Atlanta United’s season may have ended in an anti-climax: exiting the MLS playoffs in the first round having lost a penalty shootout to Columbus Crew after a wild but goalless 120 minutes, but the team can still look back on 2017 and find a great deal to celebrate.

With Major League Soccer’s format of deciding an overall champion via a post-season playoff tournament featuring the best of both East and West Conferences, the act of qualifying in the first place is an achievement for any team.

By finishing fourth in the Eastern Conference, Atlanta earned themselves a place at that post-season table. What’s more, they did it by playing attractive, attacking football, with a measure more structure than most of the teams they’ve come up against in a league where tactical discipline can sometimes be forsaken in favour of freeform sprinting.

Only one team scored more regular season goals than Atlanta, and that’s Toronto FC; eventual champions, with a squad being widely hailed as the most individually talented group assembled in the history of the league.

The club itself has a rabid supporter base. They are notorious for the enthusiasm of their support, and at their final regular season match, coincidentally against Toronto, they set the MLS single-game attendance record for the second time this season. Attracting an audience of 71,874 fans to the Mercedes Benz Stadium, Atlanta re-broke a record that had previously stood for over 20 years. That in turn contributed to the club setting the overall attendance record for a season: selling over 800,000 tickets over the course of 2017.





What’s really noteworthy, in the midst of all of this success, is that Atlanta United didn’t even exist last season.

Atlanta are one of two ‘expansion teams’, alongside Minnesota United, that joined MLS as it increased in size from 20 to 22 clubs this year. In a league where there is no promotion or relegation, expansion teams are the only way to introduce new clubs, and therefore new markets, to the division.

In qualifying for the Playoffs in their inaugural season, Atlanta became the first expansion team to do so since the Seattle Sounders eight years ago.

So just how did they do it? How did they arrive fully formed, out of the blue, with a winning team and a devoted fanbase, in a country with a decidedly shaky relationship with the world’s favourite sport, and a city previously without a football team at all?

On the pitch, some of the answers are straight forward, and some are not. One obvious piece of the puzzle: the manager. The owners hired former Barcelona and Argentine national team coach Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino to oversee their fledgling squad. On appointment, Martino instantly became the most prestigious coach operating in the league by some distance, bringing a wealth of top level experience from working with some of the best players in the world at both club and international level.





On-field, it’s slightly less obvious. The model for successful MLS teams has predominantly been based around supplementing American products with up to three ‘designated players’ (DPs), on which they are permitted to break the league-wide salary cap. This has usually meant bringing in ageing stars of the European game near the end of their careers, kicked off famously by David Beckham and carried on by such luminaries as Andrea Pirlo, Clint Dempsey and Kaka. But Atlanta have chosen not to rely on this tactic.

It’s true that US national team member Brad Guzan has cemented his place in goal having joined from Middlesbrough halfway through the season, but he is an exception. Drogba-lite former Stoke forward Kenwyne Jones was also brought in, but he has been restricted to just 17 appearances, only six of which have come since the end of May.

Instead their team has been based around young, hungry players who have bought into Martino’s exciting style. All three of their designated players are exciting South American attackers under the age of 25. Josef Martinez, a 24-year-old Venezuelan striker who had previously featured sporadically in Europe for Torino and Young Boys before becoming Atlanta’s third DP, burst into life in his first MLS season, eventually finishing fourth in the race for the golden boot with 19 goals.





And what about the fans? Where have they and their passion come from in such record numbers?

Austin Long is President of the Terminus Legion; one of the club’s four affiliated supporter’s groups who help provide the atmosphere in the stadium on matchday, as well as more broadly promoting the game in Atlanta. He believes that the city was already a fertile breeding ground, which the club did everything they could to build on:

“Atlanta fans really love their sports and soccer fans specifically were looking for a local team to rally around. Lots of soccer fans have their English or Mexican or Spanish club side but Atlanta United provided a team in their backyard that they could support by watching on TV, tailgating and supporting in the stadium.

“Atlanta have done an amazing job of creating excitement for the club both on and off the field. The club has engaged with the community through events, social media, watch parties and player appearances”

He also believes that the spectacle of game days has contributed to the groundswell of support for the club:

“Matches at MBS (The Mercedes Benz Stadium, a purpose-built, 70,000 seater $1.6b joint home for Atlanta United and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons that opened in August) are not merely soccer games. They are events. Hours before kickoff fans line up to get into the stadium, to sign the Golden Spike, to welcome the team off the bus. The in-game experience has been nothing short of spectacular.

“All of this builds to a team that you cannot take your eyes of. Win, lose or draw, the team fights for 90 minutes, drawing encouragement from fans, led by a Supporters Section second to none.”





Regardless of the short-lived nature of their first journey into the playoffs, the 2017 season was a victory in many ways; both for team and city, and for the sport in America as a whole.

With another two expansion teams planned to join the league this year from Miami and LA, and a further two in 2020, on the way to a planned eventual total of 28, the team in red and black have shown that the hunger for the game is there, as well as demonstrating what can be achieved when that hunger is exploited correctly.

As MLS looks to continue its growth and draw in more and more American soccer fans who instinctively look towards the old world for teams to support, Atlanta have provided a blueprint for continued success. And, so far, they’ve looked mighty fine doing it.