With Charlotte FC agreement, MLS on local TV is back (on tape delay) | OneFootball

After a two-plus year absence, MLS regular season matches are back on local TV. Sort of.

Charlotte FC announced an agreement on Monday to show the remaining 30 games on its MLS schedule locally over the airwaves on TV64, with matches to be shown on a roughly two-day tape delay.

Saturday matches will be shown at 11 p.m. Monday night local time. Sunday matches on Tuesday at 11, Wednesday matches on Friday, and so on. Here's the full schedule through the end of April:

March and April Re-Air Schedule:

Apple TV still retains all MLS live broadcast and streaming rights worldwide (With Fox owning a much smaller simulcast package in the United States and TSN/RDS doing the same in Canada.) But MLS rules allow for such rebroadcasts so long as they come 48 hours or more after the match.

Charlotte appears to be the first club to reach such an agreement for regular season games, but it continues a trend of some teams trying to find creative ways to get more local exposure. For example, several MLS teams in the Coachella Valley Invitational preseason tournament this year had their games shown live on local Fox affiliates.

Soccer has a considerable history of TV rebroadcasts in the United States and elsewhere. On BBC in the United Kingdon, Match of the Day still shows one condensed Premier League match and extended highlights of the day's other games on a same-day, late-night rebroadcast schedule.

In the United States, Premier League highlights were available exclusively on tape delay as recently as the 1990s, and in the 1970s and 1980s, Soccer Made in Germany showed tape-delayed Bundesliga highlights to PBS viewers.