Training Ground Notebook: Tomás Jacob Talks Finding His Head, Tata Martino Talks Trusting His Leaders
Two wins in five days have changed the mood at Atlanta United's training ground, and both Tomás Jacob and Tata Martino keep pointing at the same thing: players who know how to lead when the season is not going well. Kansas City arrives Sunday.
For most of this season, Atlanta United has not had much to feel good about. Last place in the East does not leave a lot of room for confidence. So when Tata Martino stood in front of reporters today and talked about a group that "needed to have at least five days like this," it was notable. Two wins in five days, one at home over New York Red Bulls, one on the road at Minnesota, and Atlanta United is now preparing for Sunday's home match with Sporting Kansas City. In this Training Ground Notebook, we will hear from a young defender finding his footing and a head coach who has seen this club's best version before are describing the same shift, from different angles, using different words.
Tomás Jacob stops trying to prove something to everybody else
Jacob signed for a significant fee, arrived young, and by his own account spent the start of this season carrying all of that around with him.
"I'm a guy they paid a lot of money for, I'm young, so I put that in my head and it worked against me," Jacob said. "It was very much against my own interest."
He said the shift came when he stopped treating every match as an audition. "I told myself I don't have to prove anything to anyone, I have to be myself," Jacob said.
"I think I changed my mentality a lot, and also, like you said, you keep adapting to the league, you learn what you need to improve, where they're going to attack you, so it becomes a lot easier."
Some of that adaptation, Jacob said, has come from Lucas Hoyos. Jacob described the goalkeeper as something closer to a confidant than a teammate.
"When I come here and I'm with Lucas, who I talk to, who I can open up to, who I can tell my problems to, it's like having a psychologist for myself," Jacob said. "I think I unload a lot on him, and with the experience he has, he helps me and is always there for me."
Jacob has been through an adjustment like this before, having played in Mexico prior to joining Atlanta. He said the difference this time is distance. In Mexico, he said, his family and his girlfriend could visit often. In the United States, visa restrictions have made that much harder, and he said that absence weighs more when results are not going the team's way.
"If you're winning, if you're playing, you're happy, it becomes easier," Jacob said. "But if you're losing every weekend, like was happening, it becomes a lot more tedious, harder when you're alone."
Jacob also credited the club's two most recent additions, Junior Alonso and Paulo Díaz, with helping settle a backline that got fully disorganized during the chaotic closing minutes at Minnesota, when Jacob himself cycled through multiple positions as Matt Edwards ended up filling in at center back.
"It was maybe two or three minutes where everything was a bit scattered," Jacob said, "but after that we organized quickly," largely, he said, because of Alonso talking the group through it in real time. "Today we learn a lot from Paulo Díaz and Junior Alonso, because they organize us a lot. Sometimes I make mistakes because of inexperience and they get us organized."
Tata Martino sees his old leadership model again
Ask Martino about Alonso and Díaz and he does not hedge about where his bias comes from.
"Obviously, I'm influenced by being South American," Martino said. But then he made the case anyway. Alonso arrives with World Cup experience. Díaz, he noted, was a regular call up for the Chile national team and spent seven consecutive years at River Plate, the kind of résumé that tends to travel with real standing inside a locker room.
"If these players are focused, locked in, and come to compete, their contribution has to be very important," Martino said. "I have no doubt about that, and I also have no doubt about the impact they're going to have on the group, because on top of everything, they're two players with leadership."
Martino was careful about how many players actually carry that kind of weight on a team. Not many, in his experience, not even close.
"Leadership on a team doesn't belong to more than two, maybe three players, tops," Martino said. "Guys with a strong personality, who know how to read the moments for closeness versus the moments for a strong reprimand, people who carry the coach's ideas onto the field."
He reached back to his first stint in Atlanta to make the point concrete, naming the four players who set the tone in that locker room.
"When we talk about that first era of Atlanta that we were part of, even though there were a lot of players equipped to talk to the younger guys, the leadership was represented by Brad [Guzan], by Parky [Michael Parkhurst], by Leandro [González Pírez] and by Jeff [Larentowicz], and that's where the leadership ended," Martino said. "The rest fell in line behind them."
That same conversation is where Martino made his case for Lucas Hoyos, who has absorbed real criticism this season. Martino's answer was not really about Hoyos individually. It was about how quickly people are willing to write off a player entirely once the team around him is losing.
"How many Atlanta players have stood out within a context of overall mediocrity?" Martino asked. "I think players operate within a team, and the team has moments. When the team's moments are bad, the players are all wrapped up in that moment, and when the moments are good, the players show the qualities they actually have."
He pointed to the two most recent wins specifically. "Lucas had three or four saves that were decisive in winning those matches," Martino said. "It's very easy to be tempted to lump all the players into the same basket when times are bad, because it creates the feeling that none of us are any good."
What it means for Kansas City
Sunday is the third match in eight days for a squad already thin at midfield, with Jay Fortune still weeks away and Will Reilly improving but not a definite for Sunday. Martino was blunt that Atlanta does not have the depth right now to absorb that stretch cleanly, particularly through the middle of the field, where Adrian Gill has become the fourth player to play the holding midfield role this season behind Tomás Jacob, Tristán Muyumba and Reilly, in that order.
What Martino wants out of this stretch is less about the lineup than the temperament. He described a team that is discovering it can suffer through a rough second half and still find a result, which is exactly what happened at Minnesota.
"There have been so few good moments in these seven months of competition that having two wins in five days, one at home, one on the road, is reassuring," Martino said. "It invites us to keep fighting until the end, fundamentally."
Kansas City is next, a team Martino says is still figuring out its own identity mid-rebuild. Atlanta is trying to figure out the same thing, five months of losing behind it and, for the moment, two wins in five days and two new leaders in the locker room to show for it.
Atlanta United at Sporting Kansas City airs on 92.9 The Game and the Audacy app. Pregame coverage begins at 6 p.m. with Abe Gordon and Madison Crews, kickoff coverage at 7:10 with Mike Conti and Jason Longshore.
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