On Jan. 1, Noah Cobb and Ajani Fortune became Atlanta United’s latest homegrown signings. Generally, new homegrowns don’t have too many eyes on them. It takes time for them to develop and work their way up the depth chart. But after Atlanta United shipped off center backs Alan Franco, George Campbell and Alex De John this offseason, Cobb, just 17 years old, is a couple of spots away from first-team minutes in MLS.
Atlanta United seem more than okay with that. Miles Robinson, Juanjo Purata and Luis Abram should carry the brunt of the load this year. However, Cobb is already receiving the kind of rare praise that should reassure anyone worried about the Five Stripes’ depth in central defense.
“Noah Cobb comes in January as one of the homegrowns we think he has an extremely high ceiling. For me personally, I think this kid has future national team written all over him,” Atlanta United technical director and former USMNT center back Carlos Bocanegra said back in November. “From a center back perspective, he's intelligent, he's aggressive, he's experienced beyond his age and I think you guys were able to see he played more as a right back when we played Pachuca in the AmFam Cup, but he does not look out of place physically either. And I think he was still 16 in that game if I'm correct. So we have high hopes for him. Now we've got to introduce him and Gonzalo has got to introduce him at the right time and not just throw him in the deep end where he fails. But the kid has a very, very high ceiling.”
Regardless of your thoughts on Bocanegra’s time with Atlanta, you have to concede that if anyone is going to know a thing or two about USMNT center backs, Bocanegra is a good place to start.
He’s not the only one taking notice of Cobb’s ability beyond his years though. Cobb, a Chattanooga native, has already spent time with the U.S. men's youth national team U-19s and, in 2022, he earned a spot in the MLS Next All-Star Game. There’s genuine buzz here. That can be a double-edged sword though. Now it’s up to Cobb to approach that hype and excitement in, frankly, as boring a way as possible.
The day in, day out grind
“That means a lot coming from someone like Carlos, given the career he's had played for the national team," Cobb remarked in an exclusive late January interview with The Striker. "It always feels good to have someone that believes in you. I think the way I live up to that is what I do here every single day, because I think what you do every single day on the training field, the habits you build, are what eventually come out in the game.
“Even if it doesn't come out in the game," he continued, "you come back and do the same thing, same routine, day in, day out, just working hard, I think I think the middle steps that you have to take as well eventually builds up into the national team and playing the big games of a soccer like Champions League and all that. The day in, day out grind is what eventually gets you there.”
If that answer seems wise beyond Cobb’s 17 years, well, that's just indicative of his impressive maturity. In every evaluation of Cobb, it eventually comes up. That’s not just answering questions from media about the day-to-day process, though. In fact, critically, that plays a minuscule part in why folks at the club and elsewhere see a young player ready to step up. He got that answer right. But it’s what he gets wrong and how he responds to it that makes Cobb stand out from his peers.
“Even within one activity, he gets the ball, does an action and maybe it's a mistake. You can see him the next time he gets the ball, he's doing something different. He's thinking based on his own failures, and he's thinking based on those successes,” Atlanta United Academy Director Matt Lawrey said. “That's difficult for a kid in a new environment and it's been continuous since he arrived, even watching him in [the] first team this preseason. You can see him get the ball, okay, maybe it's a failed action or a successful action, but the brain is going. And we've gotten used to seeing that with Noah and I think that's why we hold him in such high regard. Whatever environment we're able to plop him into, even if it's a struggle at first, we know he'll get there.”
It’s not just Cobb’s adaptability though. The physical and technical skillset is there too. At just around six feet tall, he doesn’t have the prototypical frame for a center back. But, per Lawrey, he does have legitimate speed. He also has the ability to use both feet to play out of pressure which should only improve over time. But, maybe, most importantly, he has instincts and an understanding of the game, which combined, allow him to take the quickest path to the ball.
“He's a very talented defender,” Gonzalo Pineda told 92.9 The Game. “He defends with very good angles and he has some pace similar to Miles. Probably not as fast as Miles but he has some physicality to him. His instincts defensively are great and he's also very good on the ball when we have to build up from the back. So he has very good attributes plus the mentality we're always looking for.”
If all of these descriptors of a slightly-undersized Atlanta United center back who excels at reading the game sound a bit familiar, you aren’t the only one who’s noticed.
A familiar mentor
“I think he sees the game well. He reads things in a way that, when I watched his video, I can see some things in him that I see in myself,” former Atlanta United player Michael Parkhurst said. “That's a tough thing to teach. You know, some guys have it, some guys don't. You can learn a little bit, but some guys are just more innate to reading it and seeing it, acting on it. And he has that.”
Now, just to clarify, Parkhurst isn’t spending life in retirement analyzing Atlanta United academy prospects for the hell of it. When Parkhurst’s career ended, he reached out to former academy director Tony Annan to see if he could offer any help to a young and up-and-coming player. Annan suggested a young(er) Noah Cobb.
Parkhurst connected with Cobb and quickly realized what Annan saw in him. Parkhurst has been a mentor ever since, talking with Cobb whenever needed to give some guidance and help prepare him for the difficult day-to-day tasks that come with developing as a center back.
“It takes time because the mistakes are amplified. You’ve got less support behind you when you do make the mistakes. It's just tough because it's a daily grind, right? When you go up there and you train with the first team for a couple of days a week or something like that, if you have a bad couple of days, you can rebound. You can go back down to the lower level and get your confidence back. But when you're in it every day, there's no out. You need to level up and get to that level as often as you can as quickly as you can,” Parkhurst said.
“I think that's where his maturity level and a good head on his shoulders helps. Because there are going to be days when you struggle. I mean guys who have been pros for five years,10 years, have those days. But it's tougher when you're the youngest guy, and some of the veteran guys go harder against you. You never get the benefit of the doubt for calls or anything. You just have to keep your head down and just know that that's part of the process. That can be difficult, especially for some players that have been on the top of the totem pole their entire life.”
So far, Cobb seems to be handling that difficulty well. Or at least, he seems primed to handle it well. There’s an assuredness to how he approaches his play. It’s not cocky, just confident. Better yet, it’s an understanding that confidence is critical to his success.
“I felt comfortable when I have the ball. I'm not afraid to make a mistake. I'll always trust my ability and always, always trust my instinct. If I think I can play a pass. I'll play the pass. If I make a mistake, I want to make a mistake playing brave and playing true to myself, not shying away from anything," Cobb said. “Now, with that being said, you have to be smart with the ball. But what I'm trying to say is that I'll always back myself, always trust myself to play a pass, always believe in myself to be able to complete whatever action on the ball that I'm trying to complete.”
It seems like most of that confidence is just how Cobb is. The club hasn’t needed to instill that in him. They just needed to foster what he already had by allowing him to prove to himself that he could find solutions to any problems he might encounter.
The path to the future
“Part of our methodology within the academy is that we don't really give the players the answers," Lawrey said. "We could spoon feed them all the way through and what we’d get at the end of the day is someone who can just spit back our language. We don't want that."
“We have a language. We have a way of working but a lot of our activities just show a problem to the player and it's the player to try to sort out the solution and give us feedback in terms of what would be the solution in this moment. So it's a lot of how we build our activities. It's a lot of how we build our coaching. We coach with a lot of questions. We coach with a lot of a ‘What did you see?’ as the player. We don't start with our own perspective. We try to start with a player's perspective. We want them to understand that it's their journey. We're here to help them.”
There’s a way to go before that process leads to first-team minutes and an even longer way to go before Bocanegra’s national team projection becomes reality. Progress isn’t linear and, more than perhaps any other position, center backs take time to develop.
However, even if tempered expectations are encouraged, Cobb’s makeup suggests that the ceiling is high. Now it’s up to the club, Cobb and a little luck to put him on the path to get there.
“The possibilities are there. But you know, it's tough to put that future national team label on anybody because that's tough expectations to rise up to and to play to,” Parkhurst said. “I think that he's definitely got a bright future ahead of him. Turning pro at 17 means they think that he's capable and that he can bring something to the team. There's no charity at this point. Carlos and the group think highly of him and I understand why he's a talented gifted young man. But expectations are a tough thing to live up to some time. So I hope that he's given the time to develop those games and mature as a player. I mean, we thought the same thing of Miles [Robinson], but he barely played for two years and you didn't know at that point. He needed an opportunity. Now he’s taken it so, hopefully, Noah can be on a similar path to that.”
At 17, expectations are going to be orbiting around everything Cobb does for a long time. By the time the 2026 Men’s World Cup comes to Atlanta, he’ll be just 21 years old, a year younger than when Robinson became a full-time starter for the Five Stripes.
That doesn’t seem to bother Cobb much. For now, he’s just a kid with the ball at his feet ready to solve whatever problems are put in front of him.
“Sometimes I do think about it,” Cobb said. “But to be honest, I'm still just playing soccer like I did when I was little. Obviously against, bigger, better, faster, stronger guys, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's still the same game that I played when I was 12. So I just treat it like that. I just come here and have fun every day.”