The Number Griezmann Did Not Change

Wednesday night at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a World Cup winner will be in the away dressing room. Sit with that for a second.

Antoine Griezmann is thirty-five. He scored 211 goals in 488 appearances for Atlético de Madrid across two spells, which makes him that club's all-time leading scorer, and since July he has been playing his football in Orlando. ESPN's power rankings led on Monday with the idea that he has catapulted Orlando City into the playoff picture. It is a good sentence. It is also the sentence this city will hear all week, in a building where Atlanta United once ran the same idea on somebody else.

So look at what actually moved.

Orlando played fifteen matches before Griezmann's debut and took fourteen points from them: 0.93 a match, goal difference minus twenty-one, conceding 2.93 goals a game. They have played eight since and taken fourteen points again: 1.75 a match, goal difference plus five, conceding 1.25. The minus sixteen sitting in the standings column is not a description of Orlando City. It is an average of two different football teams.

Now find the movement. Their scoring rose from 1.53 goals a game to 1.88. Their conceding fell from 2.93 to 1.25. The number that changed most about Orlando City is a defensive number, and Antoine Griezmann is a forward.

There is a second problem with the story, and it is the calendar. His debut — Wednesday, July 22, away at San Jose, started and scored — landed in the league's first week back from the mid-season break. Everybody came back at once. Atlanta came back too, cut at the same date and across the same fifteen matches and eight: 0.73 points a game before, 1.38 after, with no Griezmann on the field for any of it. Whatever the break did, it did to both benches. Eight matches cannot pull the signing apart from the restart.

What can be said about him is plenty, and none of it needs the causal leap. Five goals and three assists in eight MLS appearances since that July 22 debut, through Saturday's 1-0 win over San Diego. Eight starts from eight. He is the scorer or the assister on eight of the fifteen goals Orlando have scored since the restart — more than half their attacking output, from one man, in seven weeks. Eso es real. Whether it is the reason is a different question.

And the club being credited with buying its way out of a broken season has been managed since March by Martín Perelman, an interim promoted off the assistants' bench when Óscar Pareja left following three straight defeats. No formal search is under way. Solutions rarely arrive alone, and they rarely arrive labelled.

Atlanta know this play. Not the way the myth tells it, though. Josef Martínez and Miguel Almirón were not bought to rescue a season — they were signed before this club had played a competitive match, two of three inaugural Designated Players alongside Héctor Villalba, and the trophy came in year two. December 8, 2018, on this pitch, 73,019 inside it: Martínez in the 39th minute, Franco Escobar in the 54th, Portland beaten 2-0. That is the difference-maker play working. It took two years.

Here is the play not working. Pity Martínez, a reported $15.5 million from River Plate. Ezequiel Barco, $15 million. Emmanuel Latte Lath, a then-MLS-record $22 million, currently on loan at Union Berlin. And now Breel Embolo, who started at Inter Miami on Saturday, played the full ninety, was fouled seven times and buried an 87th-minute penalty on his debut. The franchise myth says buy the man. The franchise record says the man takes a season, if he takes at all.

So I am not going to tell you Orlando found the answer and Atlanta missed it. I argued three days ago that a marquee attacker was not the repair this squad needed. Eight matches in Florida have not falsified that, and the defensive numbers argue my side of it. Ask me again in November.

Wednesday, then. Atlanta's availability report had not published when I filed this, and I could not find Orlando's at all, so I will not pretend to know who starts. I spent yesterday on the column that separates these two clubs. Today the interesting thing is not the gap. It is the discomfort of watching another club run your oldest idea while you sit fourteenth, and not being able to say yet whether it worked for them or whether it will work for you.

Siete semanas no son una temporada. Neither are ninety minutes. But ninety minutes is what is on offer, and it is at home.