One last thought on Atlanta United’s 2020 season mercifully concluding

Atlanta United’s 2020 season has mercifully come to an end. The Five Stripes fell to Columbus Crew, 2-1, on Sunday afternoon on Decision Day to seal their fates. This wild, wacky and mostly terrible campaign comes to a close with Atlanta United in the lowest place it has been since its inception. The club has much work to do this offseason if they are to return themselves to the upper echelon of the league.

This isn’t going to be your normal post-match column. There’s just not much to say about the match. To the players’ credit, they fought on the day. Both literally and figuratively. The effort cannot be faulted. There’s just something rotten and festering that needs to be discovered and cleaned out in the next several months.

The one big talking point from the match is Franco Escobar’s red card and subsequent noisy exit from the field. Firstly, I don’t condone his actions of pushing a Crew staff member. However, Franco’s emotions in that moment truly reflect how every Atlanta United fan has felt since July. There’s no excuse for his actions, but you can’t really blame him for feeling the way he was in that moment. We all know he’s a passionate player and that’s what makes him so good when things are going well. Unfortunately, this season certainly hasn’t gone well and Franco finally boiled over.

We’ll soon transition from this terrible season to the fun part of analyzing the coming offseason and discussing how the front office can possibly go about fixing things.

Carlos Bocanegra and Darren Eales are scheduled to speak with the media for their annual end of season availability later today. We will be there attempting to get as many answers as possible. Please leave your questions for them down below — no matter how obvious or plain — and we’ll do our best to get them all answered as best as they’ll openly answer them.

Thank you all for sticking with us during these awful stretches where there was just nothing left to dissect or talk about. Thankfully it’s finally over and we can officially start looking forward to hopefully a much better time.