Atlanta United's defensive problems start up top

Atlanta United's defensive performance against Columbus is one of the worst we can remember. And it's indicative of a larger problem.

It’s Five Stripe Final, so let’s start with a chart and a brief explanation of a vocab term.

PPDA stands for passes per defensive action. It works as a de facto measure of pressing intensity. If opponents are completing a small number of passes before a defensive action occurs, you’re probably pressing pretty hard. If they’re completing a bunch of passes before a defensive action occurs, you’re probably sitting back.

On the other axis is “average defensive action height.” That one should be pretty self-explanatory. Put them together and we can get a decent sense of which teams are pressing and which teams are parking the bus. You can see Philly’s Red Bull-adjacent style all the way in the top left corner after six games and you can see Charlotte’s…um…“English-influenced” approach to the game in the bottom right.

Obviously, Atlanta is sitting in the corner of the chart you wouldn’t expect a Tata Martino team to be in. His game model in his first Atlanta tenure involved winning the ball high up the pitch and turning turnovers into chance creation opportunities. Naturally, that same chart looked like this in 2017.

That 2017 side overwhelmed teams. They didn’t press as high up the pitch as others, but they had opponents in hell as they tried to build out.

In 2018, they altered their approach at times, shifting into a more reserved back-three setup when the moment called for it. Even still…

If you check the scale there, Atlanta’s average defensive action height and PPDA only dropped a little, even if their place on the chart relative to the rest of the league shifted. Both 2017 and 2018 Atlanta United were in far different places from 2026 when it comes to pressing.

Spoiler here: I don’t think Tata Martino wants the team to sit back. I’m highly skeptical of the idea that his game model has changed that much over eight years, especially when the defensive meta in the sport has shifted towards man-marking in pressing moments to force teams to disrupt their buildout and play the ball long. What we’re seeing is Martino begrudgingly adapting to his current roster.

We’ve talked about it so much this year already, but we have to keep talking about it until it’s not the main character in the story. This team is unathletic to an impressive degree. It’s why 17-year-old Cooper Sanchez began the year as a starter. It’s why Matias Galarza is a breath of fresh air. Their ability to do something as simple as “be a professional athlete who can move quickly” makes them stand out.

The pressing issues don’t start and stop with the midfield, of course. A front line that includes Alexey Miranchuk putting the treadmill at 3.5 MPH for 90 minutes is never going to overrun teams. And Miguel Almirón and Latte Lath, despite their relative speed, haven’t been effective pressers this year.

That seems to be somewhat by design. It almost feels like the fear of asking this midfield (and Miranchuk) to cover any space at speed has forced Martino to ask them to stay back. That’s not inherently the end of the world. In theory, sitting back could allow Atlanta space to hit on the counter.

HOWEVER…

There’s sitting deep and there’s whatever they did against Columbus.

Don’t worry. We’re just getting started here. I’ve got plenty of clips of this team jogging around, running into an invisible wall at midfield and letting Columbus do whatever they wanted to. They were slow, they were unorganized and they were extremely lucky to get out of the first half without allowing multiple goals.

Here, the Crew walk the ball to midfield, drag Atlanta around for a bit as they fail to get pressure to the ball, and end up a split second away from finding space to run at speed into the 18. Immediately after that, we get a part two.

This is just an aimless low-stress cardio session. There’s some jogging. Some more jogging. And then