While it may not have seemed it at the time, the 2015 USL Cup served as a watershed moment for the USL Championship.

Not only did the game serve as the first under the banner of USL Productions, it was also the first game in the league’s history to be aired on an ESPN platform.

Fast-forward three years and that night’s broadcast on ESPN3 could now be viewed as a portent of what was to follow as 2018 saw the United Soccer League and the Worldwide Leader in Sports strike a two-year agreement this past April that made the USL Championship one of the initial offerings on its new ESPN+ service.

Eight months on, the USL Championship stands alongside top domestic and international soccer competitions from around the world, boosting the league’s visibility across the United States to an unprecedented level. More than 450 games aired on the new service this year, while the league’s broadcast package on ESPN2, ESPNews and ESPNU expanded to include six regular-season games aired during the summer.

Perhaps most notably, the first year of the new partnership was capped by the first airing of the USL Cup on ESPN2 in the United States and ESPN International in more than 50 countries around the world, which gave the league’s championship game its broadest audience reach ever and provided a fitting platform for legendary forward Didier Drogba’s final professional bow in Phoenix Rising FC’s colors.

While the partnership with ESPN was a major step forward for the league, the role that USL Productions played in the Championship’s expanded visibility shouldn’t be underestimated. The USL’s partnership with Vista Worldlink – and the investment made in creating arguably the largest Remote Integration production structure currently operating worldwide – has been transformative for the league’s clubs, opening the door for local broadcast agreements in more than two-thirds of the USL Championship’s markets this past season.

Those agreements have created valuable revenue streams and brought USL Championship broadcasts to markets that boast a population of more than 84 million across the United States and Canada.