Dear Matteo,
I need to write this before I talk myself out of it. I judged you. Fairly early, with considerable conviction, and — as I am now forced to accept — without anything close to the evidence required to justify that conviction.
I wrote you off. I told people. Some even nodded along, which made me feel even more confident about being completely wrong.
Let me explain the charges I laid against you, so you understand the full scope of what I’m walking back.
I had concerns when you arrived at Atlético
Madrid last summer for around €20 million. They felt reasonable at the time. You had made your debut for Atalanta against Liverpool in the Champions League in November 2020, a match Atalanta lost 5-0, which is the kind of debut story you share at a dinner party when you want people to feel better about their own worst days. The Europa League winner’s medal from 2024 was real and impressive. But Serie A and La Liga are different animals, and I wasn’t sure you were ready for one of the trickier positions in Diego Simeone’s system.
So I watched, and I formed opinions. They were, without exception, the wrong opinions.
I thought your defending was too loose. I thought you gambled too often going forward, leaving space in behind that any half-decent winger could drive a bus through. I thought your crossing was a decoration rather than a weapon, plenty of whipped deliveries into the grateful arms of goalkeepers. And as the autumn wore on and results stuttered, I thought that the left-back slot remained what it had been since Filipe Luís left for Flamengo in 2019: Atlético Madrid’s recurring misery. A position where good players went to look ordinary, and ordinary players went to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions.
Filipe Luís played 333 official games in red and white and, in the words of club president Enrique Cerezo, “owned the left flank.” He won three UEFA Super Cups, two Europa Leagues, a Copa del Rey and La Liga. After he left, Atleti tried various combinations; Lucas Hernández shifted out of centre-back, Renan Lodi brought in and then moved on, Reinildo steady but never spectacular. None of it quite stuck. The position had become a soft underbelly in an otherwise granite-hard defensive structure.
You, I decided, were more of the same. I would like to apologise for this.
Before signing you, Atlético had been chasing Andy Robertson, a Champions League winner, and when that lost momentum, the club had interest in Lucas Digne, a former La Liga champion. You were not the first name on the list. That detail unfairly coloured my view of you before you’d kicked a ball. I held it against you that you were the club’s third choice at the position, as though that were your fault, as though Filipe Luís himself had arrived at the Calderón as anyone’s first pick.
I was building a case. The cross that floated wide. The overlap that came a second too late. The defensive positioning that looked, in isolation, like recklessness. I was compiling a dossier, and I was enjoying it, and I was wrong.
Then came Barcelona. Lamine Yamal arrived as La Liga’s brightest talent, and you kept him silent across both legs in the Copa del Rey. He caused all kinds of problems in the La Liga meeting at the Metropolitano on April 4, and anyone watching, myself included, filed that one away as evidence, fearing a return to the worst. Days later, at the Camp Nou in the Champions League quarter-final first leg, I expected more of the same: Yamal terrorising you for 90 minutes while I tried to look sympathetic.
Instead, in the 70th minute, you latched onto a brilliant pass from Antoine Griezmann and delivered a pinpoint cross for Alexander Sørloth to slot home and double Atleti’s lead. Not a hopeful ball into the mixer. Not a cross that whispered apology to the goalkeeper as it landed in his gloves. A proper, purposeful delivery, the kind that ends up in highlight packages. Barcelona’s Jules Koundé, who was supposed to stop exactly that from happening, didn’t do nearly enough to close you down in the build-up to the goal. That is not a Koundé problem. That is a “you were too good” problem.
And yes, Lamine Yamal is Lamine Yamal. But you contained him. Sure, he broke through, he created chances. I’m including that not to undermine my apology but because context is important: no left-back on earth neutralises Lamine Yamal for 90 minutes. The teenager is currently the best player in the world at doing the thing that right wingers do. The question was never whether he’d create problems. The question was whether you’d give Atlético something going the other way, and whether you’d stay competitive enough defensively that the tie remained manageable.
Atlético won 2-0. Juan Musso made a series of outstanding saves to preserve the clean sheet. You played your part in that.
Earlier in March, you impressed against Club Brugge, and then again in the 3-2 win over Real Sociedad, where you contributed an assist. You were no longer a player muddling through. You were a player finding his level.
I also note, with some discomfort, that you have simply been there. Week after week. Diego Simeone’s system demands physical output and defensive discipline simultaneously; it is, famously, not a system built for passengers, and you have not missed significant time. In a squad that has had its injury concerns, your availability has become its own form of value.
The search for a left-back last summer was described in these pages as pressing and unresolved. Robertson fell through. Digne fell through. You signed a five-year contract, and six months later, I was treating that as confirmation of a problem rather than the beginning of a solution. The problem was mine.
Atlético have tried to fill the Filipe Luís hole for six years. Centre-backs converted. Loan signings. Stopgap solutions. The left side has been a place where Simeone has had to compromise his system rather than trust his full-back. You are, right now, the closest thing this club has had to an actual answer at that position since the Brazilian who owned it for a decade took his winner’s medal to Rio and left everyone else to sort it out.
I got it wrong, Matteo. The crossing is good. The attacking threat is real. The big-game temperament is genuine. The consistency, unglamorous, unheralded, present, is exactly what a Simeone side needs from that position.
You were not the third choice. You were, it turns out, the right choice.
My apologies.
