Atlanta United has managed to put itself on the world stage after springing a surprise and eliminating Leo Messi’s Inter Miami in the MLS playoffs. The feat does not seem to be such a coincidence when you consider that three of the Herons’ six defeats this season have come against the same opponent. It is curious to note that one of the architects behind this success is Spanish, from Cartagena.
Leo Messi and company are eliminated I Inter Miami 2-3 Atlanta I Highlights and goals I MLS
This is Jose Daniel Alfonso, who works as an analyst for the club that has managed to make it into the top eight of the US championship. In addition to explaining the keys to the system that stopped the Argentine star, the coach has a most curious career: he has worked in places as diverse as Ukraine, Sweden and Ghana. All this until he arrived where he is today, in a league that continues to expand and grow.
This is corroborated during thechat with MARCA. “In terms of soccer, Atlanta is growing a lot. The club is big and MLS, with the arrival of big players like Messi, is becoming a very interesting league. There are many different types of play because there are many coaches and players from many different nationalities, with different football cultures. This makes it more exciting and has more incentive at a tactical level, which is what occupies me the most and makes the league very rich and very interesting.”
In terms of soccer, Atlanta is growing a lot. The club is big and MLS, with the arrival of big players like Messi, is becoming a very interesting league
It’s not easy to concisely explain a career as varied as that of Jose Daniel, who studied Sports Science at the Universidad Catolica de Murcia and made his first steps in Spanish football as part of the coaching staff of Juan Ignacio Martinez, who was then coach of Cartagena. “Since I was a child I loved sport and the first dream I had was to be a physical education teacher, because they are the first contacts you have. Little by little you grow up, you compete at a sporting level and you are always curious to know things like why coaches make one decision or another, or what it is that leads you to get the best performance out of the players you have to beat your opponent,” he said.
That itch for tactics and preparation was soon joined by an adventurous spirit. “I had that curiosity to live abroad, and I started a more international career in several countries. I went through Dnipro, at the stage where we were fighting to win the Europa League and played the final against Sevilla. I was working remotely and with the idea of going with the team the following season, but the first Russian invasion of Ukraine broke out and everything was cancelled. Then I found a very nice project in Nordsjaelland, in Denmark. It is a youth project from which players like Mohammed Kudus or Kamaldeen Sulemana are now coming out, with players at international level from Ghana and Denmark who are now competing at the highest level. Then I went to Malmo in Sweden, which is a historic club and the most successful in the country playing almost every year in the Europa League or Champions League.”
Last year I signed for Atlanta United and here everything is big, with giant facilities and a stadium where there are more than 40,000 people every game
The analyst has already traveled a lot over the years, which has also led him to leave the European continent more recently. “In this last stage, I was also part of the Ghana national team and I was with them in the World Cup in Qatar and in the African Cup. Last year I signed for Atlanta United and here everything is big, with giant facilities and a stadium where there are more than 40,000 people every game. And with that exponential growth that MLS is having, which can almost be compared to the five major leagues. I think it can be there in terms of level of play and resources, with the excitement that implies here, because there are many Latin players and many Latin fans, and that makes that passion is felt in the matches.”
In terms of his day-to-day work, the coach explains that his specialisation is “tactical analysis, in terms of seeing the strengths and weaknesses of opponents, but I have also gone deeper into analysing which learning processes are the most effective. Apart from the tactical analysis, in which I already have my experience in Europe and at international level, I feel quite comfortable going much deeper into how to advise the coach and how to guide the players when it comes to reflecting and learning about the game, and how to improve in the training processes. That’s where I think in the United States they are still a little bit further behind with respect to the latest teaching methodologies, and where I do think I’m bringing an added value that they hadn’t perceived before.”
Jose Daniel has found in Atlanta a place to continue growing and where he hopes to win a title that will bring greater prestige to his work. “What I set out to do is to enjoy the day-to-day with the players and learn from the cultures of each country. And above all, to optimize performance as much as possible and win everything we can because I am very competitive,” he said. However, he admits that his idea in the future would be “to return to Europe, for personal and family reasons, but also to return to the top level, which is where I come from.”
Messi’s kryptonite secrets
When everyone expected that, with Lionel Messi and company, Inter Miami would dominate MLS with ease, soccer once again insisted on reminding us that sometimes it is not enough to have the best players. Among other reasons, because there is usually an opponent in front of you who can also have their weapons and who usually prepares meticulously for this kind of match. This is precisely the work that concerns our protagonist. “When you play against Miami, every game is a special situation. Since Messi, Jordi Alba, Busquets and Suarez arrived, both in terms of marketing and communication, everyone has the expectation that Messi will continue to break records,” he said. “You feel a little bit like you’re on the other side and that everyone is against you, and I think that even motivates you a little bit more. It makes us want to show that we are also good and it is always a super complicated game. Keep in mind that Inter Miami this year has broken all the regular season records and have achieved the highest number of historical points in MLS.”
To add even more merit to what Atlanta has achieved, Jose Daniel explains that they came from “a complicated season, with a change of coach and sporting director, and we had also sold the two franchise players: Giorgios Giakoumakis and Thiago Almada. Even with that we have managed to qualify for the playoffs in the last place and we have overcome Miami in the first round. Now we are in the semifinals and we will see how far we can go.”
Since the arrival of Messi, Jordi Alba, Busquets and Suarez, both in terms of marketing and communication, everyone has the expectation that Messi will continue to break records.
Despite appearing to have everything against them for the tie, the Herons had the ability to minimize the virtues of their opponent. This is something that, as the analyst points out, “it’s not just about stopping Messi because they have so many resources. It’s the whole team in the end and that combination they’ve made with Messi, Jordi Alba, Busquets and Suarez. They practically don’t need to look at each other to know where each one is and combine with each other, and yes, the patterns are quite predictable, in the sense that they do it constantly. For example, that pass that Messi makes to Jordi Alba and how he makes the pass back inside the area for Messi or Suarez to finish. That happens constantly, but they have that capacity, that technical ability that makes it super difficult to stop them even if you know it.”
At this point, it is worth asking how they did it. Obviously, it was not an easy task. “Stopping them requires a lot of coordination, a lot of training and a lot of thought. It’s what I was saying before. We ask the players a lot of questions so that they identify the visual cues. That is to say, so that when they start the movements, they have everything very planned and can recognize at a visual level and act quickly. That back pass from Messi to Jordi Alba or from Jordi Alba to Messi is the classic movement that we have seen so many times and they are still doing it here, and they have scored 3000 goals. So yes, it has been very difficult and we have even suffered in previous games, but in the end we have been the only team in MLS that has managed to beat Inter Miami so many times. Out of six games, we have beaten them three times.”
That Messi back pass to Jordi Alba or Jordi Alba to Messi is the classic move we’ve seen so many times and they keep doing it here, and they’ve scored 3000 goals.
And while it cannot be denied that beating such a rival always requires a certain amount of luck, both in football and in life in general, luck is also something that is worked on. “It does seem that somehow we have got the measure of them. When you play against them you also need your goalkeeper to have a good game or those chances that they normally put away to miss,” he said. “But at the same time, it requires a lot of concentration and you can’t relax for 90 minutes. It is true that we found some deficiencies in the spaces they leave behind, and there you have to be clinical to take advantage of it. We have worked hard to be precise.”Madness and debauchery in MLS
Returning to what has to do with the career of Jose Daniel, his explanation of the differences he has found in the football of each country in which he has worked is very interesting. “For me, the Spanish and English leagues are the best in terms of level. Logically, in terms of quality, player by player, the technical and tactical level is very high. Then, for example, in Scandinavia, the technical level is much lower, but the game is very well studied and very structured. You do see a lot of blocks that defend very well and that go very much together to the signs of pressing because they are very disciplined.”
For me, the Spanish and English leagues are the best
In the case of the United States, where they have their own particular culture of sport and entertainment, the coach explains how soccer differs in many ways from the soccer we are used to seeing in Europe. “Here, because of the salary cap, they have categories for players. There are franchise players, very much in the style of the NBA or American soccer, and they also have what they call ‘home ground’ players, who are born at the club, just as they have the category of international players. This means that salary caps are very well clarified, but it also means that there are quite a few levels of players. Franchise players here make a very big difference. Many times, the teams that manage to get those franchise players to also defend and complement each other with the team, are the ones that end up going higher. But we also see cases of franchise players who do attack a lot, but then have a lot of deficit at the back and become end-to-end games. That makes it different coming from a more European way of looking at soccer. Here we see that it doesn’t matter so much if you’re winning or losing, and from the 60th minute onwards it’s end-to-end games that go crazy. From a European point of view, as a coach, you say you have to control the game, but sometimes you get caught up in that end-to-end stuff, and it’s very difficult to handle.”
Unlike what has happened and still happens so many times in soccer, the reality is that Atlanta United’s players showed that it is possible to deactivate stars like Messi without the need to cross certain red lines. In this sense, the Cartagena native agrees with the idea of “protecting the players” above all else. “Many times, with the higher level players, there is a tendency for the marking to be more aggressive. It is true that there is a limit between hurting and playing hard, but I wouldn’t know what to tell you because there are cases and cases,” he said. “It seems to me that the refereeing is good and they do their best. I think we have to protect the players in terms of health, and ensure that quality players, within the legality of the rules, have protection.”
In relation to the health of footballers, there is also the controversial issue of the football calendar. On this subject, Jose Daniel believes that perhaps the problem is not so much the workload as the evolution of the game. “In the end there has to be a limit to the number of games, but not long ago I read a study in which it was explained that 15 years ago, players played more minutes than they are playing now. It is true that now there is a lot of travel and what has changed a lot in today’s football is that there are many movements and more explosive runs, and so that tends to generate more muscle injuries.
In the end there does have to be a limit on matches, but I read a study not long ago that explained that 15 years ago, players were playing more minutes than they are now.
The analyst proposes several possible solutions to at least alleviate this situation. “For me, one would be to limit the number of matches or at least not to keep adding more, while another would be to have longer squads. If we want to maintain this level, we have to accept and work the squads so that the average level of the squad does not drop so much, although the best players sometimes have to rest. That is also part of our job as coaches, to have a balanced team that in the long run is more sustainable and we can reach our objectives. Another thing that can be done and that I think would be interesting would be to limit the time of matches. In the end we are talking about a match time of 90 minutes plus added time, but if we do as in basketball and stop it every time the ball goes out, in the end we limit the total time that the player has to be exposed to tension. I think that could be a good resource to use.” For the moment, what has worked are his analyses used to eliminate Messi’s Inter Miami.
