A lot can change between now and February 23, but when Manchester United visit Atletico Madrid in the Champions League last-16, they will play a team facing an identity crisis.
On January 7, Diego Simeone will have spent 10 years as Atletico Madrid coach. It might be a good time for the manager and club to sit down and talk, and agree on something: ‘either we agree to do it your way, or we agree to do it our way, or we just go our separate ways.’
Atletico’s attacking resources – not to mention their defensive shortcomings – are now such that to play anything other than expansive, fearlessly attacking football makes no sense.
Diego Simeone will have spent 10 years as the manager of Atletico Madrid early next month
The Atletico boss started forward Joao Felix (L) on the bench for the loss against Real Madrid
But that just isn’t Simeone’s thing. Which is why he started on Sunday against Real Madrid with Joao Felix on the bench and had Marcos Llorente chasing Vinicius down.
Ralf Rangnick will have been delighted at the farcical Champions League re-draw, as his United side swapped a nightmare fixture against Paris Saint-Germain for the slightly easier fixture against Atletico.
Of course, a team that includes Antoine Griezmann, Thomas Lemar, Felix, Yannick Carrasco and Llorente should not be sniffed at, but the prospect of the LaLiga champions is certainly an easier one than Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe.
In truth, with the team they have, Atletico ought to be Spanish football’s entertainers. But one of the main reasons why they are already 13 points off the pace in the title race is that their coach does not fit with that footballing philosophy.
For all that he tries to change, Simeone sees football differently. The man who played a back-six last season in the Champions League against Chelsea is maybe never going to be the man to get the perfect sound from the symphony of striking options now available.
After Sunday night’s defeat to Real Madrid at the Bernabeu he needed little encouragement to praise the opposition. He said: ‘Madrid are very solid. They are playing the football I like. They defend deep, they are strong at the back and they counter-attack at speed.’
Ralf Rangnick will be delighted at being drawn against an Atletico Madrid side stuck in a rut
The likes of Thomas Lemar are struggling to thrive as Simeone sticks to his defensive guns
Apart from that being a rather stingy summary of the way the competition’s runaway leaders are performing, Simeone was reminding us all that he was never happier when he could play with two disciplined banks of four and a Diego Costa or Radamel Falcao to kill rivals on the break.
He never wanted to stop playing that way. It was not his idea to break the club’s transfer record to sign Lemar and then break it again to sign Felix. He went along with the repatriation of Griezmann and all three are top players.
He knows that and, like any coach, he’s happy to have them, but not at the expense of signing another Diego Godin or another Gabi – two club legends who have proved irreplaceable in his system.
It’s an incredible achievement to last a decade at Atletico. There was a time when the manager got the boot every time the president sneezed. They had 34 managers in the 25 seasons before Simeone took over. There were six different managers in the 1993-94 campaign alone. Simeone has steadied the club through the last decade.
Simeone was full of praise for Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid and their style of play on Sunday
Simeone has steadied the ship in the last 10 years and has won two impressive LaLiga titles
He has led them away from their city-centre cauldron of passion, the Vicente Calderon, to the colder more isolated Wanda Metropolitano. It was a heart-wrenching move that could have torn the club’s soul out but he persuaded the supporters that it was for the best.
He has won two titles – one with the might of Real Madrid and Barcelona trying to stop him, and another amidst a pandemic. He has also taken the club to two Champions League finals.
He has for a long time topped the list of highest-paid coaches grossing £34.6m (€40.5m) a season and that’s been used as a stick to beat him with but he is Atletico’s Sir Alex Ferguson.
And he brought the club well over £256m (€300m) in prize-money from those two Champions League final appearances, plus another semi-final, two Europa League finals and two European Super Cups.
The Argentine has also guided the club to two Champions League finals, losing both to Real
Yet Simeone is now struggling to adapt his style to accommodate Atletico’s attacking stars
And if they love him more than this vision of becoming the side everyone wants to watch then they should sell Joao Felix, pack-off Griezmann back to Barcelona, and sign a couple of warriors in their place. At the moment they are neither one thing nor the other.
It’s true that Thibaut Courtois had to keep them at bay on Sunday but over the course of the season so far they have lost all their old defensive fortitude and gained next to nothing in capacity to break down the opposition.
Something has to give. It’s either Simeone’s way, or he heads for the highway, and Atletico look for a different sort of coach.
And whatever happens, United will be breathing a sigh of relief, confident in their ability to brush aside the current LaLiga champions in a two months’ time.
