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Sports EdgeMACALLAN 1926May 18, 20262 min readAd-free
MLS Expansion Fee Hits $200M as Sacramento, St. Louis Eye Final Two Slots
League sets formal bid deadline while Inter Miami's Messi premium reshapes franchise valuations across the table.
Sports Edge deskSports Edge · Huang GoodmanSource: Fox Sports ↗
In plain words
MLS franchise entry fee doubles to **$200M** as Messi's Miami premium resets league valuations and forces Sacramento, St. Louis to prove subscriber math, not sentiment.
28 teams
with franchise fees now starting at
$200 million
double the
$100 million
Minneapolis and Nashville paid in 2017
29th slot
remains officially open
Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber announced Thursday the league will expand to 28 teams with franchise fees now starting at $200 million, double the $100 million Minneapolis and Nashville paid in 2017. Sacramento Republic FC and a St. Louis ownership group—fronted by Enterprise Holdings heiress Carolyn Kindle Betz—will make formal presentations to the expansion committee by mid-December, with final votes expected by February 2025. The 29th slot remains officially open, though league insiders expect it stays dark until the Apple TV deal matures in 2032.
The fee jump reflects what one league executive called "the Messi tax"—not a literal surcharge, but the recalibration that happens when Inter Miami's enterprise value climbs 22 percent in twelve months to roughly $1.03 billion, per Sportico's latest audit. That puts Miami ahead of LAFC ($975 million) and Atlanta United ($850 million), despite Miami finishing 22nd in attendance last season. The delta is naming rights, kit deals, and international broadcast carriage suddenly willing to write checks they ignored in 2022. Sacramento's bid packet now has to explain how a 120-mile drive from San Francisco generates that kind of centrifugal pull without a Ballon d'Or winner on the roster.
St. Louis already cleared the hardest part: a $458 million downtown stadium that opened in August, fully privately financed, with 22,500 seats sold out for aUSL Championship match against Pittsburgh. The Kindle Betz family put in $70 million of equity; the rest is a construction loan from Commerce Bank that gets refinanced the day MLS says yes. Sacramento's math is messier—$300 million stadium in the Railyards district, no shovel in dirt, predicated on an MLS award that has now been "imminent" for six years. The expansion committee knows the difference between a tenant and a landlord.
What matters for the other 27 owners is not the stadium but the unit economics Sacramento and St. Louis bring to the Apple deal. MLS gets $250 million annually from Apple through 2032, structured as a revenue share once subscriber additions hit agreed thresholds. Sacramento's pitch is 1.6 million people in the metro, zero Big Four competition, and a Hispanic population share (22 percent) that indexes high on MLS Season Pass uptake in early Apple data. St. Louis counters with 2.8 million metro, a shuttered NFL team that left 300,000 lapsed season-ticket accounts, and Betz's willingness to write an opening-day check that clears before the lawyers finish the operating agreement. The committee has seen enough vaporware; they will vote for the bid that wires fastest.
Watch the December committee meeting for any language about international expansion—Mexico City remains the 30th-team whisper, though Garber has never said the number out loud. Sacramento's stadium groundbreaking, if the vote goes their way, would likely happen Q2 2025 to hit a 2027 kickoff. St. Louis could play 2026 if they wanted, but the league prefers rolling launches to maximize Apple's algorithmic launch windows. And keep an eye on Nashville SC's ownership—rumored to be taking quiet calls from private equity platforms sizing MLS exposure now that the $200 million comp is public. The bid process ends in February. The repricing starts the day after.
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