If winning a second division championship, which was last achieved in 2011 and helped them gain promotion, is only considered a side note at this point, you have to look back a little further in Atalanta Bergamo’s history to see a title win. It has been 61 years since players from the club from the Italian region of Lombardy, which is located in the north, were able to hold a trophy in their hands. Atalanta won 3-1 against AC Turin in the Italian Cup final on June 2, 1963.
For Angelo Domenghini, it is apparently a day that he remembers fondly to this day. The former striker, now 82 years old, scored all three goals for Atalanta. A black and white video snippet of the triumph at the time has only been available on his Instagram account for a few days – with impressions and his three-pack.
Everyone who likes Atalanta – and perhaps Angelo Domenghini too – will be looking forward to Dublin on Wednesday evening. There Bergamo will face the new German champions Bayer Leverkusen in the final of the Europa League (9 p.m., RTL).
Bergamo just lost the cup final
The game, Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini recently said, was “a historic opportunity”. He, the players, those responsible and also the fans are hoping for a better outcome than in the Italian Cup final, which Atalanta beat last week after previously impressive performances, including the 3-0 wins over Liverpool FC and Olympique Marseille in the Europa League and a winning streak in Serie A, losing 1-0 to Juventus. The record winner secured the Coppa Italia for the 15th time.
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But now Atalanta is reaching for another title, just like Bayer 04. The Werkself have the treble waiting for them if, after the championship title, they also win the Europa League and three days later the German Cup final against 1. FC Kaiserslautern in Berlin (8 p.m., ARD ) win. It’s been a little over two years since the two teams last met. In March 2022, Bayer lost in both games in the round of 16 of the Europa League: 2-3 in northern Italy, 0-1 at home. “It’s a very good team. “They are tactically very good and have very good players,” said Leverkusen striker Amine Adli a few days ago looking back: “When they are in the final, everyone knows that they are very good.” In the first leg, for example, the odds ratio was 11:4 for them Bergamo.
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Now it’s time for a reunion. And in Leverkusen they are under warning despite their super series of 51 unbeaten games in a row. “For me they are one of the toughest opponents in Europe. They have a great mentality, a coach who knows very clearly what he wants. They have a large squad, they play very intensely,” said Xabi Alonso, Bayer’s coach, with a view to their final opponent: “Every game against Atalanta is very tough for every opponent. We expect a super final. It will be very close.”
Atalanta is in the Champions League for the fourth time
There are quite a few people in Italy who are keeping their fingers crossed for Bergamo to beat favorites Leverkusen on Wednesday. The club enjoys a high reputation beyond the city limits because, compared to big clubs such as AC or Inter Milan and Juventus, it always manages to make its mark in Italian football with a much smaller budget. Like just last weekend, when they qualified for the Champions League for the fourth time with a 2-0 win at US Lecce. From 2019 to 2021, the club qualified three times in a row.
Robin Gosens played for Atalanta Bergamo from 2017 to 2022
Those: picture alliance/IPA/Francesco Scaccianoce
The pillars of the club, where Robin Gosens, who now plays for the Bundesliga club 1. FC Union, once made it into the German national team, include Gianluca Scamacca, who came from West Ham United before the current season. Together with the Belgian Charles De Ketalaere, the Dutch Teun Koopmeiners and the Nigerian Ademola Lookman, he shapes the offensive game. The latter moved from FC Everton to RB Leipzig in 2019. But he couldn’t hold his own there before he came to Bergamo in 2022 via loan stations FC Fulham and Leicester City.
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There will be big celebrations if the Bergamo team, which fans have called “la Dea”, the goddess, for decades, manages to win the final – in a city from which images went around the world almost four years ago that shocked not only Italy, but the whole world. They were images of nighttime corpse transports at the beginning of the corona pandemic in March 2020, when army trucks drove through Bergamo loaded with coffins and were on their way to crematoria in other cities. A total of 4,500 people died in the region in the first weeks of the pandemic. A Champions League match between Bergamo and Valencia FC in February 2020 had become a super-spreader event at the time.
Pictures of an Italian army convoy from Bergamo went around the world in March 2020: The trucks transported bodies of those who died from the coronavirus to the cemetery in Ferrara
Those: picture alliance/dpa/LaPresse via ZUMA Press/Massimo Paolone
Four years later, Atalanta is now preparing to create different images. Images of triumph, of happiness. But there is still one hurdle to overcome: Bayer Leverkusen.
