Atalanta and the myth of fairy tales
There’s no such thing as a fairy tale. Even if there is, it doesn’t come with a happy ending. There’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only muddy puddles. Water doesn’t turn into wine.
Atalanta are out of the Champions League.
Just as there was no more heartwarming sporting story in these grim times than their surge up the Serie A table to reprise last season’s third-place finish, there is none more heartbreaking and cruel than the manner of their exit at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain.
This wasn’t David against Goliath, it was an ant against an elephant. Atalanta’s weekly wage bill of 557,750 Euros — Papu Gomez and Duvan Zapata are their top earners on 64,000 a week — wouldn’t even convince Neymar (on 700,000 Euros a week) to get out of bed. It wouldn’t be enough to pay both Kylian Mbappe (360,000) and Thiago Silva (305,000). You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to understand why every neutral football-lover on the planet was rooting for the team from a region (Lombardy lost more than 17,000 people to the virus) that has had to withstand so much misery during this pandemic.
Look at the personnel too. The fulcrum of this Atalanta side is Gomez, an Argentine journeyman now 32 years old. The nickname of Papu (Daddy) is more than apt. Their leading scorer this season, Josep Ilicic — who scored four times in his last Champions League outing against Valencia — wasn’t even in Portugal for this game. There are rumours that he may never play again because of personal problems. The Colombian duo of Zapata and Luis Muriel both had spells with bigger clubs — Napoli and Sevilla — without leaving any lasting impact.
Gian Piero Gasperini — a shoo-in for coach of the year honours — lasted weeks in his only big job, at Internazionale. In four seasons at Atalanta, he has finished fourth, seventh and third (twice in a row). Imagine Chris Wilder, rightly lauded for the football his team have played back in the top flight in England, taking Sheffield United into the Champions League twice in succession, and you begin to get an idea of the scale of Gasperini’s achievement. It is simply unparalleled.
Sometimes, with unhappy endings, there is the scope for redemption. That’s unlikely to be the case with Atalanta. Even if Ilicic returns, and that’s a big if at present, both he and Gomez will be 33 by the time the Champions League reaches its climactic stages in 2021. The giants of European football would have used the current economic constraints to further widen the gap to the have-nots like Atalanta. No, this was a one-off, a rare chance for a Cinderella side to have a proper tilt at Champions League glory. And it’s over.
Cold reality, we hate you.
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