Atlanta vs. San Jose Never Makes Sense
- Jarrett Smith
- Feb 27
- 9 min read
Four meetings, zero normal outcomes. From seven-goal comebacks to stoppage-time free kicks and bench red cards, this fixture has become MLS’s most reliably chaotic spectacle.
It’s a hot, muggy night in Atlanta. Like most game days during the 2017 season, it has rained at some point and you can cut the air with a dull knife. Bobby Dodd Stadium is packed to its capacity, which is somehow more than it can actually handle. If anyone can make that happen, it’s a building full of engineers. You are sweating as much as, if not more than, the players.
Across the field, you watch Josef Martínez jump to a frankly worrying altitude and drive a header home to take the lead against a 10-man San Jose Earthquakes. You’re cheering. You’re celebrating.
You haven’t actually stopped celebrating when Chris Wondolowski scores an equalizer moments later and stands in front of your section and screams. You will want to hate him, but I promise you cannot.
Maybe you know who he is and maybe you don’t. What you don’t realize is that you’ve crossed the event horizon into what is actively the drunkest “rivalry” in American soccer. Scratch that. It’s not a rivalry. It’s just chaos. A black hole of questionable ideas that answers the unnecessary question: what if Calvin and Hobbes directed a live sporting event?
These two teams have played four times since Atlanta’s arrival. You could call it coincidence that every one of those games has been black-out drunk in one way or another. I would not.
We’ve already taken a surface-level look at Atlanta United’s drunk games, but let’s be honest: San Jose deserves its own recognition.
2017: Fourth of July Insanity
Let’s start in 2017, where the Five Stripes started their stretch of Fourth of July Insanity by playing San Jose on a muggy night at Bobby Dodd Stadium. San Jose got things started in the 2nd minute with a Tommy Thompson goal and started experimenting with short term insanity almost instantly. The insanity earned them a red card about 15 minutes after this was a yellow.
Good god, none of us were ready for this.
The Five Stripes found a goal with Carlos Carmona before taking the lead with a towering header from Josef Martinez.
Of course, as you learned when you started reading this, they proceeded to give up a goal to MLS legend Chris Wondolowski moments after that because these games are distilled with absurdity. Atlanta found the lead again late when Anton Walkes buried a header off a set piece, and none of you had that on your bingo card. Finally, Josef finished things off when San Jose decided that Brandon Vazquez required the majority of their attention because positional gravity controls you, not the other way around.
Seriously. Look at this. What is the goal here?
There were literal fireworks that night, but San Jose got one more round of fireworks in by getting a second red card in the waning minutes.
The final damage involved six goals, two red cards and seven yellow cards. In hindsight, this was a good warmup for what these two teams would give us all.
2018: The Drunkest Game in MLS History
Like Shrek 2 before it, the sequel in 2018 set a standard that has never been matched. There is a strong argument that it is the most insane regular season game in MLS history.
2018 Atlanta United and San Jose completes me. I can watch it anytime, in any mood, and it never fails to make me smile. Buckle up. This is as dumb as you remember.
San Jose entered the match in full meltdown. Mikael Stahre was out. Steve Ralston was interim. The New Manager Bounce delivered a 2-0 lead against an Atlanta team chasing the greatest season in league history.
A perfect cross and header. A long ball against the run of play finished flawlessly. Unexpected, but not unheard of. MLS After Dark does that.
Atlanta pulled one back with a sequence that defines my mental relationship with Tito Villalba. Semi-open net? Right at the last defender standing in goal. One-timer on a rolling ball? Placed like a FIFA cheat code.
So 2-1 at halftime. Doable.
Then we get what I believe is the moment Chris McCann’s magical defensive run ran out. San Jose pushed it to 3-1. Then 4-1 through Wondolowski. Lights out. Pack it up.
What? VAR?
Yep that’s a chicken wing. So now we are back to 3-1 and a PK for Atlanta. But let’s take a minute here to address the situation because linear time was a tough concept that night.
This counter that comes off the chicken wing is triggered at around 65:53.
The goal is scored around 66:04.
The broadcast team and their inability to understand how var looks at things or works helped construct a really wrong narrative here because, again, linear time is tricky I guess. Either way Atlanta scores and we go from 4-1 to 3-2 and we have collectively moved off beers to whatever is on the bottom shelf behind the bar that wasn’t confiscated by the responsible authorities.
Atlanta scored again soon and now we are all just taking pulls off a glass bottle of Watkins Vanilla Extract when Josef is fouled in the box. The ref points to the spot but doesn’t blow his whistle (?!) and Almiron stares at the ref in bewilderment before slotting away the tying goal.
I just don’t have a good explanation for this one. It’s the kind of drunk where you start to hallucinate. But you don’t remember that you hallucinated. Someone told you about it the next day and you spend weeks trying to figure out if it’s true or they are just screwing with you.
You know how this ends, though. Barco frees Almiron who crosses to Josef in stoppage time for the winner. The Quakes were standing next to the Elephant’s Foot in reactor 4 the moment Almiron got that ball out wide and started running with Josef man-to-man in the box. They were dead, they just did not know it yet. But Josef, in his infinite mercy, made it official and finished off what might be the most absurd game in recent league history until San Jose would play Vancouver in a late night MLS is Back game that would require way too much time to explain. Just go look it up. Please.
The final damage here is seven goals, one disallowed correctly, no reds somehow and a level of drunkenness that will stay with Atlanta fans forever. I choose to believe that all Atlanta fans can vividly remember where they were when this happened.
2019: Bench Reds and Radioactive Vibes
2019 is the next stop on our tour and after 2018, anything else would be tame. That said, there’s some absurdity here that can be found if you dig. It’s not as much obvious insanity but if you move the dirt around, you will find it. For example, there are three red cards in this game and two of them are for guys who were on the bench. That is something you expect in Copa Sudamericana.
This one starts pretty silly but nothing too wild. The Justin Meram revival tour continues with a deflected goal, then Brad Guzan deflects a ball in with his hamstring. That is room temperature tap water for this series. And even if it was not, most of you had built up a tolerance that you did not know was possible.
Let’s talk about Christian Espinoza for a minute. He tormented Atlanta early in the game including forcing this error but whatever sacrifice he made to chaos was not good enough and he got sent off moments later for stepping on Franco Escobar. I wrongly believed he got two yellows in the span of 5 seconds, as his first yellow came earlier in the match. But still, the man was a terror and he went from ‘forcing an own goal’ to ‘sent off’ in seven minutes.
Now let’s talk about Daniel Vega. Vega is in that class of keepers who can be wholly uninspiring and average in a way that makes you think replacing him is an afterthought. He is Crash Bandicoot without the disembodied mask floating around him. He is Mario or Luigi without a mushroom. However, he occasionally he finds a star and look the hell out if that happens. I don’t have a super cut of his saves but go check out the highlights at the end of this article and look at how many impressive saves he made. He found the Mario star for about 60 minutes and damn near snatched a draw out of this loss.
Unfortunately for Mr. Vega, chaos demands more. So Emerson Hyndman scored after missing the sitter of all sitters in the first half before Pity Martinez scored in stoppage time to make it 3-1.
While we discussed linear time earlier, let’s break that rule and go back to just before Hyndman scored and remember how this game had three red cards and we have only talked about one of them? Yeah, Matias Almeyda was sent off from the bench. But that was not enough so Chris Wondolowski was sent off from the bench as well in stoppage time. Wondo, man of the people that he is, spent the next game with the supporters because this series not only drunk but also radioactive and the half-life is noteworthy.
This game threatened to be normal-ish but these two teams dragged it into the void kicking and screaming. Instead of a standard MLS game we had to watch a coach and hall of fame player get red carded while sitting on the bench as their defense finally faltered late in the game.
2023: Almada After Dark
Four long years passed before we were deemed worthy again to open 2023 with fireworks.
And fireworks are what we got.
Atlanta and San Jose opened the 2023 season in Mercedes-Benz Stadium with the fourth edition of this non rivalry.
These two teams really are the LSU-Auburn rivalry of MLS. They are going to end on a reasonable and realistic score, but they are going to get there in the most Roger Rabbit fashion possible. This was no exception.
Let’s start early with San Jose countering (never give up the first big switch) and Jeremy Ebobisse hammering the finish home past Brad Guzan.
Ah, yes that’s Christian Espinoza with the assist. Good thing they never let him get away.
In any case, this feels like a normal game right? Team with a high powered attack gets countered early at home. Most teams settle down and pile on the pressure and force a mistake, which is exactly what happens! Atlanta earns a penalty late in the first half, and up steps Luiz Araujo.
He hesitates on his run up, maybe overthinks it, and then misfires so convincingly that the broadcast thought the ball had gone in.
Ok. No big deal. It’s 1-0 at half. Home team is favored, got countered early and sent a penalty screaming toward East Point. Not technically normal. But also not blindingly drunk like the rest of these games have been in one way or another.
In fact the second half is actually a normal adult professional soccer match. There are chances both ways. No one gets sent off. No one scores. We are staring down the barrel of a rather unremarkable 1-0 road upset to open the season for an Atlanta team with high expectations.
Enter World Cup Winner Thiago Almada.
We are, as you see, in stoppage time. Brooks Lennon plays a really smart ball to the top of the box to Almada. He kind of does the thing Josef used to do where he pump fakes the shot and then snaps his foot through the ball and off the underside of the crossbar. The stadium explodes. Almada celebrates. Andrew Gutman appears to have a spiritual experience.
That’s fine. Point rescued. Atlanta can take that point to the bank. It was a great fight to get this far and get the goal back.
Well, we are not done here. San Jose commits a foul in a place where a Kratz Country sign once stood and well, we knocked over that sign for a new one that is just a picture of Thiago Almada’s face with no written warning.
In a normal game of soccer you would sit there and think ‘man, imagine if this went in the back of the net on the last kick of the game.’
This is not a normal game of soccer. This is Atlanta and San Jose. That ball was only ever going to end up one place and one place only.
That was effectively the last kick of the match. Atlanta stole three points off the Quakes who now have every right to hope that Futurama is right and Atlanta floats off into the Atlantic before sinking and becoming a mutant merpeople city.
2026 is the fifth edition of this series. It is a travesty that we have not gotten more games between these two. In hindsight we should have made them play at MLS Is Back. Maybe that would be too much chaos for one stadium to contain.
One day these two will play a normal game. With any luck I will be deep in the cold, cold ground before that happens.
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