FOOTBALL COUNTRY (profanity alert):

"Boxing was my number one sport, then NFL, then some basketball, so unless you were getting dunked on, run over at the one-yard line or knocked out in the first round, I wasn't interested," says Russell Gaither , a telecommunications worker and capo for the Footie Mob supporters group. "Then we got our team. And I just got the bug."

The contagion is spreading. The fact that Atlanta United, in only their second year of existence, are top of the MLS table with less than a month remaining in the regular season is remarkable enough. That an upstart soccer team are attracting upwards of 50,000 fans to games in a city notorious for professional sports apathy - and in a corner of the country where the other football is less pastime than cultural vanguard - is without precedent. Sunday's game was its seventh 70,000-plus crowd of the season and set a new MLS record.

Atlanta's well-documented indifference to professional sports is down to several factors. The south didn't have a long-term presence in any major league until the 1966, when baseball's Braves relocated from Milwaukee and the Falcons joined the NFL as an expansion team - a stark contrast to the Southeastern Conference football programs, many dating back more than a century, and which many southerners are born into and follow with religious fervor. Even as the Braves won a staggering 14 consecutive division championships during the 1990s and 2000s, the team's struggle to fill seats even for playoff games became a national punchline.

Atlanta is also a city of émigrés, a demographic shift only accelerated by the influx of corporate headquarters and dramatic economic growth during the 1990s. A 2016 study shared by WABE, the local NPR affiliate, showed that 37% of the city's population were born in another state or country. Here the relative youth of MLS for once works in the league's favor: while a newcomer from Boston, for example, might be loth to surrender a generational allegiance to the Red Sox or Celtics upon relocating to the city, the ties that bind them to the MLS club they left behind may be more flexible.

"You go to any other game, I don't care if it's Braves or Falcons or whatever, there can be a lot more away fans than home fans," says local native and Footie Mob co-founder Terri Harrington, a high school English teacher by day. She estimates less than 10% of the group were born in Atlanta: "It's a city of transplants."

This makes the eye-popping attendance figures for Atlanta United all the more remarkable. The club set the league's single-game attendance record during last year's inaugural campaign and broke it again when more than 72,000 fans turned up for 2018's opener. This year's average attendance of 51,826 is light years beyond any team in the league outside of Seattle - and ranks among the top 15 for any club in the world.

"I don't care where you're from," Harrington adds. "If you moved here in the past 10 years, this is your team."

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