With the coaching and front-office staff in place, Atlanta United’s attention now turns to bringing in players for their inaugural season.
“We’re trying to build a key part of our roster, and you’ll see that over the coming weeks as we have the Expansion Draft, the SuperDraft,” said team president Darren Eales after last night’s unveiling of the team’s home kit. Both Eales and Carlos Bocanegra, the team’s technical director, are particularly glad head coach Tata Martino has arrived to take part in personnel decisions.
“It’s fun now, we have a coach to discuss players with and instead of just theory we talk about actual targets that we’re going to go for,” said Bocanegra. “For us, it’s been great to have him in town so we can actually go for these targets. We talk about a lot of players, but now let’s go get these guys.”
Martino, who has never coached in MLS, is still learning the intricate roster rules and regulations unique to the league. But he’s learning quickly.
“It’s been great,” Bocagenra said of working with Martino. “He and his staff have been watching a lot of video together, watching the league, learning about the league.”
The team’s leadership — Eales, Bocanegra, Martino, and director of soccer operations Paul McDonough — is intensely focused on the upcoming Expansion Draft. Unlike in previous years when expansion teams had 10 picks, Atlanta United and Minnesota United will only have five picks, making solid pre-draft research and preparation all the more critical.
However, they won’t know which players will be unprotected until Dec. 11. At that point, they’ll have 36 hours to make a decision on who they’ll choose with the first pick they won in a coin toss last month. Right now, all they can do is scout and rank the players they think might be available.
“That will continue right up to when we know who the unprotected players are,” Eales said. “And then there will bit of game theory because obviously Minnesota gets to pick as well. So you’ve got that extra dynamic.”
“That’s quite part of the fun of it,” he added.
Having previously worked for Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League, Eales has never participated in a player draft. But he’s been receiving expert strategic advice courtesy of the Atlanta Falcons, owner Arthur Blank’s other professional sports franchise. Falcons Head Coach Dan Quinn invited Eales into the last two NFL draft rooms to see how the process works in real-time.
“The idea was to get the dynamics of how you think about acting in a dynamic situation when a player’s been taken off the board and how you react,” said Eales.
“We’ve still got about 20 players to get, so that’s a lot of work to be done,” admitted Eales. “Carlos and myself will be working day and night, really from now until the first day of preseason.”
