TikTok Partners with MLS for Experimental Live Stream Event

TikTok is expanding its sports content offerings by partnering with Major League Soccer (MLS) to live-stream Inter Miami’s upcoming finals match. The unique aspect of this broadcast is its focus on a single player: Lionel Messi. The “Player Spotlight” cam will provide fans with continuous coverage of Messi’s movements throughout the match, marking the first time TikTok has streamed an entire live soccer game with this player-centric approach.

TikTok has become a hub for sports discussions, particularly among younger audiences. In 2024 alone, users have posted over 7 million soccer-related videos. While this Messi-centered stream is simply an experiment to test how these kinds of streams would perform, it aligns with TikTok’s strengths in short-form and highly focused content.

The live stream will be available on TikTok accounts for both MLS and Inter Miami, starting five minutes before kickoff. While streams like this have been tested before by platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the costs were hard to justify. By focusing on a single player, Tiktok aims to test whether or not this player-focused method of streaming a game would be more successful (and, in the long term, more affordable).

This stream is almost guaranteed to bring in a wave of new MLS and Messi fans, and could further strengthen TikTok’s appeal to sports fans in general if they can promise future streams for other games or sports. For now, it’s simply a matter of seeing how the experiment plays out with this initial test stream.