In late February 2012, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona went to the old Calderon Stadium in Madrid to give a lesson in possession football. Their hosts, Atletico Madrid, had a relatively new manager in Diego Simeone, but already a defined, and effective style under him.
Over the 90 minutes, Guardiola’s team had the ball for close to three-quarters of the time it was in play. Yet they drew just one save from the then Atletico goalkeeper, Thibaut Courtois.
Atletico, with their sparse share of possession, won more corners than Barca and drew eight saves from the visiting goalkeeper Victor Valdes. The winners? Barcelona, 2-1, thanks to a late Lionel Messi free-kick, struck while the Atletico defence were still preparing their defensive wall.
The game was Simeone’s 10th in charge of Atletico, his first loss and a strong signpost to how he would organise and inspire Atletico over the next decade, building into European heavyweights and domestic title-contenders a club who previously had a reputation for erratic frailty. There would, over Simeone’s next 561 matches managing the club, be very few further times when an Atletico defensive wall was shabbily put together.
Tuesday’s first leg of the Champions League quarter-final between Manchester City and Atletico will be only the fourth meeting as managers of Guardiola and Simeone. That’s a relatively light head-to-head history given they have been elite coaches for so long.
They are contemporaries, both were high-class central midfielders as players, but in terms of coaching dogmas, they can seem poles apart: Pep the purist’s purist, ‘Cholo’ Simeone the arch-pragmatist.
In any Atletico side of the Simeone era, you expect certain characteristics. Guardiola listed them on Monday. “They avoid risk in the build-up,” he said. “They are aggressive, consistent. They know how to handle this competition: they’ve been in two finals.”
Which is one more than Guardiola, who won two Champions League titles, in 2009 and 2011 with Barcelona, has managed in the 10 years since Simeone took charge of Atletico.
Guardiola keeps being reminded that some people think he has very easily identifiable characteristics in the late stages of the Champions league, too. The City manager spoke sharply to the repeated criticism that, when the high-pressure ties arrive, he ‘overthinks’ his game plan, with unexpected team selections – such as leaving out an anchor midfielder for last season’s final, a 1-0 defeat, against Chelsea.
“In the Champions League, I always overthink new tactics,” he told reporters, speaking with heavy irony. “I overthink and create stupid tactics! So I’ll take inspiration [against Atletico] and do incredible tactics – we’ll play with 12 men.”
The criticism does grate with Guardiola, partly because there’s a long pattern of it. The most admired coach of his generation, the purist of pass-and-move was deemed to have misjudged in picking a back three against Lyon in City’s quarter-final defeat in 2020 and to have sacrificed width in his midfield choices when Liverpool beat City 3-0 in the second leg of the 2018 quarter-final.
Then there was 2016, the last time Simeone’s rugged, resourceful Atletico took on a fluid, enterprising Guardiola side. Bayern Munich, where Guardiola was in his third and last season as coach, commanded possession over the 180 minutes of their semi-final.
Manchester United 0 Atletico Madrid 1 - player ratings
But Guardiola had raised eyebrows by leaving Thomas Muller on the bench for the Madrid leg, where Atletico snatched an early lead. For all their domination after that, the purists could not break the pragmatists. It finished 2-2 on aggregate, Atletico reaching their second final within three years on the away goals rule.
They are, like City, defending domestic champions, but, unlike City, who lead the Premier League table, Atletico are out of realistic contention to add a third Liga title of the Simeone era this time round.
For stretches of the autumn and winter, they lost their traditional ruggedness, although a run of eight games unbeaten, with victories in seven of them, is a strong record to bring to Manchester, where they last month eliminated United in the last-16 phase, winning 1-0 at Old Trafford. “We turned the situation around in the last two months,” said Koke, the Atletico captain.
Simeone will be without central defender Jose Maria Gimenez, who limped off the pitch late in Saturday’s 4-1 victory over Alaves, while Yannick Carrasco serves the last match of a three-game suspension. Carrasco was one of a trio of Atletico players sent-off in the course of a difficult group stage. For City, Kyle Walker is also serving a ban, and Ruben Dias misses out due to injury.
Burnley 0 Manchester City 2 - in pictures
