NEW YORK – The most famous member of Atlanta United is 54 years old and has receding, salt-and-pepper hair, an indelible tan and a generous smile. When the club travels, he is the one stopped most often for a picture or an autograph.

He has zero goals, zero assists, zero saves and zero tackles in Major League Soccer this season. Yet Gerardo Martino, the expansion club’s first head coach, who just goes by “Tata,” has a bigger hand in its early success than could ever be expressed by a stat sheet. Because just being competitive is a feat in your maiden season, and United has a solid 3-4-2 record.

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The veteran Argentine, now on his 12th job in a two-decade managerial career that followed a long run as a star midfielder for Newell’s Old boys, is Atlanta United’s biggest name and its signature signing. Because Martino’s last two jobs were some of the biggest in the business: coaching Lionel Messi at Barcelona and then again with Argentina’s national team.

But here he is, in a dining room of a Midtown hotel, on the eve of a matchup with New York City FC, watching the D.C. United vs. Montreal Impact game on his cell phone. Before that, he watched the Boca Juniors-Estudiantes bout back in his home country. A few hours earlier before the team flew to New York, he put the Barca-Villarreal match on the bus TVs. And at the airport in Atlanta, he’d taken in Granada vs. Real Madrid.

Martino is a soccer junkie. And that’s part of what brought him here to America, to an expansion team in a league that isn’t yet a hot destination for the world’s biggest coaches.

Because for as much as Atlanta has impressed with its spending, ambition and sizable following, landing Martino was nevertheless a major coup. Even club president Darren Eales admitted to Goal.com that he was “cynical” when word reached him through the agent pipeline that Martino was keen on the job.

“My immediate thought,” Eales said before the season, “was that he couldn’t really be that interested.”

Eales and technical director Carlos Bocanegra flew to Argentina anyway last summer to meet Martino after he resigned from the national team following two straight Copa America finals lost to Chile on penalties. Martino showed up with a fat file of scouting reports on MLS teams. This alone contrasted sharply with other foreign managers who arrived in MLS, long after their hiring, with no understanding of its rules or indeed its stylistic particulars.

“That’s what we do as coaches,” Martino explained to Yahoo Sports, in Spanish through an interpreter. “When we meet club directors, we want to be prepared and show a good understanding of the league. I wanted them to hire me. So I had to bring a big folder.”

Martino’s vision for the new club matched up well with that of his would-be employers, and he signed on Sept. 27. He may have had offers from other clubs. He almost certainly did. But Martino is coy on this.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I came here. That’s all that matters.”

He had good reasons for committing to Atlanta with a two-year contract. “Firstly, because I like the country,” he said. “Secondly, because I liked the proposal the club gave me. And thirdly, because I wanted to escape those high public expectations that people had in those other jobs.”

This was the crux of it. After a year at Barca and two with Argentina, Martino had grown weary of the perpetual scrutiny and of the attendant responsibilities of managing those teams – the politicking, the searing media spotlight. “There comes a point where people just keep talking about you,” he said. “The whole world has an opinion in those two jobs. There’s always a high public exposure, and you reach a point after three years where you just want to say, ‘Enough.’ ”

To emphasize the point, the warm and overwhelmingly charming Martino picked up my notebook and theatrically faux-scribbled on page after page after page. “The newspaper … Martino … Martino … Martino …” he said in English. “Very tired. One day, I think, ‘No more Martino.’ ” And then he chuckled, as he often would over the course of a 40-minute chat.

One of Martino’s Barcelona predecessors, Pep Guardiola, and his successor, Luis Enrique, both burned out on the job as well, announcing their departures and sabbaticals after four and three seasons, respectively. “They were players at the club [first], so they knew what expectations were like going into the job,” Martino said of resigning from Barca after just one year. “For me, I was new at the club. So I think I reached that point sooner.”

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