Considering an Atlanta United offseason with Tata Martino's return on the horizon

this was originally gonna be a thing about Tata vs. Gio Savarese but then Rob sent me the "Hydrogen Bomb vs. Coughing Baby" meme

Yesterday, reports from both ESPN and The Athletic indicated that Tata Martino is in talks to return as head coach of Atlanta United. Tom, Felipe and Paul’s report in The Athletic went as far to call Martino the “clear frontrunner.” If you haven’t caught on by now, there isn’t just smoke on this, the whole dang building is on fire.

Normally, when there’s this much inertia toward an outcome, it takes something pretty spectacular to stop it. Either Tata Martino is the next head coach of Atlanta United, or we’re going to hear in a couple of weeks about how contract talks began to break down and Chris Henderson said, “Sweaters tied around the neck are tacky, actually.” To put it one way: It’s not done, BUT…

Anyway, we can at least start to imagine an offseason where the goal will be to remake the roster in Martino’s image. It’s admittedly a little difficult to know exactly what that looks like in 2026. The last time we saw Martino, he had to sort out how to make a team of ex-Barcelona stars function as they speed-walked around the field. Y’all were there for the playoffs. You know that there were mixed results. I don’t think there’s a ton to take away tactically from Martino’s/Messi’s setup in South Beach(ish).

We can still operate with the assumption that the game model will largely be the same as what we saw previously in Atlanta. Martino will want to press, play on the front foot, and attack at speed.¹ Typically, he’ll do that out of a 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 setup. At a base level, we’re not too far away from what you might have hoped Ronny Deila’s model would look like. Obviously, though, there are a few major changes that need to happen to make that setup work. Starting with…