Atlanta United’s 2024 Playoff Run Was Short, But Oh So Sweet
This is largely driven by my rage at the fact that my World Cup team of choice, England, was eliminated by my World Cup team of hate, Argentina, on my home turf of Mercedes Benz Stadium (or Atlanta Stadium if you’re FIFA and hate free branding). So, rather than hire an Etsy witch to do unspeakable things to the Argentine national team, I decided to reminisce on the good ole days when Messi actually lost something within this hallowed beast of an arena.
First things first, a bit of context. Atlanta United is a team based in (shocker) Atlanta, and has been a part of Major League Soccer (MLS) since 2017. Their earliest seasons were arguably their most successful, with them winning the MLS Cup in 2018 and the US Open Cup in 2019. Since then, it has honestly been an agonizingly slow downfall, interspersed with brief flashes of hope that tend to be extinguished pretty quickly. The team in recent years has been mired with issues, including a rotating cast of coaches, injuries to key players, and expensive and underperforming signings. It is often a squad that looks great on paper, but struggles to click when the whistle blows. But mama didn’t raise no quitter, so I continue to root for and follow this team, even when I’ve moved away for college and can barely attend their home matches. I am many things but never have I been a fairweather fan!
The other key team in this saga is this super niche indie team called Inter Miami, captained by this guy you’ve probably never heard of called Lionel Messi. They played their first season in 2020, but gained significant international attention in 2023 when they signed Messi. This was a field day for the team, and it had the Powers That Be within the league rubbing their hands like flies at the thought of all this marketing and attention. Finally, MLS will get the recognition it deserves! All it took was a thinly veiled retirement package for the sport’s biggest star! Surely everyone will agree that it’s in the league’s best interests to cater to Miami and Messi and make sure we never miss a chance to mention him!
A tangent on the Messi Mania of it all. He’s your goat, he sure as hell ain’t mine, I think he’s a tool for various reasons. But! A lot of people love him and the league absolutely knows this. As a season ticket holder for a different team, the ticket price that happens when Miami plays an away game is absurd. Seats that might go for $30 at a regular match are suddenly hitting triple digits. And even if Miami isn’t playing, the league will never let you forget that he’s there! He’s in all these ads, the commentators can’t take his name out of their mouths even when it’s two completely different teams, it’s absolutely absurd. It’s honestly embarrassing for the league. The worst part is, we as fans are expected to be grateful? Like we should just be happy to be blessed with soccer greatness, and ignore the league bias and preferential treatment Messi and his team get? It’s a feeling that is shared by virtually all non-Miami MLS fans, but seems to be impossible to get across to international viewers who just Don’t Get It. But tangent aside, time to return to the juicy goss.
The narratives around Miami began as soon as Messi joined them, and everyone who even remotely followed this league could see the writing on the wall. It was treated as all but inevitable for commentators and writers that Messi would lead Miami to greatness. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), since he joined the team midway through their 2023 season, there wasn’t enough time to turn a frankly dogwater team around. And then the 2024 season happened.
Miami frankly dogwalked the league. 22 wins, 8 draws, and only 4 losses. A record-breaking 74 points for the regular season, giving them the Supporter’s Shield. They were top of the Eastern Conference, and many considered them a shoe-in for the Cup Final if not the whole shebang. This, in spite of the fact that MLS seems to have a curse where only 7 teams have Ever won the Supporter’s Shield and the Cup in the same year. The pundits and big wigs of the league all agreed, Miami would break this streak! They would do it and the league would reap the benefits of all those sweet sweet international viewers wanting a glimpse of their goat!
And then this cute lil team called Atlanta entered the picture. For some reason, despite another lackluster season that saw us (yes, I’m using “us” instead of “them” because if I’ve had to watch this team through the good, bad, and ugly of their seasons I’m damn well allowed to lump myself in with their achievements) end up in 9th place in the Eastern Conference with only 40 points and a 10-10-14 W-D-L record. Shockingly average! But for some reason, we were immune to Miami. I don’t know how else to put it, but whatever made them so dominant just had zero effect on us. In March of 2024, Atlanta United broke a two-month winless streak by beating Miami, in Miami, 3-1! Saba Time struck, with our resident Georgia-the-country-ian getting a brace, plus a cherry on top from our striker Jamal Thiare. I remember being on vacation, listening to this game through a radio broadcast, and being absolutely delighted. This didn’t magically fix Atlanta’s midness, of course, but it was an omen of things to come for Miami.
Now let’s flash forward to the final matches of the season. Miami are comfortably ahead in the Eastern Conference, their place in the playoffs is set, no worries there. But Atlanta is hanging on by a thread, and have a miniscule shot at the playoffs. Their chances hinge on them winning their final match of the season, alongside some other key teams losing, to keep them within the 8th/9th position that would have them compete in an additional match to be the “wild card”. Low and behold, they manage to do so, beating DC United, so they must face 8th place Montreal (in a funny twist of fate, Montreal’s striker is none other than Josef Martinez, who led Atlanta to their Cup win in 2018 and is still generally beloved by fans). The match ends up going to penalties, everyone’s favorite, but Atlanta eke by 5-4. Now, as divine punishment for being so spectacularly mid in the regular season, this wildcard team that barely made it to the playoffs must face 1st place Miami. The horror!
2024 was a season of experimentation for MLS, and I will die on the hill that at least part of the change in playoff format was rooted in trying to aid Miami for the Narratives (and also capitalism, always capitalism). Part of this change was a bizarre 3-game series for the first round, where the higher-ranked team gets 2 home games and the lesser-ranked gets one. So, now the stage is set. Miami and Atlanta are going to face off a minimum of two times in this early stage. People who blindly follow Miami only assumed it would be a cakewalk for Miami, but Atlanta clearly had other ideas.
The first game, down in Miami, was a loss for Atlanta, largely because it was Atlanta’s third match in the span of a week. It really wasn’t much to talk about, because the lads were tired!
But this made the second game, hosted in Atlanta, all the more important. Miami wanted to win to eliminate Atlanta, and also afford themselves an extra few days of rest before the next round. Meanwhile, this was do-or-die for Atlanta, who had a chance to force game three. And by god did they play their hearts out. Watch the highlights, they speak for themselves. Brad Guzan ate his wheaties before every game of this series, and pushed his ancient 40-year-old self to the limits to prevent a blowout. Meanwhile, our attack found that beautiful thing with feathers, and magic happened. I was in fact at this game, and I genuinely haven’t felt the stadium have an atmosphere like that in years. It was so beautiful to see, and made all the more beautiful because Atlanta won against the Big Bad. It’s hard to convey how loud that stadium was, but the most telling thing was watching two players keep duking it out after the final whistle blew because it was so loud that they couldn’t hear it.
And thus, we find ourselves back in Miami, that beautiful capital of Latin America despite not being Latin American, for the third game. Once again, Brad Guzan played like an absolute beast. I just want to rub his beautiful bald head like a good luck token. This, despite some very, shall we say, dubious calls or noncalls by the referee (sound familiar?). One of the most egregious came after Miami scored an equalizing goal, and Guzan was picking the ball up from the net when he gets pushed into it. None other than Messi’s gnasher-in-chief Luis Suarez appears, gestures at him to get up, and is generally his rude self. Not a card in sight! But karma will strike this petty, nasty little Miami squad, because Atlanta’s winning goal comes off a play where a Miami player goes down, and they basically stop playing because they assume they’ll get the call. Rule number one of this sport is you play to the whistle, any 10-year-old in a rec league can tell you that. Miami were ultimately their own undoing.
And thus, Atlanta became, for a brief time, the people’s princess of MLS. Rivals and neutrals alike put up their scarves and settled down, hoping and praying for Atlanta to do the impossible. I’ve never seen such peace and unity in the r/MLS subreddit. This was partly self-interest, I think, because while Miami was clearly not untouchable, other teams seemed to struggle against them a lot more than Atlanta. Maybe it’s our playing style, maybe Miami is just shit at defending, maybe all of the above, but these fans had a vested interest in seeing Miami out of the playoffs. But I’d like to think it went deeper than that, to. This win was a rejection of the pre-written narratives, crafted by an inherently greedy league that so clearly wanted to shoe-horn Miami into just about any Miami-shaped space it could fit. But soccer is at its most beautiful when it’s unscripted, when the shocks and upsets happen and create some truly exciting games.
So where does this glorious tale of overcoming the odds stacked against us end? Well, in the next round we played our age-old rivals, Orlando City, who shot us 57 times. Orlando then get beaten by my beloathed New York Red Bulls, who go on to lose to LA Galaxy, so. That happened. Oh, and Miami won the cup the very next year. Lol.
And yet, I felt so much joy watching those games happen. One of my favorite things about sports is the anticipation, the hope. Even when your team goes through a rough patch, it makes those bright spots all the more rewarding. These few years were honestly very rough for me for various reasons, but getting to see my team do their best, and find success, defying the assumptions of so many, was just glory. And we got to stick it to the MLS man! Coming off of this most recent World Cup, which felt like a slap in the face regarding some of the refereeing decisions and biases, I needed a reminder that things can in fact be different. The joy I felt watching Atlanta’s playoff run in 2024 was mirrored in England’s run in 2026. Hope can go a long way, and even if you don’t win it all, just getting this far is an achievement in itself. All things in perspective. Maybe these are slightly bitter ramblings of someone who’s had a mid day of work the day after their team got eliminated by a WWE team disguised as a football squad, but I’d like to think there’s some vague wisdom to be imparted somewhere. And if there’s no wisdom, you can close out this page being a little wiser on the wonderful world of American club soccer.
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