'The wisdom was you needed a Beckham': What can Atlanta’s rise teach MLS?
Graham Parker speaks with Atlanta United president Darren Eales on continuing their improbable rise and learning from their peers
It could have been so different.
As the second-half wore on, and it became increasingly obvious that Atlanta were going to win their first MLS Cup on Saturday night, it was possible for thoughts to drift to other phantom versions of this final in other cities and stadiums.
It’s not a totally idle exercise to think like this. Atlanta winning a final in front of more than 70,000 of their hometown fans, in a state-of-the-art NFL scale stadium that manages to honor rather than suffer soccer’s presence in it, was by several degrees the most extreme outlier anyone could have imagined as a spectacle for MLS Cup before this season started.
And as remorseless and thrilling as Atlanta’s play has been at times this year, their triumph wasn’t wholly inevitable, as their last day regular season collapse to gift the Red Bulls the Supporters Shield illustrated. For that matter had VAR not called Bradley Wright-Phillips’ equalizer offside in the first leg of the Eastern Conference Final, the inquests might be about the continued difficulties of even consistently winning teams attracting attention in New York, rather than speculating about just how high Atlanta have raised the bar. If the spectacle of this final was a glimpse of the glorious future of MLS, it’s important to remember that that’s just what it was – a visitation from an improbably optimistic future.
Nobody knows that better than the people now tasked with sustaining what Atlanta just did. The day before the game I’d sat down with team president Darren Eales, and we’d discussed the game as an inflection point that had come very early in Atlanta’s history. Key personnel, including coach Tata Martino (definitely) and Miguel Almiron (probably) will be moving on in the off-season, and while the organization won’t need to reinvent wholesale, they need only ask last year’s all-conquering Toronto, who missed the 2018 playoffs, how hard it can be to sustain success.
And to add one more “what if?” scenario into the mix, Atlanta could have lost the final – even lost the final by throwing away a lead – as team owner Arthur Blank’s NFL team, Atlanta Falcons, had infamously done in giving up a 28-3 lead over the Patriots in the 2017 Super Bowl. Under the circumstances Blank had seemed rather insouciant in the lead up to this final – casually mentioning on Thursday that he had already spoken to the mayor about a potential parade on Tuesday. It had prompted his counterpart Merritt Paulson to wryly remark to media that, “I guess there’s no need to even play this game, right?”
Any team, even the best team, can lose a game, but so remarkable has been United’s ascent that the thought of them being written into the narrative of Atlanta sporting chokers could easily have become a self-fulfilling destiny, had the team been weighed down by expectation, but as Eales was keen to emphasize, as far as Atlanta were concerned, “It’s already a success. Hosting a final in only our second year.”
It didn’t hurt to win though. As for the next stage, the first order of business is to find a new coach. Eales is keen for continuity on some fronts (“we have a fun, exciting team to watch and the players to play like that, so we need a coach who can fit that style”), and while he feels that this time round there’s less of a need to make “an immediate statement about our credibility, given what we’ve done as an organization this last couple of years”, he’s also mindful that ensuring Atlanta’s ongoing success in the city now requires cultural sensitivity as much as tactical nous.
“We’ll be looking at style of play … youth development is going to be really important in a salary cap environment,” says Eales. “Bringing more players through from our academy like a George Bello or an Andrew Carleton. And then, what’s tremendously important to me is the bond with the fans … It’s vital that any coach who comes in understands that we’re still pioneers.”
As director of football administration at Tottenham Eales played a key part in aiding MLS’s ongoing, sometimes painful integration with the global market — overseeing the deals that took Robbie Keane to LA, and Jermain Defoe to Toronto. Yet it’s another lower profile deal from that period that stands out to him as key to his thinking in Atlanta.
“The interesting one was Simon Dawkins — a young player we sent on loan to San Jose,” he says. “For me that was really fascinating. I was watching a lot more MLS and seeing that he really developed as a player. What I found really strange was that we had done that deal and nobody else really reached out to me from other clubs and said, ‘Have you got any other young players at Tottenham?” So I definitely felt that young players could be developed in MLS, and also that there was clearly scope to tell young talent that, ‘Look, this could be a stepping stone for you – people know America, the league is on in over 150 countries. You can be seen.’”
That belief has informed Atlanta’s strategy from the start: “When I first sat down with Arthur I said that I strongly believed that the team shouldn’t go down the path of the older designated players, but instead do what the rest of the world does, and develop young players and become part of the global football network and not be bashful about it. I basically said to him, ‘Look, everyone’s a selling club except Barcelona’ — and now Neymar’s left Barcelona so I suppose everyone’s a selling club if the price is right…”
The success of Miguel Almiron et al in playing themselves into contention for big money moves provides something of a luxury headache for Eales in replicating what the first extraordinary batch of players have done. But as he describes it, this was always part of the vision.
“The perceived wisdom was that you needed a David Beckham or a Wayne Rooney to sell shirts, and I think we definitely put that myth to bed,” he says. We showed that if you had a young, exciting team, and you tell their stories well, that’s how you market players. Miguel Almiron was the number one selling shirt in our first season. Bastian Schweinsteiger was number two. And with the greatest respect to our fans I’d say maybe less than 5% knew who Miggy was before he joined us. But they saw the way he plays and that captured the imagination.”
And now Atlanta has captured the imagination of fans around the league, as well as putting down a marker for what’s possible that almost any of those owners would struggle to replicate — but as Eales points out, that’s not really the point. Atlanta see themselves as part of a continuum:
“There’s no one-size-fits-all. And also, to quote Newton we’re ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. The teams who’ve been there from the start; the teams that helped the league reinvent and survive after struggle; what Seattle did with their crowds; what Orlando did in establishing a team in the South when everyone thought it couldn’t be done; Dallas and the Red Bulls with youth development … We’ve learned from all of them.”
And now Atlanta has plenty to teach.
