The Champions League group stage draw hadn’t even finished when neutral fans across the continent began to share their excitement with the fact that Jürgen Klopp’s relentless Liverpool had been paired with Gian Piero Gasperini’s Atalanta. For Atalanta fans, it is surreal to see their club face such illustrious opponents and not least in a competition such as the Champions League. How is it even possible that a provincial club from Bergamo, who has never won the Serie A, has grown into one of Europe’s most exciting football teams, capturing the hearts and minds of millions of viewers? This is the story of how three men have taken a traditional lower mid-table club from relegation scraps and the fear of Serie B to Champions League quarter-finals and games against the likes of Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and Liverpool.
Antonio Percassi came through the ranks at Atalanta in the 1960s and made his debut in 1970, and went on to make 110 appearances for the club before he retired at only 25 to pursue a career as an entrepreneur. Born in Clusone just outside Bergamo, Percassi became the owner of the club in 1990 but left in 1994. Following relegation to Serie B in 2010, Percassi purchased the club again and has remained in charge since. The first managerial appointment of his second reign was Stefano Colantuono, who led the club back to Serie A at the first time of asking and Atalanta has remained in the top flight ever since.
Percassi’s most important appointment, however, was made in 2014 when he recruited Giovanni Sartori as the club’s new sporting director. Sartori was, of course, well-known within the Italian game as the miracle worker behind Chievo’s astonishing rise to Serie A regulars and even European competition.
In 1989, Giovanni Sartori called time on a 14-year professional career at nine different Italian clubs, with its peak reached at AC Milan, his boyhood club, when the Rossoneri lifted the Serie A in 1979. The last five years of his playing career were spent at Chievo, a spell that ended with the club promoted to Serie C1 in Sartori’s final season. Sartori retired as a player and joined the coaching staff where he would spend two seasons as a coach. In 1992, Luigi Campdelli, Chievo’s owner, died and his 23-year-old son Luca replaced him. The new owner’s first course of action was to promote Sartori to the role of sporting director.
Sartori and Campedelli then opted to appoint Alberto Malesani as head coach, which proved very successful as Malesani led Chievo into Serie B for the first time. In 2001, by now led by head coach Luigi Delneri, Chievo were promoted to Serie A, also for the first time. The following year, Chievo finished fifth in the top flight and astonishingly qualified for the UEFA Cup. In only ten years, Sartori had built teams to win Serie C1, win promotion to Serie A and finally to quality for Europe. Sartori stayed at Chievo for 22 years in total, establishing the club in Serie A with relegation in 2007 as the only stain on his record and with the Champions League play-off loss to Braga in 2006 as the biggest “what if?”, eventually leaving in 2014 with Chievo a bonafide Serie A club. His work at Chievo is rightly considered to be a miracle, and Percassi believed Sartori could perform another miracle at Atalanta.
Sartori stuck with Colantuono as the coach in his first season up until March when Edy Reja came in. Reja didn’t work out at the Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, though, and, in June 2016, Sartori made his second head coach appointment. This one would work out better.
Gian Piero Gasperini had always been around in Italian football. After a 17-year playing career at various clubs, Gasperini returned to his boyhood club Juventus and spent nine years as a youth coach. In 2003, he was appointed head coach at Crotone and had two spells at the club (this is Italian football, of course) before joining Genoa in 2006. He immediately led them into Serie A in his first season and then finished tenth, fifth and ninth in his three full seasons in the top division. After a poor start to the 2010/11 season, Gasperini was sacked. His stock was high though, mostly due to the exciting nature of Genoa’s football. Gasperini’s fluid 3-4-3 became legendary and, in 2011, earned him his big chance when he was appointed at Inter.
However, an ageing Inter side proved incompatible with Gasperini’s tactics in the five league games Gasperini was given before being sacked. He then had two spells at Palermo before rejoining Genoa in 2013 and spending three seasons with the Grifone before the call from Sartori came in 2016.
Atalanta’s sporting director saw Gasperini’s blend of high-energy football and trust in young players as the perfect recipe for a young Atalanta squad. However, Gasperini, again, started poorly with Atalanta losing four of the first five games. Rumours spread that Gasperini would be sacked, but Percassi and Sartori knew that it would take time for Gasperini to get things right and chose to trust their coach. They were duly rewarded since Atalanta would follow those first five matches up with eight wins from the following nine, beating Napoli, Inter and Roma in the process. Atalanta went on to finish fourth, then seventh and eventually third in 2018/19 to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history. When there, the swashbuckling side reached the quarter-finals, only missing out on the last four due to a very late PSG comeback. Atalanta made a late title push post-lockdown last season, but eventually finished third, five points behind Juventus. In honesty, the only blip on Gasperini’s time in Bergamo is the Coppa Italia final in 2019 when Lazio proved stronger with Atalanta missing out on adding to their solitary Coppa Italia title from 1963.
Gasperini’s Atalanta has become an attacking machine, top scorers in Serie A for the last two seasons, hitting 98 goals last term. This season, they’ve started by scoring 13 goals in three games. They entertain, and they win. The attacking game is based around rapid ball circulation with a purpose: to play the ball forward quickly and hurt teams. They do this either by exploiting space in wide areas thanks to their marauding wing-backs or by using quick passing combinations to find their dangerous attackers in central areas, the likes of Gómez, Iličić and Pašalić, between the lines of the opponent’s midfield and defence. Out of possession, Atalanta adopt a collective man-marking approach that is so aggressive that teams are often pressed off the pitch. It’s risky when up against the best attackers, but so far it has worked tremendously well and very few teams have come up with methods to stop La Dea. Gasperini has said that the key is that his players work harder than everyone else, and it’s hard to argue with him when you watch them play.
Besides Gasperini and his unique tactics, the key to Atalanta’s success has been their recruitment. Every summer, the club has seen some of their key players leave for bigger clubs. And every time, Sartori has managed to replace them and improve the team as well as the squad. The easiest way to look at this is by looking at Gasperini’s preferred team from 2016/17, his first season in charge. He usually played Etrit Berisha in goal, a back-three of Rafael Tolói, Mattia Caldara and Andrea Masiello, a midfield duo made up of two out of Roberto Gagliardini, Franck Kessié and Remo Freuler, two wing-backs in Andrea Conti and Leonardo Spinazzola, and a front three of Jasmin Kurtić, Andrea Petagna and Alejandro “Papu” Gómez. Only Tolói, Caldara (who was sold to Juventus and then returned in 2019), Freuler and Gómez remain at the club.
Sartori and Gasperini have made good use of Atalanta’s famously well-run academy with Gagliardini, Kessié and Conti becoming important players before being sold for big money or, as in the case of Dejan Kulusevski, Alessandro Bastoni and Amad Diallo, by selling young players who’ve barely played but are destined for great things by spotting and recruiting them early. Those six academy players alone brought in an initial €184m! Sartori has also been clever with the markets he’s targeted, signing players like Hans Hateboer and Robin Gosens from the Netherlands, Timothy Castagne and Ruslan Malinovskyi from Belgium, José Luis Palomino from Bulgaria and several out of favour players from around Europe, including the mercurial talent Josip Iličić and Chelsea’s perennial loanee Mario Pašalić.
Sartori’s connections within Italy have also paid off with players like Gianluca Mancini and Bryan Cristante coming into the club, excelling and then being sold on to Roma, in their case, for big money. Sartori has also been ready to pay for the right players, such as Colombian strike partners Duván Zapata and Luis Muriel. All together, Sartori’s excellent eye for talent and intelligent recruitment have created exciting Atalanta squads for Gasperini to mould in his image, which has had benefits for Atalanta both on and off the pitch.
In total, Atalanta has turned a PROFIT of more than €90m from transfers alone while progressing from a mid-table club to a regular in European competition during Gasperini’s four years in charge. It’s safe to say that Sartori has worked another miracle, both financially and in a sporting sense by finding the right coach and the right players.
Atalanta under Sartori has never signed bonafide superstars because they know that they can’t. Instead, Gasperini’s coaching has created superstars. Papu Gómez and Josip Iličić had always been good Serie A players, but never the consistent top-level performers they’ve been over the last few seasons. Equally, Zapata had been a consistent Serie A striker, but didn’t make it at Napoli and definitely didn’t look like a Capocannoniere candidate at Udinese or Sampdoria. Gasperini has managed to make his very good players more consistent and elevated them further while improving the more mediocre players to solid Serie A and European performers. Without Gasperini, there’s every chance that Atalanta would still be a mid-table club. The success of this Atalanta project hinges on the quality of the sporting director and the coach, and the trust placed in them by the owner.
2019/20 will go down in history as Atalanta’s best ever season in sporting terms, despite the lack of silverware, but it’s also easy to argue that it was their worst ever season off the pitch. Atalanta is THE club in Bergamo and there is a strong bond between club and city. Since Bergamo has been one of the cities in Europe most devastatingly hit by covid-19, with enormous death tallies during the spring in particular, the players, staff and entire club were hit hard. Several players have talked of the psychological toll the situation in the city took on them, but can take solace in that they brought some pride and joy back to the city thanks to their performances over the summer. Bergamo is still a broken city, but it is also more united than ever before and that bond between club and city has grown stronger.
Given everything that has happened, it would be poetic if this is the season when Gasperini leads Atalanta over that last hurdle. The dream of the Scudetto is there, even if it remains distant, after winning the first three matches and scoring 13 goals in the process. Juventus and Inter should be too strong, but if Gasperini can get Iličić back playing at a similar level to what he was last season following his return to training, anything is possible.
On a personal level, Atalanta’s success over the last few years has been surreal. One half of my family hail from a small city just outside Bergamo, so Atalanta has always been present in my life. I remember speaking to my dad about the club when they were in relegation scraps in the past and that he always used to say that if they went down, they would always come back. You know what, dad? You were right, but I don’t think this rise is what you meant.
Whenever I speak to my grandfather now, we always talk about Atalanta. He supports AC Milan and has done throughout his life, but he lights up every time I mention the performances of the Bergamo club. “I don’t believe it. That small club? In the Champions League? It’s amazing”.
It IS amazing. Atalanta shouldn’t be this ridiculously good. Yet, they are. Thanks to clever people, a long-term plan and smart decisions, Atalanta has become one of Italy’s best football clubs and a global model for how to run a club not blessed with billionaire owners or millions of fans. Atalanta can dream of a Scudetto, and dreams do come true. After the year their city has endured and the graudal growth the club has shown, no one could begrudge them that.
The fact that they’re even here is largely thanks to the vision, intelligence and greatness of three men: Antonio Percassi, Giovanni Sartori and Gian Piero Gasperini.
From bergamaschi everywhere,
Grazie.
Comments