New York Red Bulls' Dax McCarty | AP Photo/Ted S. Warren M.L.S. gets its life-changing television moment

Back in September 2013, F.C. Dallas owner Dan Hunt referred to the league's next TV deal as "the life-changing moment in time."

Hunt had good reason to hope so: For Major League Soccer to truly compete with the other professional domestic leagues and soccer leagues around the world, it needed to dramatically increase its television revenue.

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That's about to happen.

The league is on the cusp of an eight-year deal with ESPN and Fox to televise both M.L.S. and U.S. World Cup qualifiers, for an annual fee of $70 million per year. That's a roughly four-fold increase going into the pockets of each M.L.S. franchise. And it doesn't include rights in other languages: Univision paid $9 million, or roughly a third of the total pie, in the last round. So there's more money coming.

Even with expansion increasing the number of teams, that's about $3 million more per team per season from English-language rights alone. To put that in perspective, the M.L.S. salary cap for each team last year was $2.9 million.

Perhaps the most surprising part of all this is how much this deal doesn't represent any real progress by the league in getting people to watch its product on television.

Ratings this past year were down significantly for the league on both ESPN and NBC, even with the latter often pairing M.L.S. matches with their more glamorous soccer Premier League broadcasts. The quality of play within the league was better than ever, and even its long-sturggling New York flagship team finally broke through and won a trophy.

Part of this comes from the league itself, which has repeatedly prioritized attendance over television, whenever the two come into conflict. The result has been, predictably, better and better through the turnstiles, but at the expense of eyeballs on television. This is probably best expressed this way: the league's championship final drew 505,000 viewers on ESPN, or less than a competitor at that timeslot, a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond.

There's been a sea change in the league's ability to keep its best domestic players, however: Clint Dempsey returned this summer, with the Seattle Sounders able to afford him because of their tremendous attendance. And Toronto F.C., one of the clear underperforming outfits in the league, just completed an aggressive one-two transfer punch, adding Jermain Defoe from Tottenham Hotspur and more to the point, American stalwart Michael Bradley from A.S. Roma.

In essence, Fox and ESPN are giving M.L.S. the money up front to do more of this. Hamstrung by low television ratings leading to tiny television deals, not only were M.L.S. clubs effectively priced out of competing for most elite players, they were losing their young talent to European clubs, and their veterans to Scandanivian clubs that could pay more for mid-level contributors.

A workaround, the league's retention fund process, was created to address this as surely as the designated player rule was created, then expanded, to allow owners who could self-fund star imports to do so. (See David Beckham and Thierry Henry for examples of this.)

Now, for the next eight years, doing things like this to help bring more talent into the league will be vastly easier for each team.

It's not an automatic thing that the ratings will follow. But as it stands right now, with the market for live sports at its highest-ever level, the biggest network players in the game were willing to gamble a ton of money on just the chance it might.