A year and a few days into the job as Atlanta United’s president, Garth Lagerwey acknowledges that he may have underestimated the effort it would take to realign the team’s direction to fit within his proven path to success. But he is confident that the franchise soon will be better positioned for consistent long-term success.
“I hoped in one year we could get everything level-set,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I think it’s going to be a third bumpy transfer window. I simply mean there are things that have to move out before we can move what we want in, in terms of building that sustainable foundation. I am hopeful that at some point next year we will get to the point where we have the level playing field where we have the foundation where we have contracts aligned to the things I believe in.”
Lagerwey said his focus is on giving the season-ticket holders and the typical crowd of more than 47,000 their money’s worth in every game. Not just from the product on the field but the experience off the field. He said they deserve no less.
It didn’t always work this season. Lagerwey said he believed the team wasn’t ready to compete for a championship. He was right. The team failed to accomplish any of its goals: finishing at least fourth, advancing out of the Leagues Cup, winning a playoff series. The season included successful moments, especially compared with the previous season, but overall was not a success. It finished sixth, and it signed several players who should form the core of what could be a dynamic lineup.
“Directionally, we made progress,” Lagerwey said. “I think the whole point would be to say that there weren’t concrete successes per se, because that would imply that we had reached the destination that we want, but I think we’ve had successes and are beginning to reset the foundation.”
Recapping Lagerwey’s first year:
During a video call after previous president Darren Eales resigned in July 2022 to become the next president of Newcastle in England’s Premier League, Steve Cannon, the vice chairman of AMBSE, didn’t know who Lagerwey was when asked if he would be considered.
It didn’t take long for Cannon and others overseeing Atlanta United to learn.
Lagerwey was hired Nov. 22 last year and introduced as Atlanta United’s second-ever president Nov. 29. His hiring was considered a coup. Lagerwey’s history of successes – three MLS Cups, one Champions Leagues – leading the soccer side of Real Salt Lake and then Seattle made him the top target for MLS franchises looking for leaders.
Lagerwey had never led both the business side and soccer side of a club. It’s something he very much wanted to do and enjoyed being a part of in his first year.
“The potential here is absolutely awesome,” he said. “To just to go from an operation the size of the AMBSE (Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment) is really game-changing. It’s a totally different scope. You’re involved in, I think, a lot more interesting issues. In terms of the company’s hold on and giving back to the community, a lot of resources here. It’s arguably the best opportunity in the world. And suddenly I really enjoyed the first year. As much more potential as I thought. I’m very excited about the future.”
Taking over Atlanta United wasn’t going to be easy. On the business side, things were going well. The club had just finished its sixth consecutive season leading MLS in attendance. That would stretch to seven this season. Still, Lagerwey made moves to strengthen with it the rehire of Sarah Kate Noftsinger, one of those who helped build Atlanta United’s brand in its first years. Behind the scenes, Cannon and others were working to convince U.S. Soccer to move its headquarters to Atlanta and build a national training center. The city was working to land matches in the 2026 World Cup and next year’s Copa America. Noftsinger was brought back after leaving to join Adidas to help the club take advantage of those coming opportunities, Lagerwey said.
On the soccer side, there was a lot of work to do, work well within Lagerwey’s skill set.
Eales built the club’s foundation. It won the MLS Cup in 2018, the U.S. Open Cup and Campeones Cup in 2019, and reached the finals of the Eastern Conference playoffs a few months later.
Many of the supporters loved Eales. He would take selfies and take shots with them in the supporters’ lots before matches. He would send out cryptic tweets on X (formerly known as Twitter), teasing to a signing or news the club was about to announce.
In many ways, Eales was one of the faces of the franchise.
By August 2022, the club’s direction seemed muddled. It had fired manager Frank de Boer. It had hired and fired Gabriel Heinze. It had hired Gonzalo Pineda. Its roster was composed in part of a few highly paid younger players with potential, but most of whom weren’t breaking out, and some big-time payroll gambles on a few more-experienced but also unproven veterans. In a salary-cap league, teams can’t take too many gambles on contracts. Atlanta United had taken too many. It failed to make the playoffs in 2020. Pineda rallied the team into the playoffs in 2021, where it was beaten by NYCFC. It failed again to make the playoffs in 2022.
Enter Lagerwey. Paraphrasing his philosophy, he attempts to build clubs for sustainable success over blocks of years. Using data and analytics are among his strengths. Though not miserly, he’s also not one to advise those who work for him to throw money at problems, either. He’s very deliberate. Lagerwey, while very friendly, also isn’t as sociable as his predecessor. If he has an X account, he’s never used it. There are no photos of him taking shots with anyone.
Lagerwey went to work, tasking Vice President Carlos Bocanegra with what some might describe as a more financially disciplined approach to building, or in this case, rebuilding a roster. Some moves had been in place before Lagerwey arrived, such as buying out the contract of Josef Martinez, which proved wise, and signing Derrick Etienne as a free agent, which hasn’t yet worked out.
In came key pieces such as striker Giorgos Giakoumakis and centerback Luis Abram, players with hundreds of games of experience with clubs and some with their national teams.
The club then announced a partnership with a data-analytics company whose owners Lagerwey worked when he was at Seattle to help scout potential signings. A few months later, the club traded Andrew Gutman in an exchange with Colorado that was tough at the time because he was a productive starter but would prove to be a shrewd piece of business. Gutman was going to be out of contract, the team received as much as $550,000 in Allocation Money for a player who cost the team almost nothing to acquire from Celtic, and it opened a permanent slot for Homegrown signee Caleb Wiley. The team also was able to unload Luiz Arajuo, whose salary of almost $4.5 million was the highest on the team but who rarely scored or provided assists.
The summer window provided hard-to-miss examples of Lagerwey’s philosophy and was executed well by Bocanegra. In came several players as experienced as Giakoumakis and Abram with the acquisitions of Saba Lobjanidze, Xande Silva, Tristan Muyumba and Jamal Thiare. Lobjandize, Silva and Muyumba became starters and should be starters next season.
The club finished with the second-most goals scored (64) but the sixth-most allowed (52). In many ways, it fulfilled the club’s ethos established under Eales of playing attacking, sometimes dangerous soccer. Lagerwey said the club wasn’t able to get its defense fixed, something that will be a point of emphasis with acquisitions in the offseason.
Lagerwey said the goal is to help Atlanta United achieve the consistent success of Seattle or LAFC, which will play in its second consecutive MLS Cup on Saturday at Columbus, which failed to make the playoffs last season but will try to win its second title in the past four years.
“Can we make the same kind of turnaround?” he said. “I think we can. We’ve just got to get some things in place first and really not just focus on the transaction and player signings. What we also have to get right here is the leadership culture and the consistency culture.
“One of the byproducts, maybe unintended, of signing lots of young players is you didn’t have maybe the cultural foundation that you needed. Because you had a lot of folks coming in that didn’t have a ton of professional experience. What I’ve done in the first year is put in that a winning culture matters, not just to the first team but to all aspects of the club. In the academy, the second team and the first team, we want to win everything. If you are consistently winning, you are going to continue to produce players who are ready to compete. When you have that audience, it is your obligation to win. That’s our expectation, and that’s where we are headed.”
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