The Only Club Atlanta United Inconvenienced Tonight Was Themselves

Four minutes. That was all Atlanta United needed to look like a side with something left to play for.

Tomas Jacob is a defender. He had pushed high up the right the way a full-back does when a match still feels open to him, and when Miguel Almiron collected the ball in midfield and carried it all the way to the edge of the box before squaring it, Jacob was the man arriving on his shoulder. Right foot, bottom corner, past Chris Brady. The club's own report calls it the earliest goal of their season.

Then Atlanta spent the next hour proving this morning's argument right from entirely the wrong end of it. I wrote that Chicago were the one set of visitors left who needed nothing Atlanta could withhold — fourth in the East, playing for seeding, here to collect. That held. What I did not account for was Atlanta volunteering.

### Both of the goals that decided it began with their own goalkeeper

Anton Saletros equalised in the 30th, a left-footed half-volley from outside the box after a corner broke loose, through bodies and past Lucas Hoyos. There is no argument with that one. A good strike is a good strike.

The other two are a different category of thing.

In the 51st, Hoyos played a routine pass out from the back. Anzor Mekvabishvili — on at the interval for Dje Tah, six minutes into his evening — won the tackle, took the ball off it and finished simply. Chicago had skied an open net a minute earlier through Maren Haile-Selassie. They did not need to be good here. They needed to be standing in the right place.

In the 57th, Elias Baez played the ball back toward his goalkeeper, and Hoyos picked it up.

Inside the six-yard box.

That is an indirect free kick from six yards, defended by a wall standing on its own goal line. It took Chicago three minutes to actually take it, because men kept breaking early and the whistle kept going. When they finally did, Philip Zinckernagel roofed it. Sixty minutes played, three-one.

Atlanta United's own match report is headlined on unforced errors, and the club puts the defeat down to a pair of second-half miscues. When the people who write the club's words reach for that phrase on a night like this, there is not much left for me to litigate.

Breel Embolo got one back in the 67th, a header from a whipped Baez cross — the same Baez, delivering the ball properly ten minutes after delivering it the other way. Three minutes later Embolo broke clear, one-on-one with Brady, and dragged it wide of the far post. The added minutes arrived and died against a Chicago low block. One credit worth recording: Almiron's assist made him, by the club's own count, their outright leader in assists this season with eight.

### The arithmetic closed behind them while they worked

This morning the ceiling was 42 points, and six clubs in the East already sat above it. Tonight the ceiling is 39, and eight do.

Thirty points are banked. Three matches remain. And the ninth and last qualifying place — nine Eastern clubs go through, seven into Round One and two into the Wild Card Matches — belongs to Red Bull New York, who beat Inter Miami tonight and sit on exactly 39.

Exactly 39. Which is precisely where Atlanta land if they win all three.

Level on points, then. Level on wins too, in that scenario, at eleven apiece — and wins is the first thing the league reaches for. So it would fall to goal difference. The two clubs are level there as well. Minus fifteen each, tonight, to the goal.

So no, it is not mathematically finished. It needs Atlanta to win three, New York to lose three, and Columbus — on 38, with three of their own to play — to come away from all of them with nothing. Open on paper. Shut in every other sense.

### What is actually left

Wednesday at Citi Field, against New York City FC. I have owed that marker for four pieces and corrected the address once already this morning; after tonight I would sooner go and spend it than keep promising it.

Toronto at the Benz on 1 November, the last home match of the season.

And then 7 November, in Harrison, New Jersey, where the fixture list has arranged something it could not have known to arrange: the final match of Atlanta United's season, away at the one club standing in the place they would need, the pair of them separated by nothing at all.