Training Ground Notebook: Atlanta United Faces Nashville Without Its Most Important Player
- Jason Longshore
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Tata Martino and Matías Galarza addressed the Almirón absence, the Nashville challenge, and a midfield that is just now starting to look like itself. The timing on all three couldn't be more complicated.
Atlanta United came out of Friday's media availability with a clear picture of what the next week looks like and not much about it is easy.
Miguel Almirón is out one to two weeks with knee discomfort. Nashville SC arrives Saturday sitting at the top of the Eastern Conference, coming off a road win in Mexico against Club América.
Tata Martino and Matías Galarza both spoke to media on Friday. Between them, the contours of where this team is right now came through pretty clearly.
The Almirón problem has no clean answer
Martino was direct about what losing Almirón means.
"The absence of a player as important as Miguel is a deciding factor for any team. That's why he's a player with the career and trajectory that he's had."
He was equally direct about what Atlanta will not do: rush the timeline. The club is not going to shorten his recovery to get him back for one game. That's the right call, even if it means facing Nashville and potentially another opponent without him.
Galarza said what everyone already knows: replacing a player of Almirón's trajectory and performance level is just difficult. There is no clever workaround that makes the problem disappear. Tata will put out who he feels is best, the team will go compete, and Miguel will be back when he's ready.
That answer could read as deflection, but the logic behind it is sound. Almirón is in a World Cup year. Paraguay will need him this summer, and Atlanta will need him healthy for the stretch run. Rushing a knee issue and turning a one-to-two week absence into something longer would be a far worse outcome than missing one or two matches now. The sensible call is to let him heal fully, and that appears to be exactly what the club is doing.
What Wednesday actually showed
Chattanooga is not at the level of the opponents Atlanta faces in the MLS Eastern Conference on a weekly basis, and Tata was careful to frame the result accordingly rather than oversell it.
"I think we have to put that game in the corresponding context. But setting aside the first ten minutes, I thought in the first half, we were very good. We were aggressive going forward. We got a lot of players and numbers into the box. We won the game in the second half, but I thought the best portion of our play was in that first half."
Thirty to thirty-five minutes of the kind of soccer Tata wants to see. That's the thing worth holding onto from Wednesday, not just the result.
A significant part of why it looked that way was Jay Fortune.
When the question came up about whether Fortune and Galarza brought an athleticism and pressing intensity that has been missing this season, Tata widened the frame. Cooper Sanchez has the same characteristics. So does Fortune. So does Galarza. The point wasn't to single anyone out, it was to note that Atlanta has multiple players who can provide that quality, and injuries and late arrivals have kept them from being consistently available together.
Fortune covers ground. He presses with urgency. He makes the team's defensive shape feel active rather than passive, because he is disrupting rather than waiting. And crucially, he gets forward. He arrives in dangerous areas at the right moment. That two-way quality, the ability to threaten in the attacking half and then recover to close space defensively, is something Atlanta has lacked for stretches this season.
That two-way quality is exactly what Saturday demands.
It matters specifically against Nashville, which is very good at winning the ball and immediately attacking the space behind you. Tata named Hany Mukhtar, Sam Surridge, and Cristian Espinoza as the individual concerns, though Surridge is questionable for Saturday. The larger point was about the collective: Nashville transitions faster than almost anyone in the East, and the spaces they exploit are the ones midfielders leave open when they can't recover quickly enough. Fortune's mobility addresses that problem in a way Atlanta's midfield hasn't consistently been able to this season. Wednesday offered at least a glimpse of what it looks like when he's available and fit to do it for a full ninety minutes against real Eastern Conference competition.
Staying true to the idea
Asked how important it is to stay committed to the way he wants to play when the results aren't there, Tata didn't hesitate.
"I think changing the idea would contribute confusion. I analyze the games, and as coaches we make small modifications in names or positioning, but the core of what we want to do, I'm convinced we should not change."
That conviction is either disciplined or stubborn depending on your read of the season so far. The case for disciplined is that the buildup phase has actually improved. Tata said it Friday, and the evidence is on the field. Atlanta is building out of the back with more purpose, holding possession longer in the middle third, and creating the conditions for good chances more consistently than they were in February and March.
The issue is what happens next. Galarza acknowledged it honestly.
"We've been good in the buildup, but we haven't been sharp in the attack. The goals just haven't wanted to go in."
He thinks it's a confidence cycle. One or two wins in a row changes the feeling and the sharpness follows. The buildup is there. The structure is there. At some point the ball starts going in, and when it does, this attack has the quality to make it happen in a hurry.
The margin Tata is actually worried about
The most candid exchange of Friday's session came when Tata was asked about his margin for error at this point in the season.
He didn't minimize it, but he wasn't sounding alarms either.
"Many things can change. But in regards to the poor results, it's something that we can resolve before the World Cup break. It's also important to the confidence and emotional state of the team. If you're losing games in a row, what we also have to work on is not just trying to solve the results, but trying to improve that confidence and emotional state as well."
The key distinction in that answer: you can recover points. You cannot always recover confidence. If the losing continues long enough, the psychological damage becomes harder to reverse than the standings deficit. That's why Saturday matters beyond the three points. Not because one result fixes everything, but because this group needs the experience of winning a real game against a quality opponent.
Still becoming a team
The larger thread running through both pressers was the same one that has been present all season.
Galarza said it plainly: new group, players still getting used to each other. Tata said it in structural terms: players arriving at different times, injuries disrupting continuity, the roster never quite complete from day one.
When asked about the relationships between players on the field as the next step in the team's development, Tata gave a thorough answer that covered both sides of the equation.
"I think we have various things we still need to resolve. When we do our analysis of the games, there are still many things to work through. Some have to do with the relationships on the field, and others have to do with the answers we as coaches need to give the players through training, through video, or through direct conversations."
That's an honest accounting from a coach who is not finished with the problem and is not pretending it's someone else's job to solve it.
Nashville is first in the East and just beat América in Mexico City. That is the level. The encouraging thing is that the players who gave Atlanta its best soccer of the season on Wednesday are going to get the chance to prove it wasn't just Chattanooga that brought it out of them.
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