The simple thing is to do the simple thing

What to expect from Ronny Deila's Atlanta United

Henry Higuita’s breakdown of the Norwegian coach’s system for Scarves & Spikes is very much worth a read (and is a great example of the excellent local soccer journalism out there that deserves supporting!).

First, I want to address this question Henry poses early in the column:

Why did Garth Lagerwey and Chris Henderson believe he would be a good fit for the team?

The simple enough answer is that Deila will keep things simple enough. As Henry outlines, we can probably expect the Five Stripes to play out of a 4-2-3-1 that mostly morphs into a 4-4-2 shape in mid-block, and has zonal pressing principles when defending on the front foot. In possession they will build from the back and probably have the ball more often than not. They will create overloads and then try to strike quickly into the channels when the opposition over-extends.

This is all intuitive stuff – what I’m describing above has been the meta in our sport for about the past 20 years. When you have superior talent (which is likely for Atlanta in about 90% of their games given the amount of money they’re about to spend in this transfer window), sticking with the meta and letting that talent be the decider is the right choice much, much more often than not.

So Deila, whose main principle as a head coach during his first stint in MLS seemed to have been “put your best players in their best spots and let them cook,” is back for a second tour because Lagerwey and Henderson trust him to do just that once again.

Two slightly more granular things from Henry’s piece that I wanted to highlight. Let’s start with this annotated frame he pulled:

This is early in a build-out against a pressing team, and as Henry noted, this situation often left NYCFC in position to switch the field of play.

That option, however, is one that the Pigeons did not often take under Deila (they were in the bottom quarter of MLS teams in switches both attempted and completed during his 90 games in charge, as per TruMedia via StatsPerform). That is customary of all CFG teams, who uniformly switch play infrequently. When they do play from one side to another it's usually part of a series of movements across the game channel, which is why such a great progressive passer like Keaton Parks really blossomed under him (and James Sands, who's a more conservative passer, was forced to expand his game).

I think Bartosz Slisz and Mateusz Klich fit the Parks profile pretty well. I am a bit more tentative about picking out a true backline shield to play the Sands role for Atlanta.

The other granular thing I wanted to expand upon is Deila’s teams’ propensity to get the fullbacks forward into position to cross.

That was indeed a huge part of how Deila's NYCFC side played, but bear in mind they almost never settled for useless touchline crosses like Brooks Lennon loves to hit. The point of the overlap during the Anton Tinnerholm days was to get one fullback or the other into those primary assist zones along the side of the 18, which then allowed them to hit pullbacks across the 6 with multiple options to choose from. So while Lennon, at first glance, seems like a great fit – he is, after all, a fullback who loves to get forward and cross – he'll have to be much more discerning about where and when he's running, and what kinds of crosses provide actual value.

That has, uh, never been his strong suit. Though I do think there’s real untapped upside to explore, and it’s reasonable to hope that Deila will be able to coax the kind of individual improvement from Atlanta’s mid-career veterans that he was able to get out of Tinnerholm, Parks, et al (not to mention a guy like Taty Castellanos going supernova).

Anyway, I really like this coaching hire. The Five Stripes don’t need a genius of a head coach; they just need someone who’ll put the players in spots to succeed and keep the locker room together. Let the talent win the games.

Deila’s already shown he can do that in MLS, and has the hardware to prove it. I think there are pretty good odds that, in the next season or two, he’ll have even more on display.