The first move Larry Berg made when he was asked about his vision for pursuing the MLS’ next media rights deal was to boot the question over to Don Garber.“As the incoming commissioner I’m allowed to kick it to the current commissioner to answer that question,” Berg said Tuesday during his introductory press conference at MLS headquarters in New York. To which Garber joked, “only for a few more months.”While the outgoing commish performed the requisite footwork with a brief paean to Apple TV (“we’re proud of the fact that every single one of our 600 games is televised like a national game, [and] we’re proud of the fact that we have global distribution”), Garber allowed that the future would be all about “leaning into the transformation and disruption of the media business.”Garber then flicked the question back to Berg, who “has got a lot of great ideas” about media. Berg, who earlier had said that he’d soon be embarking on a listening tour of the 30 MLS owners, acknowledged that substantive talks with would-be distributors likely won’t begin for another year to a year-and-a-half after he officially succeeds Garber on Jan. 1.“Since we have a little time before the next media deal, it’s about finding media partners that want to co-create the future with us,” Berg said. “It’s about co-creating; what’s interesting to them, what’s interesting to us. How can we change certain things for their benefit?”By way of an example, Berg gave a nod to the brief, but lucrative, breaks in the action that were introduced by FIFA in this year’s World Cup. “We obviously all discovered hydration breaks, which were interesting in many ways,” Berg said. (Here in the U.S., Fox made a bundle off the new advertising opportunity, while the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo decided against using the pauses to sell additional advertising units.)“My job is to sell the future and to paint what MLS can be,” Berg said, noting that he’d be talking up the new playoff system and the expanded Leagues Cup tournament to MLS’ media suitors. “I’m hoping to explain [these features] to people and get them excited about them. … If I can establish those relationships and they can engage—and I’ve been doing that already—then we’ll have a good time of it 12 to 18 months from now when we engage on the business side.”While the current rights deal with Apple TV still has some life in it—the pact expires in May 2029—the original 10-year, $2.5 billion streaming arrangement last fall was truncated by three years. At the time the contract was signed in 2022, Garber characterized the Apple deal as “transformational,” although some critics argued that placing nearly all of the league’s games behind a paywall would only serve to hamper its growth.As Apple TV is not measured by Nielsen, no consensus view of the state of MLS’ “TV” audience has coalesced. Before the World Cup kicked off earlier this summer, MLS said it had averaged 7.9 million live match viewers per week across all platforms through the first three months of the current season, a cumulative figure that has no analog in Nielsen’s standardized measurement scheme, which captures average-minute deliveries across individual matches.