Mid-season Performance Evaluations: Latte Lath

Good player. Bad team.

via Atlanta United

Before the season began, we ran a series called “Performance Evaluations” that looked back at each returning player’s 2024 and took our best shot at what their 2025 might look like. Some were optimistic (Hi, Bartek), some were skeptical (Hi, Alexey), and some were a psyop based on per 90 stats to kickstart flame wars about certain players that would in theory boost clicks to the article (Jk we would never do that) ((Hi, Edwin)).

As we continue to try and find the black box on Atlanta United’s 2025 season, I thought it might be instructive to look back at the preseason evaluations and compare them to the actual performances. We we’re going to start by examining each of the starting strikers and wingers, but I got so engrossed in one player’s performance in particular that we’re going to go solo from the jump.

Let’s begin with a chart…

The TL;DR here, as with most things in this series, is: Eeeeek.

American Soccer Analysis’ Goals Added metric hasn’t been kind to Atlanta United’s starting striker and wingers this year. Josef Martínez has technically been more productive on average than all of them. That’s…y’all, it hasn’t been a good season.

We’ll get to the rest of the bunch soon, but our opener today is MLS’s record signing. We didn’t have a performance evaluation on him. But we did have a big article about how much I loved the signing.

Latte Lath | 2025 g+/96: in 1,022 minutes, 12 starts | Probable cap hit: DP | Contract length: 2028, Option for 2029

That is not a DP-caliber chart nor a DP-caliber Goals Added per 96 rate. And then you look at his numbers at Middlesbrough just a few months ago and…

The big question for a number of players in this series is gonna be, “Is this guy actually bad at soccer or does this team just eat paint chips?” You’ll see it with Miguel Almirón later on, too.

The bottom line for me here though, is that I don’t think MLS has suddenly become exponentially more difficult than the English Championship. The difference in Latte Lath’s production isn’t about his ability, it’s about his environment.

What’s odd about his environment is