It is easy enough to picture it, a scene painted in the soupy colors of a weekday morning in the carpeted halls of a nameless American airport. A man in a red and black Adidas tracksuit, his age showing around his waist and his temples, glides across the carpet. It is amazing you don’t see him, but he’s anonymous here, a simple face among many others. His shirt under his collar reads GM, initials few around him save his own teammates would know.



In South America he has a different name, a different profile, a different aura altogether.



El Tata.



Atlanta United coach Tata Martino exists simultaneously above and below the visible plane of American sports stardom. On the American sporting Richter Scale, his decision in 2016 to become the manager of the MLS team registered somewhere in the vicinity of a low-level NBA offseason trade. That Atlanta had landed someone who had coached Lionel Messi at both FC Barcelona and the Argentine national team did...