At Atalanta’s Christmas party, club president Antonio Percassi raised a glass. Over the last year, specifically after winning the Europa League in Dublin in May, the team he played for has become the envy of Europe. “We were pivelli,” he likes to say. Newbies. Complete beginners, almost new to UEFA competitions until seven years ago. But what mattered more than the perceptible admiration and abundant respect that Atalanta’s achievements generated. “We have relations with all the clubs in Europe and they congratulate us a lot,” smiles Percassi.
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That’s all they pay Atalanta.
Scientists roaming the CIES Football Observatory with their clipboards and white coats recently calculated that Atalanta made a profit of €236 million from player swaps over the past decade, the record income of Manchester United who bought Rasmus Hojlund after a season in Bergamo. for 73. 9 euros. m (61 million pounds sterling). Amad, winner of the Manchester derby, did the same two and a half years earlier, having played just 59 minutes of first-team football with La Dea. The total cost of this measure could amount to €44 million (£36 million).
Sales like these are often indicative of the break-up of an over-performing team, and yet Atalanta’s first trophy in more than 60 years came, in football terms, long after them. When Percassi proposed a toast, he did so from an unprecedented position. Atalanta were alone at the top of the table in Serie A after 15 games. They stayed there the following weekend. It was the first time since Opta began collecting stats in Italy that Atalanta spent consecutive weeks in solitary command of the table. The win over Cagliari in Sardinia on December 14, where Atalanta lost last season, was their 10th in a row in the league; a new club record. Then on Sunday they sealed a dramatic 3-2 win against Empoli, thanks to a late winner from Charles De Ketelaere.
Cagliari’s victory is vital for new and cultural reasons.
First of all, unlike Milan and Juventus, they did not drop points after playing in Europe in midweek. Once again, Atalanta’s strength in depth made the difference. Nicolo Zaniolo emerged from the bench, as he did against Roma, and scored the decisive goal. Next, in the event Atalanta were to win the Scudetto for the first time in their history, it would probably echo what opponents Cagliari did in 1970. “We have to keep our feet on the ground and be very careful,” Percassi warned, “because this industry is very tricky and we’re managing a club that can’t compete with the others in terms of turnover.”
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Champions Inter, for example, announced record revenues of 473 million euros in the fall. The Milan cousins were not far behind, raising 457 million euros. Even taking into account their exclusion from the Champions League, Juventus, in a difficult year, raised 394 million euros. In comparison, Atalanta, during a historic season and after 8 consecutive years of constant expansion on the field, accumulated 242 million euros. This means that when we talk about Atalanta winning the title, we are asking a featherw8 who recently promoted to middlew8 to reach the heavyw8 class.
Or are we?
Atalanta are leaner and more agile than the competition. Their wage bill remains outside the top four but they are cash rich in a way that’s reminiscent of Brighton & Hove Albion after Chelsea’s repeated raids. The Seagulls used that to their advantage in the market last summer when other Premier League clubs were worried about profit and sustainability rules. In Atalanta’s case, winning the Europa League, qualifying for the most lucrative edition of the Champions League and leveraging Teun Koopmeiners’ desire to go to Juventus and Juventus only, in a sale that was surpassed only by Hojlund’s switch to Old Trafford the previous summer, swelled coffers that were already teeming.
Other new investors followed majority owner Steve Pagliuca and bought the club. Work on the Gewiss Stadium, the unrecognizable and renamed Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, is complete and, as a stadium with a Premier League feel and Serie A atmosphere, revenue will only increase. Although still a small club in name, Atalanta actually has a lower upper class.
The club’s upward mobility, in turn, has moved Bergamo forward. Leading the Serie A championship, the city also crowned for the first time the annual Il Sole 24 Ore ranking of Italy’s most productive places to live in terms of quality of life. “This extraordinary achievement, five years into the pandemic, is a source of wonderful satisfaction for our community,” Bergamo Mayor Elena Carnevali told the ANSA news agency. “But it also invites us to demonstrate a deep sense of duty for the future. “
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No one has contributed more to this rise than Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini. Percassis’s fortunes as Atalanta’s goalkeeper suddenly changed when he was chosen as coach in 2016. Players who knew Atalanta, like Papu Gómez, have come and gone, and yet the club has continued to grow. Even the departure of sporting director Giovanni Sartori, who temporarily built a Bologna team capable of qualifying for the Champions League for the first time in six decades, replaced nothing. Gasperini has been the only constant. While Atalanta has much more than the sum of its parts (control team, academy, recruitment), he is the only indispensable part. Take it out of the equation and does it still matter?
The Percassis can simply claim that they favored the kind of solid environment that Gasperini was looking for. For example, he took Genoa back to the most sensible flight for the first time in 11 years and missed the Champions League showdown, but owner Enrico Preziosi sold his best players within months of its blossoming. Percassis’ insight and additional help from Pagliuca allowed Atalanta to stay together longer and rebuild stronger.
This existing vintage feels like Gasperini’s third or fourth team in 8 years. Many believed the zenith had already been reached between 2018 and 2021. Atalanta qualified for the Coppa Italia final twice in this run, came within seconds of a League semi-final and finished third for three consecutive seasons in Serie A. Top scorer in Italy in each of those years and scored 116 goals in all competitions in the 2019-20 campaign alone. It was like something that happens once in a lifetime. Then Gasperini fell out with Papu, intellectual aptitude problems affected Josip Ilicic and Duván Zapata’s physique began to deteriorate. The narrow window of opportunity to win something seemed to be closing.
And yet, Atalanta returned to the Coppa Italia final. They have become the first Italian team to win the old UEFA Cup this century (Parma were the last Serie A representative to do so in 1999) and now have the confidence and self-belief as a club to carry the Scudetto to Bergamo. Gasperini spoke about the team returning from Dublin with a new mentality. Atalanta beat Liverpool at Anfield and beat undefeated Bayer Leverkusen to win the Europa League. Those and the experience of playing a 56-game season in which they played two finals, won one and still finished among the best four in Serie A, caused a click in the body and mind.
With Gasperini wondering if it was the right time to leave, wasn’t it as smart to win the Europa League as it seems?– and won Napoli’s proposals, he probably felt that this team still had more to give. Also, as he discovered during his brief spell at Inter, the grass is not greener on the other side and we would have to start again. Gasperini will never be tougher at a club than at Atalanta (where he negotiated a percentage of player sales to improve his contract). He has asked Berat Djimsiti and Marten de Roon to be so in tune with him that his coaching staff is no longer limited to the bench. Now Gasperini has assistants on the field.
Unlike Milan and Juventus, whose groups have been overwhelmingly founded abroad, Atalanta, like their main rivals Inter, has an Italian core that helps keep everyone in check. The team is bigger than ever. Sartori’s departure was intended to be a blow, but Atalanta covered it in other ways. They have broadened their horizons.
Lee Congerton joined as head of international development in the the spring of 2022 from Leicester City. Now at Al Ahli, it is hard to imagine Atalanta pushing so hard to sign former Leicester City loanee Ademola Lookman, the recently crowned African Footballer of the Year and hat-trick hero against Leverkusen, without his input. Sudarshan Gopaladesikan joined from Benfica as director of football intelligence and played a role in recommending Hojlund when he was a relative unknown with Sturm Graz. Sartori’s more orthodox successor, Tony D’Amico, built on the reputation he earned at Verona. A player he signed for them, Isak Hien, followed him to Atalanta and has developed to such an extent over the last 18 months it wouldn’t come as a surprise if he fetches a fee as big as the €52million that Tottenham paid for fellow centre-back Cristian Romero in 2021.
Of course, it helps that Percassi and his son, Luca, the CEO, also played. Atalanta has players in positions filled through Harvard Business School. This is not an affront to the Ivy League, it is just a popularity that in an ecosystem with its own particularities such as Serie A, having a Masters in the Italian league is one more issue.
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The current team has a shot at history. It’s simultaneously fresh and battle-hardened. Eleven of the 17 players who have clocked up the most minutes this season are 25 or under. Zaniolo and Lazar Samardzic, a player Inter and Milan tried to sign the summer before last, are back-ups. Serie A top scorer Mateo Retegui, a summer acquisition from Genoa at the start of August, was brought in to pick up the slack left by Gianluca Scamacca, who tore his ACL in pre-season and left a 28-goal hole in the team. That the team has thrived without him and come through an early-season injury crisis in which midfielders and wing-backs were covering in defence has only galvanised the mentality.
This in part dates back to Anfield last season, when the absence of Sead Kolasinac a cause for wonderful fear before kick-off. Atalanta won 3-0 as De Roon, one of Gasperini’s on-field coaches, adapted, not for the first time, to a role in the back three. Lookman and De Ketelaere have become unplayable. “CDK’s football IQ is over 200!” “” a banner reads at Gewiss Stadium (yes, they meant “IQ”). This calendar year alone, he has totaled 36 aims and assists. The most productive player in Serie A in 2024 looks like a toss-up between him and Lookman. Inter reiterated on Monday what a formidable opponent they are with a 6-0 victory over in-form Lazio in Rome. Atalanta’s reaction got here in the Coppa Italia a few days past duer. They obliterated Cesena 6-1. It the 3rd time this season they had hit an opponent for six. Then they picked up that past due 3-2 win over Empoli to make it 11 league wins on the bounce – De Ketelaere scored two times and Lookman were given the other.
Belief grows.
If Atalanta were to win Serie A, Bergamo would be the smallest city since the center of Cagliari in 1970 and Vercelli in 1921 to host the Italian champions. In football terms, perhaps the closest comparison is with Sampdoria in 1991. Their Scudetto is the culmination of seven years there. more or less, winning the Coppa Italia in 1985, 1988 and 1989, and then the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1990. Atalanta’s trajectory is not too different.
“I don’t need to make comparisons with other Atalanta teams I’ve had in the past because they are different,” Gasperini said after the 3-1 win over Parma in November. “If you talk to me about Gómez, Ilicic, Zapata and (Luis ) Muriel, well, it was a normal team. They won the Europa League. As for the Scudetto, I don’t need to communicate it because it’s only the 13th of the season, but we need to win each and every one of the games we We can. If we continue like this, we will definitely think about it. We probably wouldn’t hold back. It was like that in the Europa League too. We don’t think about winning.
But Atalanta did it. They followed theirs and captured ours.
Before sitting down at Atalanta’s Christmas party, Percassi took a sip from his glass and concluded his toast. “All that’s left to say is, ‘Forza Atalanta’.”
(Top image — design: Will Tullos, photo: Getty Images)