Are we really doing this all over again?
Atlético Madrid’s desperately poor 3-0 loss to Athletic Club in at San Mamés brought up familiar ghosts from seasons gone by, leaving fans questioning if anything has actually changed ahead of Wednesday’s UEFA Champions League trip to Anfield.
A lack of intensity away from home and a vulnerable left side saw Atleti rue missed chances in the first half, before completely capitulating immediately from the restart in the second.
Here are Into the Calderón’s key
takeaways from this first loss of the 2026/27 season.
The wonky pool table returns
Atleti are making me sound like a broken record with no other ways of analysing one of their matches at this point. For the best part of two seasons, I have been using the analogy of a pool table on uneven ground to describe the way that the entirety of the team’s play seems to gently drift over the right side of the pitch, and it’s getting tiring.
The trouble with having two explosively quick touchline-hugging players, and a left-footed attacker who wants to start their moves from a position to allow them to cut inside, is that eventually everyone will find themselves standing on each other’s toes. It becomes very predictable for the opposition to know how to set themselves up. I assumed the idea of having Kang-In Lee in the team would be to award Marcos Llorente the freedom of the wing, with the option of introducing Giuliano Simeone as a pairing with Marc Pubill when he plays right-back instead. Yet it turns out that Llorente, Giuliano and Kang-In are all looking like they’ll play (for now at least), leaving the ‘guys who try and make stuff happen’ all bunched up together.
A heavy right side usually results in a light left side, something so painful to think about going through for another season. Poor Ademola Lookman already received an apology from Diego Simeone on matchday 1 for playing him out of position, and is now cutting an isolated figure once more in the barren, deserted land of the left wing. Whenever the ball did find its way out there, the Nigerian was expected to make something happen out of nothing, often starting with the ball in a standing position tasked with finding a way through a well-organised Athletic defense all by himself. That’s not going to happen. He needs people to play off and an associate to combine with. Get the boy a striker and see what happens.
I’d like to take this opportunity to comment on how the promotion of Lookman’s understudy from the regionalised third tier of Spanish football is one I do not understand. This is nothing against Arnau Ortiz, I think he’s a fine man, a good football player and someone who was fun to watch for Atlético Madrileño last season in their quest to go up a division to professional football. However for him to be a revulsivo off the bench in a game where the team is chasing a deficit of two goals is a damning indictment of where the squad currently finds itself. Ortiz is also 24 years old which doesn’t even leave him the excuse of being a promising young talent. He’d be a fine addition to a mid-to-bottom table club in LALIGA, not a Champions League aspirant.
Defensively on that flank, Alejandro Grimaldo is the only true left-back in the squad — Matteo Ruggeri and Julio Díaz were offloaded in the summer transfer window, and Dani Martínez can play there, but he too is devoid of any kind of first division experience — making the part (or lack of) he played in all three of today’s goals a worrying sign of things to come. The World Cup winner was dragged into no man’s land for Nico Williams’ opener, torn a new one by Robert Navarro a minute later and slow to react to the counterattack down his side for Oihan Sancet’s third. Failure to secure another left-back on deadline day might prove to come back and haunt Atleti, with fingers ready to point at Mateu Alemany if that’s the case.
Intensity beats technical ability
Max Rushden of The Guardian often talks about good kicks of the football. How the essence of this sport is to propel the round thing with the body part that hangs off the end of your leg.
My word, Atleti have some good kickers of the football. The way Kang-In Lee gets his head down and carries the ball on both feet around the pitch is wonderful to watch. Álex Baena can hit one, gosh. It gives me great pleasure to watch Pablo Barrios pass and dribble. I’m sure once Grimaldo remembers how to cross and shoot we will marvel at his ability to do so.
However, for all the technical brilliance that this Atlético Madrid team possesses, they were ultimately torn apart by the intensity of an Athletic Club side who (forgive me for digging the old cliché out) simply wanted it more.
There were early signs toward the end of the first half when Atleti looked to have become slightly complacent after missing two good opportunities to go ahead. The home side turned up the heat on the hob by one number, the San Mamés crowd responded with a fiery gust of support and all of a sudden Simeone’s team was on the back foot.
That momentum was preserved during the interval and Athletic came flying out of the blocks in the second period, allowing Atleti no time to execute their idea of controlling the game. The ball was in play for just 43 seconds before there was a two-goal margin between the teams, and the typically-tall order of winning in this legendary Spanish footballing setting suddenly became a whole lot harder.
Cue ‘run out of ideas’ mode.
With a game to chase and an opposition out for yet more blood, Los Rojiblancos looked frail and went back into the shell we have seen them crawl into away from the Metropolitano for a couple of years now. A brief spell of looking as if something may happen did occur, but then the substitutes only added to the disjointed nature of the team’s performance.
I do hope this was merely a blip and that the away performances are going to be more like what we saw at Sevilla last week.
Julián did his best impression of caring
Nothing more to say for now. When he scores and holds his hands up to the fans, there will be more to add.
