At Atalanta’s Christmas party, the club’s chairman, Antonio Percassi, raised a glass. Over the last year, particularly after winning the Europa League in Dublin in May, the team he used to play for has become the envy of Europe. “We were pivelli,” he likes to say. Novices. Complete beginners, practically new to UEFA competitions until seven years ago. What mattered more than the discernible admiration, however, was the considerable respect Atalanta’s achievements have brought. “We have relationships with all the clubs in Europe and they pay us a load of compliments,” Percassi smiled.
It’s not all they pay Atalanta.
The scientists walking around the CIES Football Observatory with their clipboards and white coats recently calculated Atalanta have made a €236million profit from player trading in the last decade, the record receipt coming from Manchester United who bought Rasmus Hojlund after one season in Bergamo for €73.9m (£61m). The Manchester derby winner Amad made the same move two and a half years earlier, having played just 59 minutes of first-team football for La Dea. The total cost of that transfer could reach €44m (£36m).
(Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
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.
The Cagliari win felt significant for contemporary 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.”
Champions Inter, for instance, announced record revenues of €473m in the autumn. Cousins Milan weren’t far behind, raking in €457m. Even taking into account their exclusion from the Champions League, Juventus, in a down year, brought in €394m. By comparison, Atalanta, in a historic season and following eight straight years of consistent growth on the pitch, stacked up €242m. It means, when we talk about Atalanta making a title tilt, we are still asking a featherweight that has recently progressed to middleweight to punch in the heavyweight 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.
(Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
More new investors followed majority owner Steve Pagliuca and bought into the club. Work on the Gewiss Stadium, the unrecognisable and rebranded Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, reached completion and, as a boujee ground that’s Premier League in feel and Serie A in atmosphere, revenues will only climb further. Although still a small club in name, Atalanta have become lower upper class in reality.
The club’s upward mobility has, in turn, lifted Bergamo up. Top of the league in Serie A, for the first time ever the city also recently finished top of Il Sole 24 Ore’s annual ranking of the best places to live in Italy for quality of life. “This extraordinary achievement, five years on from the pandemic, is a source of great satisfaction for our community,” Bergamo’s mayor, Elena Carnevali, told the newswire ANSA. “But it also invites us to show a deep sense of responsibility for the future.”
No one has contributed more to this uplift than Atalanta’s coach, Gian Piero Gasperini. The fortunes of the Percassis as Atalanta’s custodians suddenly changed when they chose him as coach in 2016. Players who became identified with Atalanta, such as Papu Gomez, have come and gone and yet the club has kept growing. Even the departure of sporting director Giovanni Sartori, who quickly built a Bologna team capable of qualifying for the Champions League for the first time in six decades, didn’t change anything. Gasperini has been the one constant. While Atalanta have become so much greater than the sum of their parts — executive team, academy, recruitment — he is the one indispensable part. Take him out of the equation and does it still add up?
The Percassis might argue they have fostered the kind of stable environment Gasperini sought. For instance, he led Genoa back to the top flight for the first time in 11 years and missed out on the Champions League on head-to-head but the owner Enrico Preziosi sold his best players often within months of them blossoming. The acumen of the Percassis and additional support from Pagliuca has instead allowed Atalanta to keep teams together for longer and to rebuild stronger.
This current vintage feels like Gasperini’s third or fourth team in eight years. Many thought the zenith had already been reached between 2018 and 2021. Atalanta twice made it to the Coppa Italia final in that run, were seconds from a Champions League semi-final and finished third three seasons in a row in Serie A. They were top scorers in Italy in each of those years and scored 116 goals in all competitions in the 2019-20 campaign alone. It felt like a once in a lifetime thing. Then Gasperini fell out with Papu, mental health issues afflicted Josip Ilicic and Duvan Zapata’s body began to break down. The narrow window of opportunity to win something seemed to close.
(Chris Ricco/Getty Images)
And yet Atalanta returned to the Coppa Italia final. They became the first Italian team to lift the old UEFA Cup this century (Parma were the last Serie A representative to do that in 1999) and now have the aura and self-confidence as a club to bring the Scudetto to Bergamo. Gasperini has spoken about the team coming back from Dublin with a new mindset. Atalanta beat Liverpool at Anfield and defeated the undefeated Bayer Leverkusen to win the Europa League. Nights like those and the experience of playing a 56-game season in which they made two finals, won one and still finished in the top four in Serie A caused something to click in body and mind.
While Gasperini wondered if the time had come to leave — wasn’t winning the Europa League as good as it was going to get? — and received overtures from Napoli, he presumably sensed this team still has more to give. Besides, as he found in his brief spell at Inter, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side and he’d have to start over. Gasperini is never going to be more powerful within a club than he is at Atalanta (where he negotiated a percentage on player sales to supplement his contract). He has wired Berat Djimsiti and Marten de Roon to be so in tune with him that his coaching staff is no longer limited to the dugout. By now, Gasperini has assistants on the pitch.
Unlike Milan and Juventus, whose teams have become predominantly more foreign-based, Atalanta, like principal rivals Inter, have an Italian core that keeps everyone in line. The squad is deeper than ever. Sartori’s departure was supposed to be a major blow. But Atalanta covered for it in different ways. They 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.
(Alex Pantling – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
Of course, it helps that Percassi and his son, Luca, the chief executive, both played too. Atalanta have football people in positions increasingly staffed by Harvard business school types. That’s not a slight on the Ivy League, it’s a mere acknowledgement that in an ecosystem with its own idiosyncrasies like Serie A, having a Masters in the Italian league matters more.
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, goes back to Anfield last season when Sead Kolasinac’s absence was a cause of great preoccupation before kick-off. Atalanta won 3-0 as De Roon, one of Gasperini’s coaches on the pitch, adapted, not for the first time, to a role in the back three. Lookman and De Ketelaere have become unplayable. “Football Q.I of CDK is beyond 200!” a banner reads at the Gewiss Stadium (yes, they meant ‘IQ’). This calendar year alone he has combined for 36 goals and assists. The best player in Serie A in 2024 feels like a toss-up between him and Lookman. Inter offered a reminder on Monday of what a formidable opponent they constitute with a 6-0 win over in-form Lazio in Rome. Atalanta’s response came in the Coppa Italia a few days later. They obliterated Cesena 6-1. It was the third time this season they’ve hit an opponent for six. Then they got that late 3-2 win against Empoli to make it 11 league wins on the bounce — De Ketelaere scored twice and Lookman got the other.
Belief is growing.
If Atalanta were to win Serie A, Bergamo would be the smallest town since inner-city Cagliari in 1970 and Vercelli in 1921 to be the home of the Italian champions. In football terms, perhaps the nearest comparison is with Sampdoria in 1991. Their Scudetto was the culmination of seven years of being there or thereabouts, winning the Coppa Italia in 1985, 1988 and 1989, then the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1990. Atalanta’s trajectory isn’t too dissimilar.
“I don’t want to make comparisons with the other Atalanta teams I had in the past because they’re different,” Gasperini said after the 3-1 win over Parma in November. “If you talk to me about the Gomez, Ilicic, Zapata and (Luis) Muriel one, well, that was an extraordinary team. This one won the Europa League. As for the Scudetto, I don’t want to talk about it because it’s only the 13th round of the season but we want to win all the games we can. If we carry on like this, we’ll definitely think about it. We won’t hold back. That’s how it was in the Europa League too. We didn’t think about winning it.”
But Atalanta did. They followed their imagination 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)