As the final minutes ticked away in a disappointing 4-1 loss to Belgium on July 6 that knocked the U.S. men’s national team out of the World Cup, Fox play-by-play announcer John Strong made a direct plea to his television audience of 30 million Americans.

“If you’ve enjoyed what you’re seeing, well, support your local team,” Strong said from Seattle’s Lumen Field, packed with a sellout crowd of 66,925—more than double the average attendance of 31,000 across the Seattle Sounders’ first six Major League Soccer games this season at the same stadium. “This doesn’t have to be the last soccer you watch for the last four years. It’s a beautiful sport.”

Often an afterthought both among top-tier global soccer leagues and in the U.S. professional sports scene, MLS has long viewed this summer’s World Cup on U.S. soil as an inflection point for a new phase of growth, with help from Lionel Messi, the biggest star in the league’s history. On Sunday, the 39-year-old superstar will lead Argentina into the World Cup final against Spain while seeking to lock up the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer. On Wednesday, Messi’s Inter Miami will restart its season after MLS’s seven-week World Cup break.

League executives are confident the flurry of interest in soccer drummed up by this summer’s tournament will pay long-term dividends, just as the 1994 World Cup—also hosted by the U.S.—led to the creation of MLS in the first place. All 30 of the league’s clubs reportedly invested at least $500,000 in an advertising campaign that began this week with the tagline “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here,” and 22 teams are offering “first match on us” promotions, dangling free tickets to try to hook new fans.

“The World Cup can help build initial stages of fandom and awareness, and it’s our job to then convert that into habits day in and day out,” says Camilo Durana, MLS’s chief business officer. “I don’t think it’ll be something that’s simple to measure in the near term.”

What has been easy to track is the growth in MLS teams’ valuations. Earlier this year, Sporting Kansas City—playing in one of the smallest markets in major North American sports—sold for roughly $700 million, and the league’s 30 franchises are now worth $731 million on average, up from $185 million a decade ago. MLS is also home to seven of the world’s 30 most valuable soccer teams, with Inter Miami, at $1.35 billion, topping two NHL teams and narrowly trailing a handful of MLB franchises.

At the same time, some bankers and investors around the sport believe MLS’s valuations have grown too fast to be justified by franchises’ fundamentals. Much as the U.S. national team continues to have high hopes of a deep World Cup run every four years only to hit a wall in the Round of 16, these experts are left wondering if MLS will perpetually be waiting to take its next leap forward.

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