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On Thursday evening Atalanta won 3-0 against Marseille and reached the final of the Europa League, the second most important European football cup, which will be played on 22 May in Dublin against Bayer Leverkusen. It will be the first European final in its 116-year history: a story that has changed significantly since the summer of 2016, when Gian Piero Gasperini arrived in Bergamo as coach. In these eight years, Gasperini has made a low-ranking team, whose objective for years had been almost exclusively not to be relegated to Serie B, a team capable of competing for the top positions in Serie A, those which are worth qualification to European cups, until reaching the final of one of these cups with Atalanta. Atalanta will also play the Italian Cup final against Juventus next Wednesday.
Gasperini succeeded by making Atalanta always play in a courageous, modern manner, with playing principles which today, also thanks to his influence, are used by many coaches, in Serie A and abroad (aggressiveness in pressing, full pitch, the freedom to move given to the most creative players, the involvement of all players in offensive actions). In an interview with Gasperini in May 2020, the Guardian, an authoritative British newspaper, defined Atalanta as “one of the most entertaining teams in the world”. Today it is a very different team compared to that one, perhaps a little less exciting, but Gasperini’s skill in recent years has also been that of always managing to update himself, to change and to make Atalanta change to make the most of the new players which arrived gradually: often many of these performed beyond expectations, precisely because they were placed in the best possible conditions by the context created by Gasperini.
Atalanta players celebrate after the victory against Marseille (ANSA/MICHELE MARAVIGLIA)
When Gasperini arrived in Bergamo, Atalanta had just finished the championship in thirteenth place. Even before that, in the 2014-2015 season, they had finished seventeenth: with four points less, they would have been relegated to Serie B. Gasperini came from three positive years at Genoa, a team he returned to after leaving in 2011, when he moved to Inter . The experience with Inter was negative but also very short: he lost four out of five matches (including the Italian Super Cup against Milan) and was sacked after just 73 days. Many said that Gasperini was a good coach, but not suitable for a team with great ambitions like Inter.
He also got off to a very bad start at Atalanta, as they lost four of their first five games in the league. After the defeat against Palermo on the fifth day of Serie A there was talk of dismissal, but the management decided to confirm it, and from that moment on the team changed completely: it won eight of the next nine matches, including those against Napoli, Inter and Roma. At the end of the 2016-2017 championship, surprisingly, Atalanta finished fourth, the best placing in its history.
Especially after losing the first matches, Gasperini chose to place his trust in several players who grew up in Atalanta, historically one of the best youth sectors in Italy, such as Mattia Caldara, Andrea Conti and Roberto Gagliardini, and in other young players and up to that moment almost unknown like Leonardo Spinazzola, Franck Kessié and Andrea Petagna. Defender Alessandro Bastoni also made his debut in the first team, then 17 years old, now a regular for Inter and the Italian national team and considered one of the best in the world in his role.
Gasperini’s first Atalanta (Maurizio Lagana/Getty Images)
Like Bastoni, many of those players in the following seasons moved to richer and better equipped teams (Milan, Inter, Juventus), starting a virtuous mechanism that Atalanta has never stopped fueling in recent years, namely that to buy young and little-known footballers at a low price (or to develop them directly in its youth teams), put them in a context that allows them to excel, and then sell them for much higher sums. Atalanta has achieved exceptional results, remaining one of the few teams in Serie A and not only financially sustainable, with the accounts in order. Already in 2017 the work of Gasperini and the director of the technical area Giovanni Sartori, today at Bologna, and the management of the Percassi family (owners of the club until 2022, and still minority shareholders after the purchase by an American group ) were seen as an example for Serie A.
Since Percassi’s arrival in 2010, Atalanta has collected more than 500 million euros in capital gains, i.e. the difference between the money obtained from the sale of a player and that spent on his purchase. After that first season Gagliardini went to Inter for 22 million euros, Conti and Kessié to Milan for 24 and 32 million respectively. In the years following Atalanta, many other similar operations were successful. Danish striker Rasmus Højlund, who arrived in the summer of 2022 for 20 million euros from Sturm Graz, was bought by Manchester United for 74 million euros after just one season with Gasperini at Atalanta. The Swede Dejan Kulusevski was bought for 3.5 million euros when he was 16 years old: three years later, Juventus bought him for 39 million. Amad Diallo, despite having only played four games in Serie A with Atalanta, moved to Manchester United for 21 million euros when he was 19.
In addition to the so-called player trading, that is, the practice of supporting itself financially with the transfers of footballers, Atalanta purchased the Atleti Azzurri d’Italia stadium from the municipality of Bergamo, which today is called the Gewiss Stadium (for sponsorship reasons) and is being restored one sector at a time , to allow the team to continue playing with a good part of the public. In Serie A there are few teams that own their stadium (Juventus, Udinese, Sassuolo and Frosinone), the others are all rented: in Europe there are many demonstrations of the fact that owning the stadium allows you to earn money much more, because the revenues from matches and other events organized at the stadium go directly to the owner company. The results that are almost always above expectations and the participation in European cups are another determining factor in making Atalanta a model.
Atalanta’s curve in the 3-0 win against Marseille, with goals from Ademola Lookman, Matteo Ruggeri and El Bilal Touré (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)
In 2017-2018 they played in the Europa League for the first time (they went out in the round of 32) and finished seventh in the championship. The following three seasons were those in which Atalanta’s size and prospects changed definitively: for three years in a row the team finished third in the league, a placing that allowed it to make its debut in the Champions League, the most prestigious European club competition. All of Europe began to get to know Gian Piero Gasperini, his intense football and his players, especially those capable of more spectacular plays such as the attacking midfielders Alejandro Gómez (known by all as the Papu) and Josip Ilicic (the first is Argentine, the second Slovenian).
Both arrived at Atalanta no longer very young (Gómez at 26, Ilicic at 29), as talented but inconsistent players who had never managed to establish themselves in strong teams. Gasperini transformed them into two players who were fun to watch and above all decisive, among the best in Europe. In 2020, after he scored 4 goals against Valencia in the round of 16, many began to say that it would be right to consider Ilicic among the potential winners of the Ballon d’Or. Atalanta came very close to the Champions League semi-final (they lost to Paris Saint-Germain in the quarter-finals and suffered a comeback in the final minutes). In the 2019-2020 season, the one in which the Guardian he called them one of the most entertaining teams in the world, they scored 116 goals in all competitions, a truly exceptional number.
In 2019-2020 Ilicic scored 21 goals, Colombian forwards Luis Muriel and Duván Zapata 19 each, Mario Pasalic 12 and full-back Robin Gosens 10
During the following season, Gasperini and Papu Gómez, who was Atalanta’s captain, argued and the player was dropped from the team. The Argentine said that, during the Champions League match against Midtjylland, he did not listen to his coach when he asked him to move from the left wing to the right: according to what Gómez said, at the end of the first half the two had an argument during which Gasperini tried to hit him. From that moment on, the relationship between Atalanta’s most representative player (both because he was the captain and for his above-average technical qualities) and his coach deteriorated and Gómez was finally sold to Sevilla in Spain.
Papu’s career at Atalanta, surprising but a little melancholic for how it ended, is emblematic of what a coach Gian Piero Gasperini has been in recent years. A prepared and brilliant coach, a leader, but also a sharp, demanding person who is not easy to relate to. He can radically change the careers of players, as he has done many times, but in exchange he asks them to fully rely on him and demands maximum dedication. He is not someone who is very willing to compromise and for this reason it has happened other times that players have left Atalanta because their relationship with the coach was now beyond repair.
His relationship with the outside world (the press, referees, opponents) has also been and is often tense. Gasperini had behaviors and outings that were out of place, neurotic, a bit clumsy. In an article published on Eleven magazine in February 2021 (and titled, emblematically, “Why does everyone hate Gasperini?”), Francesco Gerardi wrote that his problem lay in his poor understanding of the context. The article problematized the great difference between the clarity of his tactical choices and the blurriness of his attitudes off the pitch: «The futuristic vision with which he brought Atalanta into the elite of Italian and European football corresponds to an opinion on ‘current events often of a surprising and therefore disheartening banality’, it was said, in reference to some of his very questionable statements on racism.
This side of Gasperini is perhaps what partly limited his career, or at least prevented him from being loved even outside of Bergamo. Everyone recognizes his exceptional work, but in Italian stadiums he is often one of the most booed coaches: «The asymmetry that exists between the coach and the commentator lies the origin of the half-hearted affection that surrounds Gasperini». This is obviously not the case at Atalanta, in whose history Gasperini has become the clearly most important figure, the symbol of how a provincial team has become a European team.
This year in the Europa League Atalanta eliminated strong and prepared opponents such as Sporting Lisbon, Marseille and Liverpool, even beating 3-0 at home, in the historic Anfield stadium, in another exceptional European evening. After that match, the British journalist James Horncastle, who follows Italian football for the authoritative specialized site The Athleticsaid that in recent years Gasperini and Atalanta «have made the extraordinary normal» and that it is incredible how the coach has built and rebuilt Atalanta every time, going so far as to define him as «the most influential coach in Serie A in recent years 15 years”.
Up to this point, Atalanta have not won any trophies under Gasperini (they lost two Italian Cup finals, in 2019 against Lazio and in 2021 against Juventus). Being able to win the Italian Cup or the Europa League, or both, would be unforgettable for the fans and according to many the right recognition for Gian Piero Gasperini and his work over the years. Even two possible defeats in the finals, however, would not undermine the quality of the work done in these eight years.
2024-05-10 15:31:27
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