My 12-year-old son has a soccer-obsessed friend named Josh who doesn't know he's "lowkey" running a media enterprise.
Every day after school, Josh scrolls through a few dozen Telegram channels dedicated to soccer clips. Goals, skill moves, celebrations, tunnel footage. He pulls the best ones, edits them on his phone, layers on music and text, and posts them to TikTok. He's not unlike thousands of other kids, farming soccer content from unofficial channels and redistributing it to audiences that the original rights holders could never reach and rarely know exist.
Now, scale that up. Replace scrolling Telegram with an AI-powered licensing platform, and the TikTok page with a global e-commerce storefront. That's the business U.S. Soccer just locked in. Same instinct, enterprise infrastructure. And honestly, they should probably give Josh a call to advise on it (seriously, send me a note tim@stateofstreaming.com if you want to make a kid's dream come true).
Because with the World Cup just a few months away, the soccer rights race in America has never been louder. Apple is bundling MLS into a $2.5 billion bet and killing the Season Pass paywall. ESPN is expanding NWSL windows on the back of 72% viewership growth. FIFA's own streaming network is gearing up for the biggest tournament to hit North American soil in a generation.
The Part Everyone Missed
U.S. Soccer just renewed its agreement with Veritone to license its entire audiovisual archive, spanning both national teams, youth squads, and extended rosters. On the surface, it reads like a content management deal. AI-powered metadata tagging, searchability, e-commerce licensing. Standard press release language.
Look closer, though, and what U.S. Soccer actually built is a monetization engine that feeds off every broadcast window the rest of the soccer ecosystem is paying billions to secure.
Here's the math that nobody's doing.
Every time ESPN airs an NWSL match featuring national team players, it creates moments. Goals, celebrations, sideline reactions. Those moments enter the cultural record. Some go viral. Some end up in highlight reels. And some become the footage that a brand needs for a World Cup campaign two years down the road.
The rights holder paid for the live window. U.S. Soccer, with the right infrastructure in place, captures the residual value downstream. The footage already exists. There's no incremental production cost. And the margin profile on licensing archived content versus producing live broadcasts isn't even in the same conversation.
This is the feedback loop hiding in plain sight. More broadcast exposure creates more iconic moments. More iconic moments create more licensable content. And more licensable content creates revenue that sits entirely outside the rights deal itself. Apple is spending on MLS. ESPN is spending on NWSL. U.S. Soccer is clip-farming the aftermarket.
Dead Footage Walking
The catch is though, that most soccer organizations don't operate this way. Their archives sit in digital vaults, unsearchable, uncategorized, and therefore unsellable. A production house working on a Nike World Cup spot can't license a clip it can't find. An agency building a Coca-Cola activation around the US Men's National Team can't browse footage that was never tagged.
This is where AI stops being a buzzword and starts being a business model.
Veritone's metadata tagging converts dark inventory into discoverable, purchasable assets. Full matches, player interviews, pre-clipped highlights, multiple camera angles, all indexed and globally accessible to sports networks, ad agencies, producers, and film studios. The content has always been there, there just wasn't a great way to generate incremental revenue because it was hard (impossible) to access it at scale.
A simple way to think of it as the difference between owning a warehouse full of footage with no catalog versus running a storefront with a search bar. U.S. Soccer just chose the storefront.
The World Cup Supply Chain
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is on American soil. Matches across 16 host cities. And the demand for soccer content isn't theoretical. It's already here.
Telemundo has sold 90% of its Spanish-language World Cup ad inventory more than six months before kickoff, ad spend more than doubling from 2022. Nearly 60 advertisers are on board, including Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's. NBCUniversal is mounting its largest production ever, with all 104 matches airing live across linear and Peacock. Fox has locked in as the official media partner for Los Angeles, leveraging local coverage to amplify its national English-language broadcast. And Netflix, already holding Women's World Cup rights through 2031 in both the U.S. and Canada, is building an entire content ecosystem around the sport, producing docuseries and shoulder programming designed to turn tournament moments into year-round narratives.
Every one of those players needs footage. Historical clips for brand campaigns. Player highlights for docuseries. Cultural touchpoints that connect a 30-second spot to the emotion of a tournament moment. The demand for U.S. Soccer archival content is about to spike in ways the market hasn't priced in, and the buyers are already lining up.
Apple dropping the MLS paywall means more eyeballs on American soccer players. FIFA's streaming network is scaling its own distribution. And ESPN's expanded National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) coverage means more exposure for women's national team stars at a moment when that inventory carries outsized value.
"With women's sports, you can think of that as pristine beachfront real estate," said Shelley Stansfield, co-founder of Centriply, on the State of Streaming podcast. "High demand, low clutter, and you can stake your claim way before anybody else shows up."
The players feel it too. NWSL viewership is up 22% year over year. The league is expanding into Boston, Denver, and Atlanta. Championship matches are selling out 18,000-seat venues.
USWNT midfielder Rose Lavelle, now in her ninth year in the league, put it plainly: "It's not just a moment. It's here to stay, and it's just going to keep getting bigger and better every single year."
That's a licensing thesis: Every NWSL broadcast window on ESPN is minting archival content in an environment where brands are hungry for authentic women's sports moments and the supply is still thin. But that window won't stay empty forever. Women's volleyball is already following the same trajectory, with three pro leagues, marquee investors, and collegiate ratings that mirror the early NWSL growth curve. And so, beach umbrellas are popping up which means U.S. Soccer has an early-mover advantage on turning demand into a scalable licensing business before the rest of women's sports catches up.
Buried in the fine print of the Veritone deal is yet another revenue line that scales with every viral clip: IP enforcement across social media. As short-form soccer content explodes across TikTok and Instagram, unauthorized use of match footage is rampant (sorry, Josh - it's best you heard it from me). The ability to detect those clips and convert them into licensing revenue is essentially a royalty collection engine, one that gets more valuable as the sport gets more popular in America.
More exposure. More clips in the wild. More licensing opportunities, both voluntary and enforced.
The Pitch Looks Different From Here
The big realization I'm having is that we may have been scoring this game wrong. The sports media conversation tracks rights deals like box scores. Who paid what, for how long, on which platform. Those numbers matter. But they only tell you about the live window.
The aftermarket tells you where the compounding value lives. And right now, most organizations aren't equipped to capture it. Their archives are dark. Their licensing infrastructure is manual. Their content sits behind walls that nobody can search.
U.S. Soccer, for all the attention it doesn't command in the streaming trade press, just locked in the infrastructure to create and capture downstream value from every broadcast window, every viral moment, and every brand activation tied to the biggest sporting event to hit American soil in a generation.
Pay attention to the aftermarket, we are.
