Miguel Almirón: Atlanta United's prodigal son relishes homecoming | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

Miguel Almirón wasn’t born in Atlanta; it’s more than 4,000 miles away from his roots in the San Pablo neighborhood of Asunción, Paraguay. On paper, his two-year stint at Atlanta United from 2017-18 might look like a fleeting stopover, shorter than his stints at Cerro Porteño and Club Lanús and a fraction of his Newcastle United tenure.

The reality is vastly different, as the sights and sounds – and smiles, so many smiles – of his return to the city last month confirmed.

Welcome home

This was a homecoming with both box-office scale – check out the throngs of supporters and television cameras as the Five Stripes faithful chanted and cheered a welcome in the terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport – and movingly personal intimacy, as the club’s social media team showed in capturing the warm embraces of those still around from the early years when he arrived at the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Training Ground.

“Remember? I told you I was going to come back one day,” Almirón murmured in Spanish to hospitality specialist Silvia Cisneros, a beloved member of the kitchen staff that makes players from across the world feel at home when they sit down to eat in Marietta, Georgia.

Big-time players, both domestic and from abroad, have walked those halls over the years. Notably, while both of Almirón's transfers to ATLUTD have involved seven-figure fees, neither ranks in the club’s top five all-time expenditures. There’s just something special about the unassuming Paraguayan playmaker and the gleaming grin that so readily lights up his face, and by extension, whatever space he’s in. Eddie Howe, his Newcastle manager, called it “infectious character.”

Talk with those who’ve known him a while, and you realize it’s every bit as central to his appeal and effectiveness as that devastating left foot and relentless work rate.

“It was really easy to connect with Miguel,” first-team physical therapist Mario Cruz, one of ATL’s earliest employees, recalled to MLSsoccer.com. “Very humble, very easygoing, very low-maintenance guy, always smiling.

“Before he's somebody who plays football, he's just a really nice guy, and he appreciates and he gives respect to everybody, regardless of the job that you do. So he was a guy that was always well-liked by everybody … It's almost like the one son that left and came back, and everybody was so anxious to see him, and everybody took him so well.”

Deep connection

The prodigal son’s return? There is indeed an almost biblical intensity to the emotional power of this beloved figure from Atlanta’s euphoric first two seasons. The bubbly No. 10 who made an entire region, one with a fairly tortured history in professional sports, fall in love with his team, led that team to MLS Cup glory, then weeks later jetted off on a then-league-record transfer to an iconic club in the world’s most-watched league.

“As a lifelong Atlanta sports fan, the moment I first saw Miguel step on the pitch, I saw something special,” said Leo Walker, an ATLUTD fan and Atlanta sports historian who hosts the ATL 3 Style podcast. “Miguel played with a passion that I’ve never seen from any other player on any professional sports team in this city. That’s no shade to other sports stars we have had here, but his passion was different. He immediately showed the fans of Atlanta that he was here to win.

“He also moved about the city and truly embraced Atlanta as his home his first stint here. His passion for winning and his dominance on the pitch made him a clear fan favorite, even though he shared the pitch with the best striker MLS had seen at the time, Josef (Martínez). He was also a focal point of conversation as well for so many new soccer fans experiencing MLS for the first time.”

‘Miggy’ left a mark on the Capital of the South. And it left a mark on him.

“From the moment that I left the airport here to go to Newcastle [in 2019], it was something that I spoke to my wife about, the possibility of coming back here,” Almirón said at his unveiling, adding that part of the joy this time around is sharing it all with his young son Francesco. “I think above all for the connection that I have with the fans and with the city.”

Providing inspiration

Today Almirón is homegrown defender Efraín Morales’ teammate. Back in 2018, he was his role model, the manifestation of everything Morales, then a wide-eyed adolescent on ATL’s Under-15 academy team, dared to dream of being. He vividly remembers being part of the Five Stripes’ victory parade after the MLS Cup triumph, snapping selfies with Almirón as their procession wound through downtown streets packed with jubilant fans.

“It was the first-team bus, [then the] U-15 bus, and we were riding around the city with hundreds and thousands of people standing outside, congratulating us,” Morales, a member of Atlanta’s inaugural academy crop, told MLSsoccer.com this week. “I have videos of me and him, right there next to each other, celebrating with the cup, and it was just that connection with the city – that's definitely one of my core memories.”

Almirón epitomized the vibrant Latin American flavor of those early ATLUTD sides, constructed and led by respected Argentine coach Gerardo ‘Tata’ Martino with an attacking outlook that made them easy to love. It certainly helped inspire Morales, who is of Bolivian descent, and many others across a booming, increasingly internationalized metropolitan area.

“I'll never forget how I would start to see not just Latino fans, but every Atlanta fan understands and uses the concept ‘La Banda’ [The Band] to describe those players: LGP [Leandro González Pírez], [Eric] Remedi, Almirón, Josef and [Ezequiel] Barco when he joined,” said Felipe Cardenas, an Atlanta-based journalist who covers ATLUTD and the rest of MLS for The Athletic. “'Culture' gets overused, that word, that concept. But in Atlanta's case, I think it was really important.

“It wasn't South Florida, wasn't Los Angeles. It was Atlanta, and it was a very Latino vibe that everyone at the stadium loved, because that's how they played, that's how they carried themselves – the emotion of the team, the passion of the team, whether it was positive or negative, everyone loved it. Even LGP’s yellow [cards] and his reds, people were like, ‘Hell yeah.’ They loved that part of the personality. Miguel was part of it, for sure … His smile and his personality connected with a fan base that I think was really desperate to just have a star.”

ATL leader

Morales would go on to become a Bolivia international, and in November he faced off against Almirón’s Paraguay in a tense World Cup qualifier in El Alto, where Almirón scored as his team scratched out a 2-2 road draw via a dramatic injury-time equalizer. Afterwards Morales approached Almirón to share what he’d meant to his younger self, neither aware they’d share the same locker room in a few months.

“That was the first time I played against him. And I pulled him over after the game, I spoke to him a little bit, and I said, ‘Hey, I remember you. When I was 11, 12 years old, I played for Atlanta United,’” explained Morales. “In the back of your head, whenever you're playing with him, whenever you're with him, you know that this guy is a winner. He has won with this club before. So he knows a thing or two.”

When the opportunity materialized to make Almirón one of this winter’s showcase reinforcements alongside club-record capture Emmanuel Latte Lath and midfielder Mateusz Klich, club president Garth Lagerwey and new sporting director Chris Henderson knew they were checking a key squad-building box for an elite winger with creativity, finishing and defensive diligence.

The intangible boost from reconnecting to those halcyon days of the past mattered a great deal, too.

“When we signed Miggy, when we brought him home,” Lagerwey said in an appearance on the Golazo Network’s ‘Morning Footy’ show, “we really felt like that would have more impact on and off the field than any other player we could sign in the world, short of a global superstar on a Lionel Messi level.”

Sunday spotlight

That’s central to the appeal of Almirón’s faceoff with Messi’s Inter Miami on Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental this weekend (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+). It’s a key early duel between Eastern Conference heavyweights, expected to draw an even larger gate than ATL’s usual biggest-in-MLS crowds at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. And there’s more still.

This is a grudge match of sorts for the Herons, who spent all winter ruminating on the shock defeat – statistically the biggest upset in MLS history – Atlanta dealt them in Round One of last year’s Audi MLS Cup Playoffs. Messi & Friends also lost 3-1 to the Five Stripes at MBS last May, the first time since Argentina's stunning loss to Saudi Arabia at the 2022 World Cup in which Messi scored in a defeat.

Martínez, Almirón’s partner in crime back in the day, said “this is my Barcelona or my Real Madrid” to describe the thrill of starring in front of those big, adoring crowds when he signed a contract extension the same winter Almirón left. Those who listened to 68,455 noisy ATL fans roar their team to a dramatic game 2 win at MBS during that playoff series last November could begin to understand what Josef meant.

Thanks to their spendy offseason overhaul, engineered in no small part by Henderson, who did comparable work for IMCF as their chief soccer officer for the past four years, ATLUTD can reasonably hope to stand toe to toe with Miami, or something closer to it, this time around. Latte Lath’s quality was evident even before he scored twice in his MLS debut on opening weekend; Klich was a steal of a deal with D.C. United, a Designated Player in the engine room, albeit one whose DP tag and the lion’s share of his contract remain on D.C.’s books. And there’s Miggy, the first one to make Atlanta fans dream big, back to help them do so again – simultaneously a face of the franchise and a top-notch ‘vibes guy’ as well.

“He's always smiling, he's always happy. I don't know that I've met many players like him that love playing football as much as he does,” said Cruz. “That, I think, helps everybody else around him. People just tend to feel that vibe and feel the same emotion, and I think that just helps everybody come together.”

Or as Lagerwey put it: “A tremendous worker, a tremendous leader, somebody who has a really positive attitude. That may sound trite, but it goes so far when someone is showing up to work every day with a smile on their face saying, 'We can do this,' and really infecting some belief into the side – and really infecting some belief into our fanbase again. And we’ve seen that excitement so far on the ground.”

ATL’s first three games suggest he remains that effervescent, all-action dynamo – “every single time he gets the ball, he likes to go forward, he likes to beat a player,” said Morales – and his colleagues have noticed how six years in the EPL pressure cooker has seasoned his mentality.

The latter may prove just as essential to Atlanta’s hopes of recapturing that bygone glory as the former.

“He was really young [in 2017-18] and he led the team on the field by the way he played and the way he connected with the rest of the players on the pitch,” said Cruz. “Today he comes in a much more mature player that demands even higher of himself and higher of those who are around him. So he's in more of a leadership role. And I think that people really appreciate that, because he's played at the highest level, and people want to hear about it. People want to earn the respect. So he's a much more demanding person of himself, and then I think that pushes everybody in the right direction.

“For me, it's been really special to see that transformation from where he was before to what he is today.”

A primetime date with Messi and the reigning Supporters’ Shield winners offers an ideal moment to show the rest of the world, too.