Simeone's Atleti team smells musty: time to air it out

Carlo Ancelotti won La Liga and the Champions League last season, his second XL double at this stage, and Madrid have dispensed with him a year later. Xavi Hernández , a Barça institution, surely the most important player in their history after Messi , was also on the street 12 months after celebrating the La Liga title. Both things seemed logical to everyone. However, at Atlético, after four seasons of soporific and progressive decline, one cannot talk, at the risk of being declared a heretic, about whether the Simeone era is over. And one must talk. It is even urgent.

So that the apologists don't get upset, I'll start by clarifying that Cholo isn't Atleti's problem, but we have to ask ourselves if he's still the solution. The red-and-white season has been mediocre, and a thrashing of Betis, whose minds are elsewhere, doesn't change that. Defining it any other way is denying the evidence, but I'll give you the excuses in advance: "The objectives have been met!" (finishing third in a league of three, to Neptune), "there was no double touch!" ( Arsenal then put five past Real Madrid ; maybe going all the way to penalties wasn't heroic but suicidal), "the squad is very bad!" (it isn't, but in any case, no player enters or leaves that locker room without the manager's approval).

Simeone said on Sunday that it's impossible to compete day in and day out with two giant multinationals like Madrid and Barça. It's true, but no one in their right mind would ask that of Atleti. What's being asked of them is to give the best version of themselves possible, and we'll see how far that takes them. It's a requirement that Cholo himself established to pull a dead club out of the morgue, but he hasn't met it over the last four seasons: the team isn't evolving, it's dragged itself through half the First Division pitches, it only knows what to do when the opponent is bigger and can simply resist, and the meritocracy has cracked ( Correa deserved more, this year and every year).

The feeling is that Simeone himself has grown complacent in the face of the lack of demands from the board, the fans, and the competition. In this lackluster La Liga, he'll be in the Champions League every year. The merit of that has been diluted; it's inertia and money.

Immediately after winning La Liga, Lamine Yamal acknowledged Xavi's work, but blessed Hansi Flick : "He's given us a breath of fresh air, we needed a change." And so much so. Now everything is nice, but in August nobody gave a euro for this Barça. Then the German arrived with a clear and modern idea, he began to resurrect footballers whose careers were fading ( Raphinha , De Jong , Iñigo Martínez , Ferran ...) and decided to look at the ball and not the stripes ( Bernal , Casadó , Eric , Gerard Martín ...). Do you know who did exactly the same thing in 2012? Simeone with Godín , Tiago , Filipe , Arda , Koke , Diego Costa ... That Atleti also needed fresh air and Cholo was a whirlwind. Thirteen years later, it smells musty again. Time to air it out.