Chris Henderson hunts Atlanta United revival and promises ‘leaders’ as DPs

ATLANTA – Change is sweeping through Atlanta United as the year comes to a close. The club’s new $23million addition to its training ground is underway. It will feature a modern office space and an enhanced production studio, among other upgrades, and be ready next summer, but on Tuesday the sounds of construction were tempered briefly in order to introduce Chris Henderson as the organization’s new chief soccer officer.

Henderson represents a considerable shift in front office strategy. He replaces Carlos Bocanegra, who had served in the role since Atlanta United’s inception in 2014. Under Bocanegra and Darren Eales, the club’s former president, squad building was a risk-reward exercise. It led to an MLS Cup in 2018, but the winning standard has not been maintained since. Henderson was hired to help change that.

“We promised that we were going to remake the club,” said Atlanta United CEO Garth Lagerwey before he introduced Henderson to reporters. “This is the first big one and there’ll be more to come to make this better in 2025.”

In Henderson, Lagerwey hired a trusted friend. As Inter Miami’s sporting director, Henderson helped navigate a financial penalty of more than $2million that the club received in 2021. MLS sanctioned Miami for violating the league’s salary budget and roster guidelines the year prior.

Henderson purged Miami’s roster then rebuilt it, knowing that Lionel Messi, Sergio Busquets, Luis Suarez and Jordi Alba would join sooner than later. He was influential in a way that doesn’t typically make headlines at a club that became synonymous with headline-grabbing news. But as Miami’s notoriety grew, Henderson’s influence appeared to diminish.

Despite Henderson’s integral role in helping steer Miami to a Supporters’ Shield in 2024, in June, Miami managing owner Jorge Mas hired president of football operations Raul Sanllehi to oversee the sporting department.

Keep in mind that Henderson has been an MLS title-winning executive since 2008. Any club in MLS could expect to immediately get better with him in their front office, but Miami is a unique case. There isn’t a more hands-on owner in the league than Mas, who personally recruited Messi and his pals.

Tata Martino, who previously coached Atlanta, resigned in November and was replaced by Messi’s close friend and former teammate Javier Mascherano. In short, Miami’s HQ got crowded.

So, does Henderson believe he’ll have a stronger voice in Atlanta?

“I think yes,” Henderson told The Athletic. “I think just in the way Garth, his vision and leadership, we’re very aligned. So I do think so. I feel like I had a voice in Miami. I had a voice in Seattle. I think that will continue, but I think now it will probably be an easier transition from the beginning.”

Henderson will go from the shadows in Miami to one of the most visible jobs in MLS. It’s not often that a team drops a teaser video on social media to hype up the hire of a front-office executive. In Atlanta, Henderson will be one of the club’s stars. Not only as a roster builder, for which he has become renowned, but as an establisher of culture. The latter has been the missing ingredient in Atlanta since their instability began in 2019.

Henderson left Miami in a much better position than when he was hired by Mas and co-owner David Beckham in January of 2021. Miami’s stuttered launch in 2020 under head coach Diego Alonso was followed by two subpar seasons under Phil Neville. Miami finished 14th out of 15 teams in the Eastern Conference in 2023.

”I feel like there was a big evolution at Miami from when I came in to when I left,” said Henderson. “And obviously I dealt with a lot of things the first three years that were, you know, unexpected when I came in, but I look at where it is now and that team is an incredible team.”

Atlanta goalkeeper Brad Guzan thwarted Messi and Inter Miami in the playoffs (Rich Storry / Getty Images)

The optics are much different in Atlanta. Lagerwey has been given carte blanche to restructure the club. Rather than rip the bandaid, Lagerwey has taken his time to make wholesale changes — a reality that has frustrated the Atlanta United fanbase. A new head coach could be announced later this month, which would finalize the technical department overhaul.

After he fired former manager Gonzalo Pineda in June, Lagerwey then parted ways with Bocanegra, who had become one of Atlanta United’s most important decision-makers. He was responsible for hiring past coaches, dealing with player agents, signing players, and even deciding what the players wore on their pregame walk to the stadium.

On Tuesday, Lagerwey lauded Henderson’s skills and his pedigree as a highly-regarded talent evaluator. Over the past five seasons, Atlanta United has spent a lot of money on players but consistently performed as a mid-table team. Their late-season push to qualify for the postseason, and then eliminate Inter Miami, masked many of Atlanta’s realities.

“I see some good pieces here and some pieces that are really good for building a roster,” Henderson said of Atlanta’s current squad.

Henderson will have a more senior-level role in Atlanta that will not be limited to scouting. Still, his influence in that department will be significant. The aforementioned task of building a culture, however, was very appealing.

“That’s one of the bigger reasons why I came here,” he said. “I feel like it’s one of my biggest strengths, that relationship with the coaching staff, relationship with the player. You know, you have a lot of conversations with players, and you’re sitting down, you have to trade a player. I’ve been traded six times, so there are certain ways that you can deliver the same message. I like to lead with empathy.”

Henderson was also genuinely excited about the opportunity to mold the soccer side of the business, not only to his liking but by working with Atlanta’s budding scouting and analytics department.

Not everything Henderson says or does is new age and progressive. His formula for success in MLS is rather standard. A club needs high-impact designated players who will “lead by example”. They don’t have to be yellers or talkers, Henderson added. Instead, an Atlanta DP has to lead inside the locker room, as well.

That’s certainly not out-of-the-box thinking, but in Atlanta’s case, they haven’t gotten elite leadership and commitment from their top players for several seasons. They enter 2025 with two open DP slots after the departures of Thiago Almada and Giorgos Giakoumakis over the summer.

Almada may someday be regarded as the most talented player in club history, but he didn’t engage with the city nor was his heart ever in MLS long-term. Giakoumakis, a DP striker who won the Newcomer of the Year award in 2023, hadn’t fully unpacked before he and his camp sought to leave the U.S. for Liga MX.

And that’s the hidden part of talent identification. Can you avoid an overpromise about a next step to Europe or a new contract and instead convince an international player to commit to MLS long-term?

“(DPs) need to be examples for the young kids. They need to be ultra professional,” Henderson said. “I’ve now been at two clubs (Seattle and Miami) where I think we’ve done really well with the DPs, and they’ve been leaders, and that’s what I want to bring here.”

Henderson (right) with late head coach Sigi Schmid and Seattle co-owner Adrian Hanauer in 2011 (Otto Greule Jr / Getty Images)

Lagerwey and Henderson have been reunited in Atlanta, but the two are still best known for their success together with the Seattle Sounders. Two MLS Cup finals were won (2015 and 2019) and Seattle qualified for the playoffs consistently for over a decade. It’s not a stretch to say that Lagerwey would like something comparable now.

“I want to be very respectful of the success that Atlanta has had,” Lagerwey said on Tuesday. “Atlanta was the most successful launch, arguably, in professional sports history. But if you talk to the guys who organized the launch, one of the trips they made was out to Seattle. So I don’t think it’s a knock on either organization that we’re trying to pull the best from both organizations and try to put it together.”

Among the popular trends that have made their way to Atlanta from Seattle is a commitment to data and analytics. In Seattle, and gradually in Atlanta, data has become an important tool for the player acquisition process. Atlanta’s data team is a work in progress, which means that data was not a central part of the scouting process until recently.

Henderson believes that data can “help us minimize risks and make decisions on players,” but adds that there’s an art to signing players that starts from one’s gut. “The data may say one thing, but you really feel strongly (about a player),” said Henderson. “He may seem slow, but he’s so good with the ball that it doesn’t matter.”

Atlanta has outgrown their original training ground, but the club needs to upgrade more than just their facilities. The product on matchday has to improve. Henderson will be expected to guide Atlanta’s return to the top of the MLS mountain in what he referred to as “a fresh start” with “a lot of resources.”

“We need to take the things in our relationship that worked, and how we work together, and with the rest of the staff, but we need to take it to this new project,” he said. “There are different players, there are different things that you’re dealing with. There’s a different stadium.”

Atlanta supporters will hope that Tuesday’s news conference was the beginning of the end, of sorts. Henderson’s hire could be the culture change that Atlanta has been grasping at for years. Celebrations in Atlanta have become transitory and patience among the fans has run thin.

For Henderson and Lagerwey, success must be more than a fleeting moment.

(Top photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)