Hijacking LaLiga: How Atlético Madrid Broke Barcelona and Real Madrid's Duopoloy on Spanish Football

2017

Introduction

IN the magical soap opera of football, occasionally a David conquers a Goliath. That’s the beauty of the sport. Rarely, though, can an underdog hold their own against two Goliaths, yet that is exactly what Atlético Madrid did in the 2013/14 season when they finished ahead of both Barcelona and Real Madrid, the two biggest football clubs in the world, after a full 38-game league campaign.

Most considered that impossible, but Diego Simeone and his squad merely viewed it as improbable. The cliché of approaching the season game by game was applied and, by the end of it all, all of those points added up to make them champions. They were just a couple of minutes from combining it with a Champions League title too.

Underdog stories have long fascinated me, just as Eibar’s did when I wrote Eibar the Brave in 2015, which told the story of how a miniature team from a tiny town in the Basque valleys won promotion to LaLiga.

Atlético’s tale is similarly extraordinary, just on a larger magnitude, but it wasn’t too long ago that the capital city team was playing Eibar in the second division of Spanish football, having been relegated in the year 2000. Just 14 years later, they were champions of Spain and I was beyond curious to work out how they’d managed to complete such a seismic turnaround in their fortunes.

This book explains how they built something special from the ashes of that disaster. In my first chapter, ‘The Champions’, I recount exactly what it is that Atlético have achieved. They won a league title, but they did far more than that and, by continuing to compete with Barcelona and Real Madrid over the following seasons, they dismissed the notion that LaLiga is a two-team league. In the following ten chapters, I investigate the various aspects of the club which contributed to these achievements. Finally, in ‘The Future’, I look into football’s crystal ball and wonder just how sustainable Atlético’s success can be.

Whether or not the club does indeed keep winning titles and frustrating Barcelona and Real Madrid, the trophies they’ve already won can never be taken away from them. Here is Atlético Madrid’s 21st-century story.

Euan McTear

Madrid

June 2017

The Champions

‘We managed to turn a team that had been relegated into the league champion.’

Filipe Luís

‘The biggest achievement for Atlético Madrid is that they can now be compared to Barcelona and Real Madrid.’

Pep Guardiola

‘Life is never more fun than when you’re the underdog competing against the giants.’

Ross Perot

Saturday, 17 May 2014. Camp Nou, Barcelona

Barcelona. Barcelona. Real Madrid. Real Madrid. Barcelona. Barcelona. Barcelona. Real Madrid. Barcelona. LaLiga had undeniably become a duopoly and for the previous nine years the championship had been passed between just two of Spain’s trophy cabinets. Not only that, but it had been five years since any other team had even come within 20 points of the champions. If the cup wasn’t sporting blue and red ribbons, it was dressed in white. On the final day of the 2013/14 season, the league was once again won in the Catalan capital, with the fans of Barcelona on their feet applauding the champions. So far, so on script.

This time, though, La Blaugrana’s players were crying tears of despair, not of joy. They hadn’t retained their title and the ovation was not for them. Instead, it was for the players of Atlético Madrid, the underdog who had just broken this duopoly of Spanish football by hijacking LaLiga at the Camp Nou.

For just the third time in the Spanish league’s eight-and-a-half-decade history, the two teams battling for top spot met on the final day of the season with all of the marbles on the line and the equation could not have been simpler. A win for the home side would see them retain their title, while a draw or an away victory would ensure the first triumph of a team not named Barcelona or Real Madrid since Rafael Benítez’s 2003/04 Valencia.

There was no doubting these two teams were the deserved league ‘finalists’, with Atlético and Barcelona the only two clubs not to have dropped any lower than third throughout the whole season and with both having gotten the better of Real Madrid in their head-to-head meetings. Yet some considered it a miracle that Gerardo Martino’s spluttering Barcelona even had a chance given how average their football had been all year and given they’d been held to a goalless draw at Elche the previous weekend.

Atlético, though, had squandered a chance to wrap up the title that same day, at the same time. Given the 0-0 scoreline from the east coast, a win over Málaga would have seen them crowned kings of Spanish football, but they simply couldn’t wrestle the necessary points out of the Andalusian side’s tight grip.

The crossbar had been rattled, penalty shouts had been made and Willy Caballero had been forced into save after save, but luck was not on the side of Los Rojiblancos – The Red and Whites. Things got even worse when Toby Alderweireld let a Caballero punt bounce, setting Samu García up for a 65th-minute Málaga opener, although the Belgian defender made amends at the other end ten minutes later by heading in the team’s 12th goal from a corner of the league season.

Still they pushed in search of a first championship since 1996 and their first since suffering a humiliating relegation at the turn of the century. With that in mind, the roar in their home stadium, the Estadio Vicente Calderón, only grew louder when the radio waves from Elche confirmed that Barcelona had been shut out. That was when it so very nearly happened.

Adrián López received the ball on the left flank in the final minute of stoppage time. He stared down Eliseu at the edge of the penalty area. He jinked past him and over the white line. He shaped up his hips for a top-corner shot. He struck the ball. The ground held its collective breath and Caballero saved yet again. Had the striker’s effort been one inch further to the right or had the Argentine goalkeeper been a fraction slower then the ball would have nestled in the corner of the net and Atlético would have been champions.

Now they had to do it all over again, and at the Camp Nou of all places. Yet they and their coach Diego Simeone had been here before. In the penultimate weekend of the double-winning 1995/96 season the team travelled to Tenerife with a chance to bag their first league since 1977, but were similarly held to a 1-1 draw. Simeone remained confident in the aftermath of that setback and proudly announced, ‘After Atlético’s 19-year wait for a league title, six more days is nothing.’ Now, as they looked for a first championship in 18 years, he had instilled that same sense of calm in his dressing room. Their title celebrations had been delayed, not cancelled, he insisted.

With that in mind, the yellow-and-black-shirted visitors stepped out in front of the packed stadium with belief flowing through their veins and they started the match well. Too well, in fact. A promising three-on-three counter attack ended up costing them their main attacking threat and top scorer in the 13th minute, as Diego Costa suffered a recurrence of a recent hamstring injury as he sped up to reach the pass spread out towards him. As if that wasn’t troubling enough, they suffered another setback and had to make another substitution just five minutes later when Arda Turan went down with a pelvic complaint.

The pendulum of momentum swung Barcelona’s way following that teary double disappointment and the home side took the lead in stunning style. Cesc Fàbregas chipped the ball towards Lionel Messi, who tried to bring it down with his chest, only for it to bounce a little too far away from him. Alexis Sánchez was close enough to reach it, but he was too far wide for a shot. Or so Atlético and most of the Camp Nou thought. With a physics-defying first-time onomatopoeic thwack, the number nine somehow forced the ball past Thibaut Courtois in the visiting goal and La Blaugrana were 1-0 up. As is stood, they were champions.

Able to nip Barcelona’s resulting swagger in the bud, Atlético held on until half-time. One Rojiblanco fan not at the game was pictured visiting her local church to pray during the 15-minute break, but Simeone took a different approach and spent the interval stressing how well they’d been playing and how one goal would kill the game. Pumped up by their coach’s rallying cry, and perhaps now assisted from above, David Villa clipped a lawnmower shot off the post just one minute after the restart. The capital city side meant business.

In the 49th minute their moment did arrive. The moment. Captain Gabi pumped a corner into the box and Diego Godín was the one there to meet it, the centre-back having dropped back before bending his pre-leap run to perfection like a high-jumper. Like a flea, the Uruguayan was slim but had a great jump, and he soared through the Catalan air at exactly the right time, swivelled his hips into exactly the right shape and sprung his neck muscles in exactly the right direction, leaving José Manuel Pinto powerless and putting Atlético on top of the table with his seventh goal of the campaign.

Following the celebratory pile-up, Godín walked back to his own half kissing the club badge and preparing himself for the salvo he and his teammates knew was coming. Like the hunter who snaps a twig in the forest to awaken the grizzly bear, Atlético had just risked provoking the world’s best attack and, sure enough, the onslaught began. They had two thirds of an hour to huff and to puff, but it was a long two thirds, like the kind of misleading hour-long ‘40-minute’ cycle of an old washing machine.

However, it was now time for Barcelona to suffer some misfortune, first with Sergio Busquets having to be replaced by Alex Song following an injury of his own and then with Messi having a close-range volley into the roof of the net cancelled out for offside, even though it appeared that Atleti defender Juanfran was the one to get the final touch. Over a full season Lady Luck tends to empower and hamper all teams equally, but this was certainly too close for comfort.

Winning a league title in the lion’s den of the Camp Nou is not, of course, supposed to be comfortable and Atlético were prepared for this fight to the end. Martino sent Gerard Piqué up to assist the attack, or he may have just repositioned himself of his own accord, but Godín kept the centre-back-turned-centre-forward at bay. Nothing, not even an X-ray, was getting through him that afternoon.

Then the fourth official’s board went up and gave the stadium another 180 seconds of hope, before a corner in the final one of those three minutes afforded the Catalans one final chance to snatch this would-be miracle title from the underdogs. Pinto even sprinted forward to position himself in the box and the goalkeeper came heart-racingly close to flicking his pony tail towards it, but Tiago Mendes was able to clear.

Quickly the ball was advancing towards Courtois’s goal again, with Neymar bursting down the sidelines, but he lost control for one second, long enough for the ball to cross the white line for an Atleti throw-in. Juanfran bode his time before placing it right at the feet of Miranda, who was already swinging his boot back ready to punt as high and far as he ever had in his life. Before the ball could even return to earth, probably with a few icicles formed on it, the whistle sounded. Atlético Madrid were champions of Spain.

The pocket of red-and-white-striped Atléticos behind the away section’s netting in the top corner of the stands erupted. Some cried. Some shrieked. Some jumped. Some hugged. Some were still holding their hands over their faces, unable to look for fear of realising it had all been a dream.

It was a dream, but it was a dream turned reality. For Barcelona, it was a nightmare, but that didn’t stop their fans from bursting into a sustained round of applause and from joining their guests in chanting ‘Atleti, Atleti’. Some footballing achievements are so momentous that they transcend team loyalties. Of course the locals wanted their team to win and they’d spent the previous 90 minutes willing the ball past Courtois, but at least they had lost to the feel-good story of the year. Or perhaps the decade.

‘This is not just a league title,’ Simeone stated during the subsequent title parade. ‘This is something much more important that these boys have shown you. If you believe and if you work, you can achieve.’

At the start of the season, few outside Simeone’s dressing room believed in Los Indios – The Indians, another of the club’s nicknames – or in any team not named Barcelona or Real Madrid, and with good reason. The 11 players who started this match cost the club less than €45m – less than half of the cost of bringing Neymar to Barcelona. Modern football had become like David and Goliath, only David doesn’t even get to use a slingshot because Goliath has already purchased it from him and sat it on his substitutes bench, yet the capital city underdogs had done it despite all the odds stacked against them. They’d yanked the league trophy away from the giants of the game and they weren’t finished yet.

Saturday, 14 May 2014. Estádio da Luz, Lisbon

Whenever an underdog bags a league title, one of the first explanations – or excuses, from the point of view of the defeated favourites – is that the unlikely champion had the benefit of free midweeks from not playing in European competition. In 2013/14 that claim could not be levelled at Atlético, who had remained in the season’s Champions League as long as any other team on the continent.

Following a 45-month absence, Los Rojiblancos returned to UEFA’s premier club competition on 18 September 2013, hosting Zenit Saint Petersburg. With the Russians a club on the rise and with Porto also in the group, a positive result in the opener was necessary if Simeone’s men were to put themselves in a strong position to progress to the knockout stages. Confidence was high, with their 2012/13 Copa del Rey victory over Real Madrid fresh in the memory, and it was cup final hero Miranda who put Atlético ahead early on in trademark fashion, heading home from a corner. A powerful blast from Hulk cancelled it out, but Atleti survived a spell of pressure and hit back, Turan finishing off some penalty-box pinball and Léo Baptistão keeping his cool to slot into the far corner.

Three points were on the board and Atlético never looked back. They travelled to Porto for the next matchday and, despite falling behind in uncharacteristic fashion by conceding a header, they soon reclaimed the air as their own and Godín headed home from a Gabi free kick. The captain set up the winner with another free kick, although this time it was a far silkier move as Turan drifted away from the wall, gobbling up enough space to receive a cunning short pass, stopping, spinning and smashing the ball in from close range.

Already they had six points and had yet to play Austria Wien, the whipping boys of Group G, who they beat 3-0 in Austria and 4-0 back home, equalling the club’s biggest ever Champions League scoreline. That booked a ticket to the last 16 with two matches to spare, while a 1-1 draw in Saint Petersburg and a 2-0 result over Porto meant Atlético topped their group by a ten-point margin, which made Europe sit up and take notice.

Nevertheless, they were still viewed as a flash-in-the-pan team and quiet delight emanated from AC Milan when they were paired with Atlético in the next round. ‘The draw could certainly have been a lot worse,’ said Umberto Gandini, the general manager of the seven-time winners, suggesting the good form wouldn’t last until the first leg in mid-February. ‘Right now they are playing very well, are having a good campaign and are a tricky team. Yet there are two months until the tie and we’ll see what they’re like then.’

It turned out Atlético were just as good then, if not better. Their form had snowballed, not melted, and they stunned the San Siro with a 1-0 first leg victory, Costa pouncing seven minutes from time from – you guessed it – a corner. The striker followed up his late Italian goal with one in just the third minute of the return leg, volleying home after Koke curled a miniature cross his way from just outside the penalty area.

Former Real Madrid man Kaká did pull one back before the half-hour mark, but there was to be no stopping this Atleti outfit. They remained calm even though they knew one more Italian goal would knock them out and Turan restored their two-goal lead just before half-time. The Turk’s shot was aided by a deflection, but he and the Vicente Calderón crowd didn’t care one jot as they rocked to the sound of The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ crackling over the speakers.

Atlético’s name was already half-written into the next round by then, but second-half finishes from Raúl García and Diego Costa crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s, as the Spanish side won the tie 5-1 and reached the last eight for the first time since 1997.

Next up was the true litmus test for this Atlético side. Still competing at the very top of LaLiga, they were paired with domestic rivals Barcelona in the quarter-finals of the Champions League and this was not the opponent the dressing room wanted. ‘In my opinion, we have been drawn against the best team,’ Gabi winced.

As would happen in the league decider, Atlético lost Costa to injury in what was an even first half at the Camp Nou, which hosted the first leg. His replacement Diego Ribas did, however, conjure up a moment of brilliance 11 minutes after the break. He rifled a shot into the top corner from the same tight angle Alexis Sánchez would score from in the following month’s LaLiga match, but from a couple of timezones further back. Suddenly Los Rojiblancos had an away goal and even Neymar’s equaliser could not take that away from them.

What had been taken away from them, though, was Costa, who remained unavailable for the return leg. Yet this was not a one-man team and Atlético demonstrated as much as they welcomed La Blaugrana back to their place, taking the lead within five minutes. David Villa smacked the crossbar from close range, but the ball did pass through the frame of the goal ten seconds later; it was recycled back to Villa, who headed for Koke to stab in.

Atlético’s tails were up like a peacock in heat and twice more they hit the woodwork in that first half as Barcelona themselves were rattled, but the ball would not hit the back of the net again, for either team. The match finished up 1-0 on the night to send Atlético into the final four and to see Barcelona knocked out before the semi-finals for the first time in seven seasons.

‘There’s lots of joy at having progressed through a tie against a great rival with a proud history,’ Simeone said of that quarter-final triumph, summing up the mood of relief and optimism. Including the Spanish Super Cup – which was lost on away goals after two draws – and the first league meeting, Atlético had played Barcelona five times by that point of the 2013/14 season and had not lost once, a record they’d maintain on the final day. If Atlético could survive so many times against and then knock out a true European powerhouse like Barcelona, surely they could do the same to anyone?

They’d put that to the test against 2011/12 winners Chelsea. Even though the English side were missing starting goalkeeper Petr Čech, it didn’t matter much as neither his replacement Mark Schwarzer nor Atlético’s on-loan-from-Chelsea shot-stopper Courtois had a tough save to make in what was one of the least eventful Champions League semi-final matches of all time, but that was just the way Simeone and his opposite number José Mourinho wanted it, with neither side entering the second leg at Stamford Bridge feeling too disadvantaged.

Former Atleti captain Fernando Torres then struck first in the return game in London one week later, momentarily handing the Blues the advantage, but Adrián levelled within ten minutes and, crucially, earned his side an away goal. Now Chelsea had to score, while the visitors could sit back and break on the counter attack, something they’d become expert at.

A penalty was then won on the hour mark to hand the returned Costa the chance to put the tie beyond the English side and he duly converted for his first of many Stamford Bridge goals. Turan followed that up with his fourth European goal of the season to send the red and white army in the corner into a frenzy and to send Atlético to their first European Cup Final since they lost to Bayern Munich in 1974. Making the moment all the more epic? The fact that Real Madrid would be the opponents.

It was the first time in European Cup history that two teams from the same city met in the final and just a few years previously nobody would have believed that Madrid would be the city to achieve that feat. Milan maybe. With a spot of luck, perhaps London. Potentially Manchester in a few years. But not Madrid, and that was solely because of Atlético, with nobody doubting