'A-T-L!': the soccer team outselling the NFL

October 23,2018

From Guardian Atlanta Week, Bryan Armen Graham

It’s more than four hours before kickoff at Mercedes-Benz stadium in downtown Atlanta on an unseasonably balmy October morning. The sprawling parking area known as the Gulch is bursting with activity, the sort of raucous, well-lubricated tailgate scene more commonly associated with America’s two most popular sports: the NFL and college football.

Football is indeed the day’s feature attraction, but not the brand traditionally linked to the deep south. Instead, red-clad fans numbering in the thousands have descended on the ground-level asphalt patch beneath a tangle of overpasses in support of Atlanta United, the nascent Major League Soccer (MLS) club that’s become the most improbable phenomenon in American sports today – and a vibrant symbol of a new Atlanta.

“Boxing was my number one sport, then NFL, then some basketball, so unless you were getting dunked on, run over at the one-yard line or knocked out in the first round, I wasn’t interested,” says Reginald McKie, a telecommunications worker and capo for the Footie Mob supporters group. “Then we got our team. And I just got the bug.”

The contagion is spreading. The fact that Atlanta United, in only their second year of existence, are top of the MLS table with less than a month remaining in the regular season is remarkable enough. That an upstart soccer team are attracting upwards of 50,000 fans to games in a city notorious for professional sports apathy – and in a corner of the country where the other football is less pastime than cultural vanguard – is without precedent. Sunday’s game was its seventh 70,000-plus crowd of the season and set a new MLS record.

Read the complete article at the link above.