On this Saturday, April 18, Atlético de Madrid will play in the Copa del Rey final, ending a 4,720-day drought since they last did so.
Many Atléticos will have fond memories of that night, 13 years ago, when João Miranda’s header broke a 14-year winless curse against Real Madrid and gave Atleti their first domestic trophy in 17 years. The journey that rojiblancos have undertaken since then has been nothing short of a whirlwind, making it hard to resonate with how life was as a fan back then.
While
there is one striking consistency on the touchline, and one certain midfielder who will have featured in both matches, the reality of where the club is now compared with 2013 couldn’t be more polarised.
The Into the Calderón team have all grown to share an equally strong love for Atlético Madrid, but where the source of this passion stems differs from person to person. Here we detail our Atleti stories which link that night in the Santiago Bernabéu 13 years ago, with hopefully one just as memorable in Sevilla this weekend.
Jeremy Beren, Editor
Thirteen years is a long time to wait.
Some of you know my personal journey with Atlético de Madrid is an unusual one. I have no familial ties to Spain, and I didn’t watch much football as a kid. But shortly after Christmas 2012, I happened upon Atlético — sitting second in the league table — as I sifted the digital pages of ESPNFC, and I had absolutely no inkling as to the journey that began when I tapped “follow” on the club’s Twitter profile.
On May 17, 2013, I arrived home from a volunteer shift at a hospital in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona and flipped on ESPN just in time to see Diego Costa sweep home the equalizing goal at the Santiago Bernabéu. What followed was my first true experience suffering through an Atlético match: Real Madrid dominated the rest of normal time, Juanfran made a clearance off the line from Mesut Özil and Atleti dragged it to extra time, setting up the 98th-minute “Mirandazo” that clinched my fandom for life.
The underdogs had done it. They had won their 10th Copa del Rey.
What’s funny is, when you’ve tasted that success so quickly upon deciding to follow a team, it’s natural to think “we’ll do this every year!” But 10 years passed in between semifinal appearances in La Copa. It’s a difficult trophy to win. I didn’t think it would be this difficult.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad. Atlético won a miraculous league title in 2014 and another one in 2021, with three other trophies secured along the way. I left Arizona in 2023 to be closer to my friends in Arkansas. And I have made multiple trips to Spain to watch the team I love as a fan — as well as to cover them up close as a member of the media, proudly representing this website.
(I have to use my Sports Journalism degree for something, right?)
At last, Atleti are back in the Copa del Rey final again on Saturday night. It’s great to be back, and long overdue. In previous years, the Copa has been a distraction from other competitions — the irony being, it is the only domestic trophy that can be considered “achievable” each season for Atleti.
Thirteen years is a long time to wait. It’s time to bring it home.
Oliver Cores, Writer
I’m sat writing this while looking out from an apartment in the Docklands suburb of Melbourne, Australia, drawing similarities between my geographical disparity from 2013 to present, and Atleti’s sporting disparity during the same timeframe. There aren’t many places further away from my European upbringing than down under, and Atlético Madrid, as a club, have advanced in comparable distances from where they were 13 years ago.
Growing up in the UK in an Atlético-supporting, half-Spanish household made for an interesting viewing experience when it came to the big matches. Spanish football was in a very strong position to be marketed abroad, with the Lionel Messi v Cristiano Ronaldo narrative leading the way for outlets such as Sky Sports to pick up the rights to LALIGA and select Copa del Rey games.
However, due to my father’s refusal to fork out for anything other than free-to-air TV, these sorts of matches were usually watched on some grainy, illegally-streamed website, on a laptop that sounded like something whirring up its engines on the tarmac at JFK Airport. The device would be on the dining room table or, when it worked, connected to the TV with the old VGA cables, and whoever was interested would join me sat in front of it.
The commentary would rarely be in English, and even when it was in Spanish, it would have a thick Argentine or Mexican accent that a kid who was only ever used to his abuela’s castellano would have a tough time to wrap his head around.
I don’t remember our exact setup for the 2013 final, but it was a 20:30 GMT Friday night kick-off after tennis practice and most likely a chippy tea. Our streaming situation meant we were denied hearing the famous goal celebration “commentary” of Paulo Futre on Spanish national broadcaster RTVE (a company who have yet to ask him back on), but rest assured I have re-watched the phenomenal clip several hundreds of times since, and will leave it with you below.
An Atleti win meant the usual post-match phone calls to Madrid were duly made, singing the hymn down the landline to the grandparents whilst listening attentively to my abuela’s lessons of why winning as an Atleti fan means so much more than as a Madridista. A number of cousins would be off that night to the fountain of Neptune, the congregation point in the center of Madrid where Atleti fans go to celebrate trophy wins.
The next five years would follow a similar pattern, except the winning feeling would be rudely interspersed with heartbreaking moments of desolation that turned the jubilant phone calls overseas into those solemn. Being at a distance from the only ones I knew who shared this same red-and-white feeling meant missing out on moments that would have helped to get over some of the hardest of losses.
The day after the 2016 Champions League final loss in Milan, my abuela organised for all of my direct cousins to go round for a Sunday lunch to prepare them for heading back to their Real Madrid-dominated school classes on Monday morning. Of course, they all went wearing their Atleti shirts with a renewed sense of pride.
Moving to Spain at 18 years old in the back end of 2018 was, in theory, my way of getting closer to the action, and while my attendance at the Estadio Metropolitano steadily increased over the six years I spent there, my luck of seeing my team win anything drastically decreased. The one season where we did manage a LALIGA title was of course during the COVID-19 pandemic, which I watched on my phone at a socially-distanced BBQ.
And now, at 26 years old and further away from it than I have ever been, Atleti once again have the chance to bring me joy to a land far away, one that I will feel just as deeply on my couch at 5am in Melbourne as I would in the stands at La Cartuja or surrounded by colchonero family in Madrid.
I will be back in Europe in time for the Champions League final, though…
Sam Leveridge, Writer
It started, as many things do in football, with someone else’s game.
May 2013. Copa del Rey final. Real Madrid vs Atlético. I watched it as a Barcelona fan. Not a secret admirer, not a sympathiser, but more of an anti-Madridista.
I’d become a full-on, Camp-Nou-attending, Messi-worshipping Barça man. When Atlético won it, I appreciated it the way you appreciate a nice sunset on someone else’s holiday when they post it on Instagram. Good for them. Moving on.
Except something lingered.
Maybe it was Diego Simeone prowling the touchline like a man who’d been told the season’s results were personal. Maybe it was Diego Godín, who appeared to be physically incapable of tiring. Maybe it was Gabi leading by example alongside a young Koke playing for his boyhood club.
Whatever it was, a soft spot had been quietly installed.
I proceeded to ignore this entirely and move to Barcelona for the 2015/16 season, going to Camp Nou regularly like the law-abiding Barcelonista I told myself I was. And then Atlético came to town. Twice. A 2-1 Liga win for Barça, fine. But then the Champions League quarter-final first leg, also 2-1, and Simeone right there at Camp Nou in full performance mode. Watching from the stands, I found myself unreasonably pleased that Atleti were making it difficult.
This was, in hindsight, a symptom.
Life took over, and I was back in London. Travelling on the Underground to commute every day. My first choice of book to read to pass the time? Euan McTear’s “Hijacking La Liga.” It lasted two days, I couldn’t put it down. And to this day it remains one of the best sports books I’ve read. The diagnosis was confirmed. I had a problem.
In 2018, I moved to Madrid. The Barcelona soft spot didn’t survive the relocation, it simply couldn’t; geography has a way of clarifying things, and the Atlético soft spot, which had been sitting patiently in a corner for five years, immediately demanded to be taken seriously. I signed up as a socio in my first week. No deliberation. It just felt right.
My first genuinely-Atlético experience was the UEFA Super Cup that summer. I watched it with, of all people, Euan. We went to Neptuno after Atleti destroyed Real Madrid. There is a tradition there that I now understand in the bones. That season, I went to almost every game. In 2019, I got an abono in the Fondo Sur and have had one every season since.
The numbers since then are, by any reasonable assessment, slightly unhinged. Over 100 games at the Metropolitano and elsewhere. Seven different away grounds, so far, and I wish that number were higher. And that’s without counting the Osasuna game at the Metropolitano in 2021. The only time I’ve ever gone crazy and hugged strangers in a car park. The kind of thing you don’t quite believe even while it’s happening.
There is one regret, and it is permanent: I never made it to the Calderón. That ship had sailed before I arrived at the dock. But now there’s a Copa del Rey final. The first real shot at silverware I’ll experience properly, with everyone around me, after COVID-19 robbed us of truly enjoying that 2020/21 league title. And at the helm, the same man who caught my attention in the first place, standing on a touchline in 2013, making it look like the most important thing that had ever happened.
It has been, all things considered, a very reasonable conversion.
Ryan McCain, Writer
I was honestly in disbelief when I saw it had been 13 years since Atleti’s last Copa del Rey final. So long ago that I didn’t even follow international football at all, let alone Atlético de Madrid.
It’s funny thinking about life without Atleti, given how much the club matters to me now. I went from casually monitoring a club to writing for Into the Calderón, which still feels surreal.
Thinking about where the club was during that time, and less than a year later when I first started following them to where they are now, is astounding. At that time, the club was the scrappy underdog who would be lucky just to make the Champions League knockout rounds or the semifinals of the Copa del Rey. While still a scrappy underdog in some respects, expectations at the club are significant higher and the club is right there competing with the European giants.
The club even finds themselves becoming something of a giant, with American venture capital firm Apollo Global Management purchasing a majority stake in the club amid construction of a state-of-the- art “sports city” around the Metropolitano.
I like to think of the club’s mantras, like “partido a partido”, “ganar ganar ganar y volver a ganar”, “me mata me de la vida”, and how they have applied to my own. There have been painful moments — whether it be almost failing out of school, seeing a match stolen from you, trips to the hospital, missing out on winning the league by three points, having your star player spurn you for another club, getting your heart broken.
But there’s always light at the end of the tunnel. There’s winning LALIGA in 2021, winning Europa League and the Super Cup in 2018 and so many other sweet memories in the past 13 years that have made that suffering worthwhile.
That’s what it means to be puro Atlético de Madrid. In life, there always will be challenges that look too steep to overcome. But through putting in the hard work, you can get through anything and eventually see the rewards.
After 13 years of Copa del Rey suffering, nothing would be sweeter than hoisting that trophy.
