Craft beer is finding its way into the corners of U.S. sports, but no league is as saturated by it as Major League Soccer.

Ask the folks in MLS’s front office who the league’s official beer sponsor is, and they’ll emphatically respond “Heineken.” While it’s true that Heineken took over league-wide beer rights from Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD, -0.75% this year, it hasn’t changed the league’s stance that individual teams have the right to choose a local beer partner.

It’s why a Widmer Brothers banner flies in the Portland Timbers’ Providence Park and the Timbers’ logo graces bottles of Hefe. It’s why cans of Long Hammer IPA are readily available at CenturyLink field, thanks to a partnership between Redhook and the Seattle Sounders. It’s why Delaware’s Dogfish Head Brewing can set up a beer garden at PPL Park after signing on as a sponsor for the Philadelphia Union.

For craft brewers, an MLS partnership provides a footing on a professional sports landscape that generally treats them like third-class citizens. For MLS, it provides strong local ties to a league still building itself one boisterous market at a time. For both, it’s a way of tapping into a young audience that still evades most of their competitors.

At a time when Nielsen notes that viewers ages 21-34 make up less than 17% of baseball’s viewing audience and when A-B InBev itself admits that 44% of 21- 27-year-olds have never tried Budweiser, both MLS and craft beer see an opening. MLS broadcasts draw viewing audiences smaller than that of the Women’s National Basketball Association, but 51% of its viewers are age 34 or younger. Meanwhile, its average attendance of 19,149 last season beats the sub-18,000 average of both the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

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Meanwhile, craft brewers has long known that those same young MLS fans love their beer. According to Nielsen, millennials account for 35% of all beer consumption and are 26% more likely to drink a craft beer than the average U.S. beer drinker. They’re outdone only by Generation X, which drinks only 21% of all beer but is 28% more likely than the average beer drinker to grab a craft beer. Those two demographics overlap nicely with MLS, which makes it very easy for DC Brau in Washington, D.C., to brew a beer for D.C. United or for Unsacred Brewing in Utah or Big Al’s and Dick’s breweries in Seattle to brew beers targeting MLS support groups.

It’s also making other sports take notice. Kansas City-based Boulevard Brewing is Sporting KC’s official craft beer partner, but it also manages to get baseball’s Royals to make it a full-time beer sponsor at Kauffman Stadium as well. Gordon Biersch is brewing beer for the San Jose Earthquakes, but has served as a staple at Giants and 49ers games as well. With craft beer padding its sports resume, it became far easier for Oskar Blues to do the once-unthinkable and make its cans of craft beer a staple during Nascar events at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Craft beer still only accounts for 11% of all beer drunk in the U.S. by volume, and MLS still draws lower ratings than U.S. men’s national team and English Premier League broadcasts. However, each has a young, enthusiastic base, tremendous growth and a promising future. For both the sports and beer establishment, they’re rival models worth scouting.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.