Atlanta United FC, in just its second season, has set league attendance records, gained more Twitter followers than any other franchise, reached this Saturday’s MLS Cup against the Portland Timbers, and established a local tradition recognized in trend stories from national outlets ranging from the New York Times to The Undefeated.

Those nearly one million Twitter followers are emblematic of MLS’s league-wide momentum. The audience growth by MLS social channels is nearly 1,000 percent over the past five years. The 613 million video views across all platforms in 2018 represent a 75 percent jump over the prior season.

With regard to innovation and experimentation, MLS SVP of media Seth Bacon said the league is “open for business.” Three franchises have broadcast rights deal with the YouTube TV streaming platform while both the Chicago Fire and the MLS Live out-of-market package both moved to ESPN+. (MLS Live in Canada is on streaming partner DAZN.) Twitter streams weekly matches for a national audience.

“I’ll use this analogy but it’s not perfect—radio built baseball, television built the NBA and NFL, and we’ve really grown up in a digital age,” said MLS Digital SVP and GM Chris Schlosser. “So 10, 15, 20 years ago, if you wanted to find information about soccer, it wasn’t being covered by the major broadcasters. You basically had to migrate online, so I think we organically grew up in a native digital sense on message boards, on Reddit, on social media. That’s where our fans have flocked.”

MLS will celebrate its 25th birthday on Dec. 17, marking a quarter-century since its 1993 launch. The league remains young, and so do its fans. A 2017 study conducted by Magna Global and published in Sports Business Journal reported on the average age of TV viewers for each major league and how that changed compared to 10 years earlier. Nine associations were included—MLB, the NFL, the NHL, the NBA, MLS, the ATP (men’s tennis), the WTA (women’s tennis), NASCAR, and the PGA Tour—and MLS had the youngest fan base with an average age of 40.

Sports like NASCAR and the NHL didn’t appear to attract many new, younger viewers, with the average age increasing nine and seven years, respectively, over the decade. MLS, on there other hand, only went up by one year.

That data informs the outlets where MLS is choosing to produce content and how those stories are presented. The league assembled an in-house development team to relaunch the MLS app. The league’s demographics skew heavy on mobile usage and interest in video, so they built around those ideas. Since the app’s relaunch in May, video views have gone up 35 percent. With support from WSC Sports’ automated clip production, the league and clubs created more than 20,000 videos this season. Schlosser said the viewership metrics were “off the charts.”

And the product keeps evolving. Recently, MLS added a Fanatics integration to let users buy merchandise through the league’s app. “Glad to have it done by Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” Schlosser quipped.

“Importantly, we’ve been able to do releases every month of new features,” Schlosser said. “That is something we just could never do when we were outsourcing development.”

On the horizon are new opportunities. MLS is in the midst of a partnership with R/GA Ventures on a league-specific tech accelerator. Opta is the league’s official data supplier, but that contract expires at the end of the year, Schlosser said, so MLS will have to deliberate whether to renew the agreement or seek a new partner. The landscape in the U.S. has changed this year with the expansion of legalized sports betting, and official data has become a source of revenue already for the NBA, the NHL, and MLB.

Bacon has described the league’s approach to innovation as being “aggressive” and being willing to “throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.” The mandate for now is to broaden the reach of MLS through new partners; matches are currently available in 170 countries. When Facebook carried its weekly streaming games last season, Bacon said the MLS tried about 55 new features, from camera zoom to graphics and picture-in-picture. The real-time feedback of viewership data and comments helped MLS react quickly.

Executives have been bullish about its current multi-year agreement with Twitter, calling the social media company an outstanding partner. The league has had some conversations with FloSports as well, with that streaming platform carrying a recent exhibition between the Chicago Fire and Bayern Munich of the Bundesliga to honor retiring German soccer legend Bastian Schweinsteiger.

“Everyone here wants to be part of the growth story that is this league,” Bacon said. “This thing is a rocket ship that is just waiting to explode off the launch pad, and everything we do … is about how to do we make this bigger, better, and make our content and our story available to as many people in as many places as we possibly can.”

MLS built a new broadcast center in Manhattan to help manage the delivery of games, and Bacon said it continues to explore how technological infrastructure can streamline the process and improve the quality while maintaining a certain trademark MLS presentation.

The league continues expanding, with new teams being added in at least four straight years: Atlanta United in 2017, LAFC in 2018, Cincinnati in 2019, and Miami and Nashville in 2020. (Those additions will bring the league to 26 teams.) Both Bacon and Schlosser credit commissioner Don Garber and president of MLS Business Ventures Gary Stevenson as driving the spirit of innovation and experimentation.

According to Bacon, “These are two people who have said that ‘We know that, we as a league being 24 years old, we have to take really big exponential jumps when we make jumps. It can’t be incremental step change along the way.’”