Making sense of Giorgos Giakoumakis' speed run at Atlanta United

The Designated Player striker was an undeniable individual success on an undeniable team failure

via Atlanta United

Atlanta United officially announced the departure of Greek striker Giorgos Giakoumakis on a permanent transfer to Mexican side Cruz Azul. The deal is reportedly for a “guaranteed” $10 million according to multiple reports.

While the fee coming to Atlanta represents at least a doubling of returns on what was initially reported to be a $4-5 million signing from Celtic, is the money worth what the sale represents? Why did this whole saga come about in the first place? And are we even confident the club will fully reinvest the funds toward a higher-caliber of player? Can they even identify that player? And aren’t we just hoping that they find a player of Giakoumakis’ quality anyway?

Woah woah woah, that’s a lot of questions. Let’s break those down to help fully understand the situation facing club president Garth Lagerwey.

“I wasn’t even anticipating GG would be the player we might lose midseason. How did we even get here?”

We covered this about a month ago when the reporting initially started breaking on a potential move, but the short answer is: money.

Giakoumakis didn’t just have a good season last year, it was MVP-caliber. He would’ve won the Golden Boot (and therefor probably MLS MVP) if he took the team’s penalties. But since he didn’t have any, his 17 goals ranked him second in MLS, as was his goals/90minutes rate, just 0.01 behind league leader Teemu Pukki. He scored those 17 non-penalty goals on just 12.6 expected goals, outperforming his expected metrics almost identically to the Golden Boot winner Denis Bouanga.

So, maybe we should’ve expected that some club would emerge and make an offer that couldn’t be refused.

But also, it was the perfect time for GG to financially capitalize off his performance. Especially at the age of 29 — before he gets that ugly '“3” at the front — it’s just enough time to get a nice long guaranteed contract that could be the last major one of his career. His deal with Atlanta was lucrative, but had option years attached.

“Okay but if he’s so good, why didn’t Atlanta just give him the contract he wanted?”

That was almost certainly an option on the table for Lagerwey, though it’s a perilous route for a number of reasons.