More picturesque dissection of the Simeone playbook
Atletico Madrid, the masters of shithousery
Stuart James Apr 14, 2022 169
Well, what did you expect?Shithousery, in a word. And, truth be told, that’s why plenty of us tuned in to watch Atletico Madrid take on Manchester City.
Sure, the contrast in playing styles was compelling. But who didn’t want to see Phil Foden looking like Basil Fawlty with that bandage around his head, Stefan Savic pulling Jack Grealish’s hair in between trying to fight the world, Felipe being dragged away from the pitch by his own players after being sent off and Diego Simeone, of all people, complaining about timewasting on the sideline. When Koke later moaned that the City players were “falling on the floor and wasting time”, we were firmly in pot-kettle-black territory.
The only surprise was that we had to wait until the 89th minute on Wednesday night for the touch-paper to be lit at the Wanda Metropolitano. The official figure has yet to be confirmed, but early indications are that Atletico Madrid may just have missed out on breaking their brawl-attendance record in the Champions League this season.
There were 42 players and staff from both clubs involved in a melee against Porto in Atletico’s final group stage game this season. Three red cards were shown on that occasion too. The imaginary yellow-card count — Simeone loves waving one of those — was off the scale, Matheus Cunha’s play-acting succeeded in getting a tearful Porto player sent off, and Koke was warned after less than four minutes that his teammates had to stop surrounding the referee.
This was the scene an hour later…
“Of course there was controversy,” Dave Farrar, the BT Sport commentator, said at the end of that wild match in Portugal in December, which Atletico won 3-1 to reach the knockout stage. “There was, to be kind, gamesmanship. It was the best and the worst of Atletico Madrid. But it was too much for Porto.”
The worst, you sense, may also be the best in Simeone’s eyes, bearing in mind his win-at-all-costs mantra. As a player, Simeone was a natural leader — talented, driven and fiercely ambitious. Losing was not an option for him. “I knew he would kill for me. He would take advantage of everything ” Juan Sebastian Veron said about his former Lazio and Argentina teammate.
Simeone could be nasty — take, for example, his challenge on Julen Guerrero in 1996 — and sly. He would chip away at opponents so much during matches that even his own teammates got fed up with him and would tell him to shut up at times.
,
If ever an anecdote captures Simeone’s personality and character on the pitch, it is the story that Jose Miguel Prieto tells about their time together as team-mates at Sevilla. “I didn’t know why the opponents would give the ball to Cholo (Simeone’s nickname)… would always give the ball to Cholo. Why do they make that mistake so often?” Prieto said.
“For instance, Aitor Karanka. He (Simeone) would learn ‘Aitor’. So he would be running and say, ‘Aitor, Aitor, Aitor…’ And the guy would say, ‘Here’, and pass it to him. You’d think, ‘Why did he pass it to him?’. Because he knew his first name.”
“It’s true,” the Atletico Madrid manager said with a laugh. “When you’re counter-attacking, you’re so blinded with the play that if your name is Pablo, and you’re running and hear, ‘Pablo! Pablo! I’m open!’ he gives it to you.”
Veron and Prieto were speaking in the Amazon Prime documentary series Simeone: Living Match by Match, which was released in January. It is a fascinating watch and goes some way to explaining why Simeone has enjoyed so much success on the pitch and in the dugout, but also why his Atletico teams are so difficult — some would say horrible — to play against. “Hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer — that’s what we have to be,” Simeone says, striking the palm of his hand with his fist after a goalless draw against Barcelona.
“I was lucky enough to get to know him as a person and as a coach,” Sebastian Abreu, the former River Plate defender, said. “Diego Pablo, a nice, cheerful guy, a joker. He’s honest, he’s emotional. And on the other hand, I met Cholo, who is demanding, tough, cruel, heartless, a winner.”
There are times when Simeone gets so emotional during his team talks that he has to stop speaking. The overriding message, however, rarely changes. “He conveys so much that when you go out onto the field you’re ready to kill,” Koke said.
The end result is a team that feels as though it is constantly playing on the edge, bending the rules at times and breaking them too. Throw in the fact that Atletico are expertly-drilled defensively, relentlessly hard-working and brilliant exponents of the counter-attack – and let’s not forget that they have some outstanding individuals – and it is easy to see why Simeone’s teams make opponents suffer.
It is possible to respect their style of play (not to be confused with their antics, although some would say that the two are intertwined) without enjoying it, albeit that is much harder to do in the wake of a defeat.
“I don’t understand with the quality they have that they play this kind of football,” Jurgen Klopp said two years ago, referring to Atletico’s defensive tactics after they eliminated Liverpool in the last-16 of the Champions League. “When I see players like (Marcos) Llorente, Koke, Saul Niguez… they could play proper football, but they stand deep in their own half and have counter-attacks.”
Atletico are far from the only team to indulge in the dark arts. In fact, City played them at their own game at times on Wednesday, especially in the final 10 minutes — Foden rolling his way back onto the pitch after Felipe had fouled him was straight out of the Atletico playbook, as was Riyad Mahrez forgetting how to take a free kick as the seconds ticked away in added time.
That said, it is hard to escape the feeling that Atletico are the market leaders when it comes to what has commonly become known as shithousery. In other words, play-acting, time-wasting, haranguing referees and generally trying to get opponents booked or sent off.
Surrounding the referee is Atletico’s go-to tactic after a foul that offers the slightest hope of further punishment. This (below) was the scene at Old Trafford three weeks ago, when Atletico beat Manchester United 2-1 on aggregate in the last-16 of the Champions League. The player on the floor in the middle of them all is Llorente.
Lying on his back and waving a hand in the air (circled below) as if he was in major distress, Llorente and his teammates (five Atletico players have their arms outstretched), put pressure on the referee to stop the game with United 30 yards from goal.
Remarkably, they succeeded. Llorente was clearly not in any real discomfort, although that doesn’t stop Rodrigo De Paul (pictured on the left below) from calling for a yellow card to be shown to Alex Telles, who had made the original challenge. It was not even a free kick and play restarted with a United drop-ball. All the while, another minute disappeared.
Liverpool experienced that and more in 2020. Led by Koke, half a dozen Atletico players swarmed around the referee to try to get Sadio Mane sent off. The Liverpool forward had been booked only a few minutes earlier.
“It is obviously a part of football that I don’t like,” Klopp said when asked about that incident afterwards. “The plan tonight was to get Sadio out of the game with a second yellow card. I was afraid that Sadio’s opponent would go down if he took a deep breath on him or something.”
In the return leg, which Atletico won in extra time, Simeone’s players were soon at it again. The posse of players below, led by Diego Costa this time, called for Trent Alexander-Arnold to be shown a card of some description after a foul that was deemed to be worthy of no more than a free kick.
By and large, the worst that happens to Atletico in these scenarios is that Koke ends up getting a one-to-one lecture.
The Atletico captain knows this conversation well — here he is in that Porto game three months ago, with the game little more than three minutes old.
On the touchline at the time of that incident, Simeone was doing what he often does in these moments — waving an imaginary card.
In England, that behaviour causes far more issues than it seems to elsewhere, as Roberto Mancini will testify — the Italian walked into a storm with his touchline antics as Manchester City manager a decade ago. “For me, it’s natural to do this,” Mancini said when asked about him calling for players to be booked or sent off.
Either way, many will rightly question and criticise the conduct of the Atletico players in the examples above, as well as Simeone’s influence on their behaviour.
Others will wonder why UEFA and the officials have failed to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to this kind of thing — showing a yellow card to anyone who confronts the referee other than the captain ought to do the trick.
And then there will be another (sizeable) group who view these antics as part of the theatre of modern football and wonder why BT Sport, or anyone else for that matter, keep telling us how “this is the ugly side of Atletico Madrid that so many neutrals do not like to see.”
The Porto game in December felt like a case in point, given that Pepe, the ultimate pantomime villain, was in one corner and Simeone and his players in the other. If that was your match of choice as a neutral (which was the case with this writer), you weren’t turning the TV on to see the beautiful game.
Yannick Carrasco saw red for Atletico and Porto’s Wendell followed, in tears, four minutes later. That the ball was in play for a total of 12 seconds in between those two incidents tells you all you need to know. Porto’s reserve goalkeeper Agustin Marchesin, who was not on the pitch, was also sent off.
Wendell, quite simply, took the bait as Atletico sought to even things up following Carrasco’s dismissal. Raising an arm to stop Cunha from grabbing the ball, the Porto substitute gave his fellow Brazilian an invitation that he was not going to turn down.
Cunha threw himself backwards as if he had been hit in the face with a baseball bat (note the irony of Simeone preaching calm to his right)…
… and the 42-man brawl followed.
An incident in the Spanish Super Cup two years ago, when Real Madrid’s Federico Valverde committed one of the most cynical fouls imaginable, provides an insight into how Simeone’s mind works when it comes to that winning-at-all costs attitude, especially as Atletico were on the receiving end on this occasion.
With the game deep into extra time and still goalless, Atletico’s Alvaro Morata was put clean through when Valverde brought him down from behind, first with his left foot and then following through with his right. It was pre-meditated, brutally effective in terms of denying Atletico the chance to win the game and left Morata in a heap.
The red card was inevitable. So, too, all the pushing and shoving that followed as players ran from one end of the pitch to the other to argue and protest. Morata, still prone, ended up with a stud mark on his forehead for good measure. To rub salt into Morata’s and Atletico’s wounds, nothing came from the free kick that followed and Real Madrid went on to win on penalties.
Valverde later issued an apology on the Real Madrid website for “something that I should not have done”. He also thanked Simeone for coming up to him as he left the pitch and saying “something that I won’t repeat”.
“I told him (Valverde) that he did what he had to do at that moment,” Simeone later said. “I think the prize for the best player (for him) makes perfect sense because Valverde won the game in this action. It was the most important piece of play.”
Watching Simeone immediately after that challenge was fascinating. Initially, he looked like a man who didn’t know what to do or what to say. He couldn’t jump up and down on the touchline and wave an imaginary card in the air because the referee sent Valverde off straight away. And he couldn’t complain about the injustice of it all, as plenty of other managers would have done in those circumstances, because he knew, just like we all knew, that what Valverde did was right up Simeone’s street.
Initially, Atletico’s shithousery was in short supply against Manchester City but, by the end of the tie, we had a full house.
The first leg had been relatively tame and only came to life once Jack Grealish was introduced. Angel Correa made his thoughts fairly clear on that substitution by smashing the ball into Grealish while he was on the floor following a foul by Sime Vrsaljko, who was later booked for another challenge on the City winger.
Simeone had tried and failed to get Kevin De Bruyne booked and suspended earlier in that game.
But it all felt a little flat until the stroke of half-time in the second leg, when Koke and friends were doing their thing again, this time after John Stones fouled Joao Felix — a foul, incidentally, that was nothing like as bad as Felipe’s reckless early challenge on Foden, which somehow escaped a yellow card. That Felipe and Savic are flanking Koke in the picture below, and presenting the case for the prosecution, adds to the comedy value.
They don’t give up easily either…
That looked like being that until the flashpoint in the 89th minute which had the purists covering their eyes and the rest of us reaching for the popcorn, knowing full well that Atletico, who had been much the better team in the second half, were pressing the self-destruct button. Felipe’s unnecessary kick out at Foden was the catalyst for three minutes of mayhem.
Savic did not take kindly to Foden playing Atletico at their own game by exaggerating his injury (there is no denying he was fouled) and rolling his way back onto the pitch…
… and within 20 seconds it was a scene of total chaos, just as it had been in Porto.
Grealish told Savic, in a manner of speaking, that he would see him next Tuesday…
… and Savic pulled Grealish’s hair in response.
One card, coloured yellow, brought a thumbs-up and a sense of relief.
Another, coloured red, provoked outrage.
There was still time for the referee to be hounded one more time…
… and for Jan Oblak to push away his team-mate…
… and Simeone (it is always a strange look when a player is trying to calm down his manager).
Perhaps it was always going to end this way — in acrimony and drama, and in anger and joy.
Sometimes you watch Atletico and wonder whether Simeone’s biggest frustration on the touchline, where he is so full of emotion and constantly on the move, is that he is unable to influence the game in the same way that he could as a player.
Then again, as Cristiano Ronaldo says in the Argentinian’s documentary, “When you look at Atleti, you also see Simeone.”
Atletico’s manager wouldn’t want it any other way.
Watch on 
