The Five Clubs Between Atlanta United and November

Wednesday night, 7:30 in Queens. Atlanta United walk out at Citi Field, a baseball ground borrowed for football, against a New York City FC side sitting twelfth.

At the same time, Red Bull New York kick off at New England. An hour later Columbus are at FC Dallas, and Toronto host D.C. United at BMO Field. Four matches. Atlanta United are in one of them.

And the honest answer to the question this club has been asked for three weeks — is it over — is no. Not yet. Not mathematically.

Here is what that actually means, because it is not hope and it is not quite a race either.

Thirty points, three matches, nine available. Thirty-nine is the ceiling, and I have written that number before. What I have not written is the other list: the five clubs standing between Atlanta United and the ninth and final place in the East, and what each of them has to do.

Red Bull New York, thirty-nine points. They host Atlanta on the last day. Before that they go to New England and to Nashville, and they must come back from both with nothing.

Columbus, thirty-eight. Three matches — Dallas, D.C., Chicago — and they must lose all three. Atlanta do not play them. Not once.

Toronto, thirty-six. Atlanta get them at the Benz on Sunday. Their other two, home to D.C. and away at Philadelphia, can yield no more than a single win.

New York City FC, thirty-five. Atlanta play them twice in the sense that matters — Wednesday, and then again in the table. They cannot win both of their remaining two.

D.C. United, thirty-three. Three matches, no more than six points.

Five clubs. Fifteen matches. Atlanta United are on the pitch for two of them.

Now the part that genuinely surprised me, and the reason there is still arithmetic at all.

MLS breaks a tie on wins first. Not goal difference. Wins.

Most leagues the people reading this grew up on do it the other way. La Liga goes to head-to-head. The Premier League goes to goal difference, then goals scored, and a club with a better goal difference sleeps easier in May. Here, the first column is how many times you actually won, and that changes everything about Atlanta's position.

Because Atlanta's only route to thirty-nine runs through three victories. There is no draw-and-scrape version. Three wins means eleven wins on the season — and eleven wins is a number that beats clubs who got to the same points total politely.

New York City FC have drawn eleven matches this year. They could arrive at thirty-nine with nine wins and a goal difference of plus three, and finish below an Atlanta United side on minus twelve. The club that scored more and conceded fewer across thirty-four matches would watch the club that did neither go to the Wild Card. That is the table Atlanta are playing in, and for once it is pointed the right way.

The ball doesn't lie, but the tiebreaker sheet occasionally fibs on your behalf.

So here is the shape of it, precisely. Atlanta United cannot finish above Red Bull New York. Nine points does not pass thirty-nine; it draws level with it. The season does not end in a chase. It ends in a tie, if it ends anywhere at all, and that tie is settled in a column where these two clubs are at this moment identical — both of them sitting on minus fifteen, to the goal.

On Saturday the 24th I wrote that the one match left where Atlanta United are not even an inconvenience had reduced this club to a date on somebody else's calendar. I stand by the sentiment and I will correct the conclusion: they can still decide their own November. They simply cannot do it alone, and they cannot do it by Wednesday.

What they can do by Wednesday is lose it. A defeat at Citi Field ends it. A draw ends it. A single Red Bull point at Gillette ends it. A single Columbus point in Texas ends it.

Four stadiums. One of them theirs.

November 7th, Atlanta United go to Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison to play the club holding the place they want, on the final day of the season. If any of this is still alive by then, it will be the best ninety minutes this team has played all year — and they will have spent six weeks earning the right to a coin-flip column.

Vamos is a word I have not used in a while. I am saving it.