How it feels to beat Lionel Messi

Atlanta United just completed the biggest upset in MLS history. A team that finished 34 points behind Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami came in and bloodied the big dogs during a three-game playoff series (a new MLS playoff format) filled with drama. Xande Silva’s last minute winner. Bartosz Slisz hung in the air for what seemed like decades in the cavernous hole of the Inter Miami defense to score the series winner. Brad Guzan is pushed into his own goal and drops to the sunken spot, squirming around in the net like freshly caught sea trout.

All good, all broad strokes fun, all easily digestible. But this doesn’t tell the whole story of a team and a fan base determined to ruin the fun. By Guzan, a 40-year-old who came back from a serious injury to steer Atlanta into the next round with save after save. About success and setbacks, the creeping doubts and the resilience to keep coming back to defeat MLS’s Monstars. And no one had a better seat than Tyler Pilgrim, founder of Atlanta Utd news outlet Scarves and Spikes, an ATL OG who has covered the club from the very beginning. This is what it meant to him and to all Atlanta United fans.

This win has kind of brought back the feeling of when Atlanta Utd first came into the league, where we started off so hot, winning the MLS Cup in the second year and the Open Cup and Campeones Cup in 2019. But then 2020 happened and thing. just fell apart in every way. And since then, every year has had the feeling of trying to get back to the glory days. Atlanta has some of the biggest ambitions in Major League Soccer. They showed that in the beginning, and then it kind of went off the rails in terms of bringing in superstars that maybe didn’t fit, bringing in coaches that maybe didn’t fit, and you have this, you know, beautiful, amazing stadium that hits attendance records all the time.

People still fill the stadium, but recently the enthusiasm has not quite been there to the same degree as it was in the beginning. And by the end of the regular season, many fans didn’t know if this team deserved to make the playoffs. If they just have to rebuild for next year and take the offseason to reset. And then they go down to Orlando for the last game of the regular season and we make the playoffs and everybody was like, okay cool, but we’re not going far.

But then you beat Montreal in the wild card game, defeat our old superstar Josef Martínez, and all of a sudden it’s like, okay, maybe we embrace it, take on that underdog mentality because we’ve never had to be underdogs before, really. . And you have a team like Miami that has Messi, that has Suárez, you know, all these guys.

I think many fans simply wanted their team, Atlanta, to be the one to shut up Major League Soccer about the constant Messi talk. You know, it was almost a little vindictive, I guess. Especially because it’s Messi, Messi, Messi, relentlessly.