NFL’s Red Zone. It has commercials, but it’s not behind the paywall. Also, around 40 percent of all the games aren’t behind the paywall either. Outside of that, you’ve got to pay.
Also, T-Mobile isn’t bringing back free MLS Season Pass this year, so that’s out the window if you were waiting on that.
Save Me $20!!
If you are an Apple TV+ subscriber, you get a $20 discount and only have to pay $79.99 for a full season of MLS Season Pass. There is literally no reason, if you plan to buy the full season anyways, not to save the $20. You don’t have to pay the $9.99 monthly fee either.
There are numerous free trials or ways to get free trials that will unlock that $20 discount. Apple does a free 7-day trial, you can buy an Apple product and get Apple TV+ for a year and on and on.
But the best way to get Apple TV+ right now is through Best Buy (unless you are entitled to a free year some other way). Best Buy is literally giving away a three-month trial of Apple TV+ with no strings attached. All you have to do is cancel before your three months are up to avoid the $9.99 per month cost. It’s good for new or qualified returning subscribers.
So, if you are an MLS or Sporting KC sicko like we are here at the KC Soccer Journal, there is no reason to not go save $20 on MLS Season Pass and get yourself three-months of Apple TV+ in the process. Then you can catch up on shows you may have missed like Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, For All Mankind or any other number of shows and/or movies.
Bonus Tip: Family Sharing
I am not an Apple product user. No iPhone. No iPad. Judge me, I don’t care. Last year, when I setup MLS Season Pass, I did so through my own account and made myself primary. But because I didn’t do it on an iPhone, I wasn’t able to take advantage of a great feature: Apple Family Sharing.
If someone in your household can be the primary account holder that has an Apple device, like my For the Glory KC podcast co-host and wife, then you can share with up to five other family members. It’s ridiculous that you can’t share without an Apple product, but just a heads up for the future. Especially if you share season tickets on one account with multiple people. This is a must to setup if one of you has an Apple product.
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Nothing wrong with sharing various ways to access the league’s broadcasts, but I object to the idea that “you’re doing it wrong” by simply wanting to access the product you want and no more.
I have no use for AppleTV. I, and quite a few other people, can’t be a STM (not to mention if you can’t afford $100, you can’t afford STM status; that’s not a way to save money). Free trial hacks only work once because you have to create an account and companies remember that you already did it (for example, I already had my “free Apple TV trial” when I bought an Apple device once and they’re not going to offer me another one).
I briefly tried the Apple Family sharing thing last year and stopped, because it turns out it’s more invasive than it sounds. It isn’t just as simple as “you get to share AppleTV”, it essentially links your devices and accounts with other people in a fairly deep way, which I wasn’t comfortable with. Maybe fine if if’s your kids/spouse. Not as cool if it’s a broader set of people.
Personally I’d rather pay $100/year straight-up for just what I want, than jump through marketing hoops, subscribe to content I don’t want, and/or give away my personal information/data unnecessarily. I just fundamentally am uninteresting in being a marketing pawn to save pocket change (considered over the course of the year).
There’s nothing wrong with pursuing other avenues if they work for you (financially or otherwise), but it’s also not wrong to keep things simple and just pay for a product you want and value with no strings attached. As you yourself argued when Season Pass first came out, $100 for an entire sports season (including playoffs) is already a rather good value, given that two years ago I’d be spending at least $70 for a month of pseudo-cable just to watch a couple playoff games.
I’m a little confused. I’ve done multiple free trials with Apple TV+ (not that there aren’t reasons they might disqualify you that I’m unsure on). I suppose there is the slight added hassle of cancelling the trial, but you save $20. That just seems like good sense. In terms of them having your info by signing up for Apple TV+, don’t they have it if you sign up for Season Pass? It’s through the exact same login for me…
As far as the Family Sharing, I didn’t mean to imply you should be sharing with people outside your family (and I don’t think I did, but the season tickets on one account I suppose could be read that way). I didn’t read it, but I suspect that is against their terms of service (not that people won’t do it, look at password sharing crackdowns on other streaming services).
I just don’t see why you wouldn’t want to save $20 if you can grab a free trial (even if you literally watch nothing on Apple TV+). Sure, you and I can afford to spend the $20, but that extra discount might be the impetus to push someone else over the line. Lots of folks are living a lot closer to $0 in their bank accounts.
These feels argumentative for the sake of being argumentative.
My first sentence already addresses most of your comment. I should have just left that as my entire comment. I never said it was wrong to do (or write about) any of these things; I objected to the claim that it was inherently wrong to NOT do any of them.
Personally, the price and any cost cutting measures are irrelevant because it’s a bad product. Regardless of what you pay, the schedule is AGAIN too congested making it impossible to follow more than one team live across the season. I’m not surprised Apple didn’t do anything about that very vocal widespread critique from last season, but it still may end up being the cherry on top of my GTFO sundae.
ETA: I want to watch whole matches live, mls 360 doesn’t do it for me. This wasn’t a problem for MLS before Apple, it shouldn’t be now.
Yeah, I’m pretty disappointed in the non-adapted schedule.
There’s still a lot to love about the package overall, as I remind myself every time I can’t watch my local hockey team, my faraway hockey team gets buried on a random cable channel instead of on the league-wide package, or I look ahead to having to subscribe to cable-like to watch hockey playoffs (for almost the same cost as a full year of MLS).
But I really thought they’d use the first season as a learning experience and adapt, not blow off fan feedback.
The irony of this thread is that I decided not to renew Season Pass up front. I’m just feeling too burned out by SKC (and the league) right now and want to see how the start of the season plays out. Too many other things going on to dive right back into being a sucker again. If everything clicks, great, I’ve been a fan too long to care about a brief bandwagon lapse. I’ve done my time as a supporter through thick and thin. Will still be watching game highlights and reading recaps, etc. Just not going to build my life around matchdays this spring.
You both make good points about Apple not adapting.
I meant to write a X # of ways to fix Season Pass in the offseason, but as you can see I get tied up writing a million other things. That’s probably one that should have made the cut.
Quickly off the top of my head
I’m sure there is more, but gotta get something done today 😀
Agree with all of these. I’d build on the commenter thing by assigning one person to cover each club, then having the broadcast teams be a pair of those people. That way you’d get informed perspective from both sides but you also wouldn’t get the homer effect (or rather it’d be balanced).
I disagree about the (mostly) unified start times. The NFL has done this for years — unless you’re one of the few teams playing the 3:25 pm slot (usually a west coast team is involved), the Thursday, Sunday, or Monday night game, you kick off at noon central / 1 pm eastern. No one buying NFL Ticket is complaining that all the games start at the same time or overlap too much. MLS does, 7:30 local time kick offs on Saturdays, unless you get the odd Sunday or midweek match. That puts the eastern teams starting at 6:30 KC time, SKC at 7:30, and the west coast games starting at 9:30 KC time when most of us are home or post-gaming at CMP. I genuinely don’t think this is an issue at all. And now that you can multicast multiple matches at once, do a split screen if you really want to watch someone besides SKC.
For me personally, I hope every other team in MLS loses every game they play, so I could give a rip unless they’re playing SKC. I do sometimes watch the late west coast game but rarely stay awake the whole match.
I suppose this is a good point about the NFL, but I’d counter that by saying they have a Thursday, Sunday and Monday night games. If MLS had those consistently so you can watch more games, I think that’d be better. OR have two start times so you can watch the complete first or 2nd game.
I don’t like watching the first half of a game then going to SKC and then joining the other games in progress.
If they had an NFL Redzone style show, that might alleviate some of that concern.
My very sweet husband re-upped our subscription not realizing how checked out on MLS/NWSL I’ve become this offseason. I had literally no idea until yesterday the season had already started or that Sporting’s first match is today. After the whole Wilkinson debacle I found I didn’t want to see or engage with anything having to do with the team. I wasn’t expecting that, and am not sure if it’s something I either can or want to come back from. It’s really sad and difficult coming to terms with the fact that something that was so important and meaningful for a decade may no longer fit in my life in a healthy way.
Thanks for the tip! I didn’t renew my season tickets for this season so I lost the free Season Pass access, so was debating whether I wanted to pay for it or not. This helps