“Simeone: Living match by match”, Amazon Prime’s latest football biopic series, is an odd affair. You cannot doubt the production values, the wonderful use of archived footage and the fame of the superstar names who offer their thoughts on “Cholismo”, the style through which Simeone created modern Atletico Madrid. These documentary makers know what they’re doing.
The problem – and nobody really bears any blame for this – is that it doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know. Over 239 minutes, a wide range of high-profile opponents – David Beckham, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Javier Zanetti – have a formula: the slightly rueful smile, the pause and then the revelation that Simeone has a “thou shalt not pass” demand to win.
Except that it isn’t a revelation at all; Simeone is a man who doesn’t so much wear his heart on his sleeve as allow his personality to seep out of every pore. There are no secrets.
Simeone is Atleti and Atleti is Simeone. Eight of Atletico’s 31 major trophies have been won during his tenure. No current manager in world football – and perhaps ever – has imprinted their own personality on a club’s style more and no club in world football had a more rigid set of principles to achieve them.
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The principles of Cholismo might remain – desire to win, aggression, pragmatism, mastery of the dark arts – but they all centred around a strong defensive organisation that has been diluted this season.
After eight straight league seasons of conceding 30 goals or fewer, Atletico have conceded 34 goals in 25 La Liga matches. In the Champions League group stages, they kept one clean sheet and won only twice to limp through to the knockout stages.
We had become used to their defence winning matches; now it’s the attack bailing out the defence. Since mid-October, they have drawn 2-2 twice and 3-3 once and won matches 3-2 and 4-3. This is still Atletico Madrid, but not as we know it.
Simeone might claim that talk of existential crisis is misplaced. Rather than a club engulfed in an unusual fog, one or two key individuals are simply underperforming.
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Jan Oblak is the most obvious example: Atletico have the worst defence in La Liga’s top half but no team in the division have faced fewer shots, fewer shots on target or allowed their opponents a lower expected goals total.
Last season, Oblak had the second highest save percentage in La Liga. So far this season, he has allowed almost exactly half the shots on target he’s faced to go past him; his save percentage is almost 10 per cent lower than any other regular goalkeeper.
But it’s not all on Oblak. Simeone has used 13 different combinations of central defenders in all competitions, using a back four and three to try and discover a better formula.
There’s an accusation too that the club have overspent on attacking players – Cunha, Morata, Carrasco and Felix cost the club £180m – and bought defenders at lower cost.
Then there’s the age problem: in September, Simeone picked a team with an average age of almost 30. The younger replacements will take time to settle.
The lot of the dynastical manager is that when your team struggles it inevitably raises questions of familiarity fatigue. A decade is an eon in modern football management. No other La Liga manager has been in place for more than four years. More than half of the 32 managers currently in charge of clubs who qualified for this season’s Champions League have been in position for 12 months or less.
The age of the dynastical manager is dead, so we are told, and Simeone is not a man to shift his principles to shift with the times. That is the only downside of your manager being the personification of your club.
There is another theory too: winning softens Atletico because they are a team built to chase. After securing the title in 2014, they immediately fell back to third.
After winning the Europa League in 2018, they then achieved their lowest points total in six years and finished behind Borussia Dortmund in their Champions League group and were beaten 3-0 by Juventus after winning the first leg 2-0.
Their three best performances this season (2-0 home win over Barcelona, 3-0 win over Real Betis, 3-1 win in Porto on Champions League matchday six) all came after setbacks that provoked serious criticism.
If that is more than a piecemeal hypothesis, the Champions League provides Simeone with the perfect stage to prove that Cholismo is not running on fumes. But it is a risk as much as an opportunity, given Atletico’s defensive fragility.
For the first time in a decade, some are starting to wonder whether Simeone is the problem rather than the solution. Against a club who know only too well the problems that come when a dynasty declines, Atletico badly need to reconnect with their old principles or face several months of messy soul-searching.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/JbBYaO7
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