Twenty-Three Scored at Home and Thirty-Two Conceded

Half four in the afternoon, the first of November, and the last time this year Atlanta United kick off inside Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

Toronto FC are the visitors. For Atlanta, nothing rides on it.

So take the one number from this season that has no parallel anywhere in the Eastern Conference.

Fourteen points from sixteen matches at home. Lowest in the East by total, lowest by the match, and shared with nobody — the next worst is CF Montréal on seventeen. That came from walking all fifteen clubs' match rows, not from a rank field.

### The easy version does not survive the rows

Here is the sentence this season is going to get written about it, and I would have written it myself a fortnight ago. The room went quiet. The club went small inside it. The goals stopped coming.

Twenty-three goals scored at home in sixteen matches. Seventeen away in sixteen.

Atlanta scored more in their own stadium than out of it. A goal and a half a match in there against barely one on the road. That is not a club that went mute.

The goals came. What did not come back with them was a defence.

Thirty-two conceded at home. Twenty-four away. Two goals a match in Atlanta against a goal and a half on the road — half a goal a match, sixteen times over, and that half-goal is the whole inversion. Home goal difference minus nine, away minus seven, adding up to the minus sixteen in the table.

Nobody silenced this team in here. They kept the back door open while they were scoring.

### El camino

On the fourteenth of October I wrote that the away column had become the better column, and I hedged it in the same paragraph, because the samples were not level. The World Cup had taken the stadium off them for a run of road matches, and the away column ran a match longer.

That hedge has expired.

Sixteen and sixteen, exactly even for the first time this season — and the gap survived the evening-up. Sixteen points taken away from Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Fourteen taken inside it. When I called the Benz worth one point on the tenth of October it was arguably a curiosity. It is not a curiosity now. It is the season.

The run into this afternoon is three straight defeats, and two of them say exactly what the splits say. Beaten 1-3 at home by Inter Miami on the seventeenth. Beaten 2-3 at home by Chicago Fire on the twenty-fourth. Three conceded in each. Then 1-2 away at New York City FC on the twenty-eighth — Atlanta scored one there, not two.

The last win was a 3-0 on the road at CF Montréal on the fourteenth. Away. Which is the point.

### The reverse image in the other dugout

Toronto arrive on thirty-nine points, level with two other clubs, so they get no ordinal from me.

What they get is their own split, because it is this club turned inside out: twenty-seven points from seventeen at home, twelve from fifteen on the road, three away wins in fifteen. Strong in their own building, thin outside it. Precisely the profile Atlanta spent eight months failing to be.

Two clubs with inverted halves, meeting in the half where only one of them came apart.

And it puts Atlanta no closer. Thirty points with two matches left is a ceiling of thirty-six, and twelve Eastern clubs are already past thirty-six. ESPN's standings feed marks nine Eastern clubs as qualifying, and Atlanta's entry carries no such note. Run it in any order and the places are beyond reach from here. I wrote that on Wednesday night, and nothing in the four days since has made it less true.

### What the seventeenth afternoon is for

A week ago I set this fixture up as the last one in the building. Let me be straight about what it can and cannot hand this club.

It cannot hand Atlanta a postseason place.

The people who bought seats in February bought seventeen afternoons in this stadium. This is the seventeenth. The sixteen before it returned four wins, and nothing at half four settles that account.

What can still happen is the one specific thing this season withheld in this one specific room. Ninety minutes where the goals that go in are at the other end.

That is a small thing to play for. It is also the thing this club has not managed in here all year.

Then a Saturday in New Jersey, and a winter to explain it.