More Than The Next Signing: What Javier Pérez Is Building In Atlanta United’s Academy
- Jason Longshore
- 3 minutes ago
- 6 min read
The academy conversation often starts with first-team promotions. Pérez says the deeper story is the environment and identity being built underneath them.
When Atlanta United hired Javier Pérez in April of 2024, the move was about more than filling a staff position. The club created a new role, Director of Methodology, and attached it to a bigger objective: strengthening the pathway from the youngest levels of the academy through Atlanta United 2.
Nearly two years later, the more interesting question is not why Pérez was hired. It is what that work actually looks like now.
That matters because academy conversations can get reduced too quickly to one question: who is the next player to sign for the first team. That is part of the story, but it is not the whole story. Nearly two years into Pérez’s tenure, a better way to evaluate the project is to look at the environment Atlanta United has built around its young players, the football identity it is trying to teach across the pathway, and whether the bridge from development to the professional game has become more coherent.
In his conversation with SDH this week, Pérez described a project that has been much bigger than coaching sessions or match results. He said Atlanta United’s vision was to move “from youth club to be an academy professional development space,” and he pointed to three early areas of focus: staffing, education, and nutrition. Those are not glamorous buzzwords. They are daily decisions, and they help explain what the club believes modern player development should look like.
“It was clear the vision of moving from a youth club to be an academy professional development space.”
From youth club to professional development environment
Pérez’s description of the shift is useful because it is concrete. He said one of the first changes was increasing the support around players on the field. For Atlanta United’s pro-pathway teams, that now means a head coach, assistant coach, fitness coach, and goalkeeper coach. His point was not simply that more staffing automatically solves everything. It was that the club needed to allocate resources in a way that made the academy environment look and function more like the professional game it is supposed to prepare players for.
That matters because methodology can sound abstract until it shows up in the structure of a training day. Pérez’s explanation made it clear that Atlanta United is trying to build an environment where young players are not just taught the game, but immersed in the rhythms of a more professional setting. The staffing piece is part of that. So is the expectation that development is detailed, specialized, and intentional rather than broad and generic.
Rebuilding the day around development
One of the more revealing parts of Pérez’s interview was his explanation of how Atlanta United reworked the daily schedule for older academy players. He said the club moved its U-16s and U-18s into a morning structure and partnered with Atlanta International School so education could happen on site. The practical result is simple: more time to train in the afternoon. Pérez said that has created roughly two extra hours for work on specific technical elements, and he believes the impact becomes clearer as the season moves along.
“We increased by two hours the training time, and we work on specific technical elements.”
That is an important detail because it gets to the heart of what professionalization really means. It is not only about hiring the right people or saying the right things. It is about designing a player’s day in a way that creates more room for actual development. Training time is currency in an academy. Pérez’s point was that Atlanta United has tried to build more of it into the structure, without sacrificing schoolwork, instead of hoping it appears on its own.
Nutrition is part of the pathway too
Pérez also pointed to nutrition as one of his first priorities, and the way he described it made it sound less like an accessory and more like part of the club’s development infrastructure. He spoke about young players arriving without breakfast, not refueling properly after training, and then carrying the effects of that into the next day. That is not a side issue in a high-performance environment. It affects recovery, availability, injury risk, and the quality of the work players can do on the field.
“Many of them, they might come here, and they come without having breakfast. Or they leave, and they don’t refuel.”
Atlanta United’s response, as Pérez described it, has been to make nutrition more intentional inside the daily routine. Players finish training, get a protein shake, go to class, and then have lunch. That might sound small from the outside, but it reflects a larger point. If the academy is meant to be a bridge to the professional game, then the club has to teach habits as well as tactics. Food, hydration, recovery, and routine all belong in that conversation.
Defining the Atlanta United way
Those changes are only part of the story. The more interesting layer is why Pérez believes they were necessary in the first place. In the interview, he said one of the questions he wanted to answer when he arrived was how to define what Atlanta United meant when it talked about being attacking-minded and entertaining. Those ideas sound good, but they can mean different things to different coaches unless a club gives them sharper definition.
Pérez’s answer was to reduce that identity to three core principles: play fast and forward, defend with a compact structure, and play with intensity. It is a useful distillation because it takes a broad club identity and turns it into language that can travel through the pathway. More staff, more training time, and a more thoughtful daily environment are not the story by themselves. They are part of the mechanism for teaching those principles consistently.
“Play fast and forward, defend compact, and play with intensity.”
That is where the job title starts to make more sense. Methodology is not just about diagrams and session plans. It is about creating a shared football language that can be repeated across age groups often enough to become part of the club’s identity.
The pathway is the point
The bigger objective here is not simply to create better youth teams. It is to create a more coherent route into the professional game. Pérez’s interview echoed that bigger-picture view. He described an academy environment built around continuity, and later discussed a second-team model that mixes first-team players dropping down, players signed specifically for Atlanta United 2, and academy players moving up into that environment.
That matters because a pathway is only real if the steps between levels are connected. Pérez’s discussion of the academy was not framed around one prospect or one age group. It was framed around environment, language, and continuity. Atlanta United is trying to make the jump from academy soccer to second-team professional soccer feel less like a leap into a different world and more like the next stage of the same process.
What nearly two years can tell us
It is still too early to judge a project like this only by who signs a first-team deal next or who becomes the next breakout name. Those outcomes matter, but they lag behind the daily work that makes them possible. What Pérez offered in our interview was something more useful for this moment: a look at the systems Atlanta United believes it needed to build first.
Nearly two years after Atlanta United put Pérez in this role, the clearest takeaway is that the academy is being shaped on two levels at once. One is structural: more support, more training time, and more attention to the full demands of development. The other is philosophical: a more clearly defined idea of how Atlanta United wants its teams to play.
If Pérez is right, those two projects are inseparable. The environment is being built to serve the identity, and the identity is being taught through the environment.