Don Garber and MLS: 25 Years Rewriting the Playbook

In August 1999, Don Garber stepped into the role of MLS Commissioner, taking over from Doug Logan.

What he inherited was a league in crisis.

Major League Soccer was only 3 seasons old, but it was already in trouble. The interest generated from the 1996 World Cup had died off, and so had the crowds, while a number of the clubs were in financial difficulty, and 2 would soon fold.

Some people thought Garber was mad to take the job and doubted MLS would last a decade.

But fast forward 25 years, and MLS is looking like a success story. A 30 club competition watched around the world, producing players signed by top clubs in Europe and South America, and attracting star players in their final years.

This is the work of Don Garber, and in this article, I’m going to look into how he did it.

Who is Don Garber?

Born in 1957, Don Garber made his name in the NFL. He spent 16 years there, helping the league expand internationally. When he was hired by MLS, it was a surprise to many. Afterall, the guy knew nothing about soccer. What he did know about though, was business, marketing, and selling sport in a crowded marketplace.

When he was brought in, MLS teams were playing at cavernous NFL stadiums that were half empty, fans were scattered, and TV networks barely talked about soccer, treating it as mainly filler content. Garber made a few early changes for the better, such as scrapping the old shootout system and introducing the Supporter’s Shield, but more time and change was needed to turn the ship around.

By 2002 Tampa Bay Mutiny and Miami Fusion had both folded, and the league was down to just 10 teams. Investors held an emergency meeting at a Colorado ranch belonging to Phil Anschutz, who had invested in numerous MLS clubs, to decide whether it was worth continuing.

Don Garber convinced them that it was, but only if they rewrote the playbook, and let him do things his way. This is the kind of man Don Garber is.

Stadiums and Soccer United Marketing (SUM)

One of the first things Garber wanted to change was the stadiums. MLS clubs needed their own homes.

Columbus Crew had opened their own stadium in 1999, but they were a lonely pioneer in that regard, and Garber knew that had to change. If clubs were to be stable, they needed control over everything from naming rights to parking charges, not to mention the enhanced enjoyment of fans in smaller capacity venues which created a more concentrated atmosphere.

This took time of course, but it was a message he spread early, and  now, more than 20 MLS clubs play in soccer specific stadiums, giving their fans a real home and the team a rootedness and sense of place.

Then there is Soccer United Marketing (SUM). This was a real masterstroke.

Launched in 2002, SUM took control of commercial rights for MLS and US Soccer. This meant the two could be bundled together when broadcasters and sponsors came knocking and gave Garber real bargaining power. He wasn’t going cap in hand asking for MLS games to be broadcast, he sold them alongside US national team matches and international tournaments.

It wasn’t a huge financial boost at first, but it was enough to keep the lights on and give MLS some breathing room to grow.

These two pillars are what everything else was built on.

Expansion Teams and Designated Players

It would have been tempting to rush expansion, but Garber took it slow.

They focussed on getting the foundations right to begin with, stabilising what was already there. It wasn’t until 2005 that more clubs began to join MLS, and even then it was a slow but steady flow.

When Toronto joined the league in 2007, it coincided nicely with the introduction of the Designated Player Rule, otherwise known as the David Beckham Rule, which Garber pushed for. There was a sense of excitement about Major League Soccer again, and the eyes of the world were looking America’s way.

A year later and the San Jose Earthquakes were reactivated with a ready made fanbase, and in 2009 the Seattle Sounders became an expansion team, attracting 30,000+ fans from day one thanks to their being a reincarnation of a previously existing club.

The combination of those early days global stars like Beckham, Denilson, Robbie Keane, Freddie Ljungberg and Thierry Henry, and expansion teams popping up all over the US, attracted lots of attention to the league, and therefore, lots more sponsorship money.

Success breeds success, as they say, and despite plateauing for a time, soon, bigger players saw the benefits of joining MLS and more investors wanted to build an MLS club of their own. By 2025, the likes of Lionel Messi, Son Heung-Min, and Jordi Alba were choosing MLS over other leagues, with expansion clubs paying $500 million to join rather than the $30 million it cost 20 years earlier.

Garber played it brilliantly.

Youth and Academies

All the while, bubbling away in the background, MLS were incentivising clubs to invest heavily in their academies.

He knew that league couldn’t survive solely on imported names, the US needed big names of their own. The likes of Tim Howard and Landon Donovan were great marketing for American soccer, and home grown players breaking into the first team did a number of things:

• Increased local support and engagement (ticket sales, merchandise, etc)
• Inspired more youngsters to get involved in soccer, expanding the talent pool
• Grew the reputation of America as a place where soccer was a serious sport, and MLS was therefore a serious league
• Made lots of money for clubs, and therefore the league, if and when they were sold abroad

This is where the Homegrown Player Rule came in. It gave young talent a pathway to the first team without needing to go through the draft, and without counting towards the salary cap. So the player they have produced is protected from competition, and can be used without impacting their salary cap. They also count as domestic players regardless of their nationality, freeing up international slots. There’s a lot of flexibility there.

The return on investment for homegrown players is potentially massive, so academies are economically viable for the clubs.

Media Deals and Apple

This was an area Garber knew a lot about, so much of what he did with the league structure, expansion teams, and rule changes was done with the end goal of boosting media revenue.

For years, MLS bounced around traditional networks, often with patchy coverage, but it was an source of income for the league nevertheless. From the first deal with ESPN for about $8 million a year, the upgraded production values that came when moving to NBC for $12 million a year, and the the split deal with ESPN, FOX and Univision that brought in $90 million a year. It was messy though.

Then, in 2022, Garber announced the deal he had made with AppleTV. A 10 year $2.5 billion partnership, and a deal that made MLS the first ever league to go all in with a single streaming platform.

It meant global access for fans wherever they were, of every single game, all in one place with no local restrictions. However, it didn’t go as well as was hoped, with far fewer people signing up for a season pass than had watched when games were still shown on ESPN.

However, at the time of writing that deal still has 7 years to run, and Garber insists this is the right direction for MLS. Only time will tell if this one will be another masterstroke or a mistake. The jury is still out on the Apple deal.

MLS After Garber Retires

Don Garber’s contract runs until 2027, by which time he will be 70 years old. He will have been commissioner for nearly 3 decades, and almost the entirety of Major League Soccer’s existence.

Given his age and the fact that MLS has never really known life without him, it’s fair to wonder what happens when Don Garber finally retires and leaves MLS.

The next commissioner will inherit a league with a stable base and a healthy financial situation, but there will still be plenty of challenges. Their job won’t just be to keep MLS from dropping off, but to grow it even further.

Soccer is a global sport, and most of the rest of the world works to the same calendar, for example. Will MLS move in this direction? How will the new commissioner increase Major League Soccer’s global audience and turn that into bigger profits? Can they turn it into a destination league for star players in their prime, rather than star players looking to extend their careers into their late 30s and early 40s?

Garber’s successor won’t have to face a league in crisis, but they will have very big shoes to fill if they want to make an impact. The post Garber era will probably take a lot of getting used to, but after everything he has done to get the league to where it is now, it has every chance of going from strength to strength.