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On Thursday evening Atalanta won 3-0 at Liverpool in the first leg of the quarter-finals of the Europa League, the second European club competition, thanks to a brace from striker Gianluca Scamacca and a goal from Croatian midfielder Mario Pašalić. It is a remarkable result, because Liverpool are one of the strongest teams in Europe, joint first in the English championship, and had not lost at home in 26 games. Atalanta (the team from the city of Bergamo) had played once again at Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium which, due to the well-attended support, has always been considered one of the strengths of the English team: they had won that time too ( 2-0, on 25 November 2020 in the group stage of the Champions League, the most important European cup). Only three teams have managed to win twice at Liverpool in European competitions: before that, the Spanish Barcelona and Real Madrid, two of the strongest teams ever, had managed to do so.
Gian Piero Gasperini, 66 years old, has coached Atalanta since 2016 and since then he has transformed it from a provincial team whose objective was salvation (i.e. trying not to be relegated to Serie B) to a European team that plays modern football and can win against much more prestigious opponents. In recent years Atalanta has continued to evolve and has managed to remain competitive despite changing many players, thanks to the brilliant ideas of its coach and management.
The team that won at Anfield in 2020 and the one that won on Thursday evening have only two players in common: the Dutch Marten de Roon and the Albanian Berat Djimsiti. In November 2020 Josip Ilicic and Robin Gosens scored, and the Argentine Papu Gómez played a great game, all players who gave their best with Gasperini as coach, and who then never repeated themselves at the same levels. Also thanks to that victory, Atalanta managed to pass the Champions League group, being then eliminated in the round of 16 by Real Madrid, in the following February 2021. Atalanta has changed a lot over time, also in the way of playing, but he has maintained the same principles: aggression, intensity and a certain courage, in the sense that he plays ambitiously both with teams of a lower level than him and with teams theoretically much superior.
Gasperini’s Atalanta has never been among the top teams in terms of financial availability, neither in Europe nor in Italy: today it has the eighth highest salary in Serie A, that is, there are seven Italian teams that spend more than it on players’ salaries players. Yet from 2016 to today they have finished third in the table three times, in 2022 and 2024 they reached the quarter-finals of the Europa League and in 2020 they even reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
That year, after winning twice against Valencia in the round of 16 (4-1 at home, 4-3 in Spain), they came very close to qualifying for the semi-finals. Against Paris Saint-Germain which had some of the strongest players in the world, such as the French Kylian Mbappé and the Brazilian Neymar, they lost in a quarter-final which was played in a single match on a neutral pitch, an exceptionality due to the period immediately following the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. They had been ahead until the ninetieth minute, then conceded two goals in a very short time and were eliminated.
Gian Piero Gasperini, 66 years old, has coached Atalanta since 2016 (Emilio Andreoli/Getty Images)
On Thursday 18 April Atalanta will play in Bergamo to defend the 3-goal advantage gained against Liverpool and try to qualify for the semi-final: it would be the second European semi-final in their history, after the 1988 one in the Cup Winners’ Cup, an old trophy in which the winners of the national cups faced each other. Gasperini’s team is also in the semi-finals of the Italian Cup, where they lost the first leg 1-0 at Fiorentina.
In these eight years Atalanta has not yet won a trophy (it lost the Italian Cup final twice), yet it has become a virtuous model for its way of playing football, based on the idea of being sustainable on an economic level but, at the same time, to buy players who are functional to his coach’s game, trying to be competitive with the strongest teams in the championship. The rest was done by Gasperini, who every year manages to put his players in a position to perform at their best. His influence is evident above all in Italy, where many teams and coaches in recent years have tried and still try to take inspiration from Atalanta.
– Read also: Atalanta is an example for Serie A
2024-04-12 08:58:22
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