Getting started
Okay, so I gotta figure out how Atlético Madrid actually set up against Athletic Club. I thought it would be easy, you know? Just look up the formation online. Simple. But guess what? Everyone said something different! Some sites claimed a 4-4-2, others swore it was a 5-3-2, and a few mentioned a weird 3-5-2 thing. I’m sitting there scratching my head, totally confused. Couldn’t make heads or tails of it from text descriptions alone. Felt stuck.
Doing it myself
Realized I had to just bite the bullet and watch the darn game back myself. Booted up the recording – gotta love being able to do that. Decided I needed to track positions properly. Started paying super close attention right from the kickoff whistle. I paused, rewound, paused again. Seriously, it was like watching paint dry sometimes, but I stuck with it.
I focused on where players actually stood when we didn’t have the ball. That’s the key, right? Defense. Who was where? I grabbed my notebook – yeah, old school pen and paper – and just started scribbling down positions during a few Athletic attacks.
- First thing I saw? Griezmann was basically playing like a midfielder, way deeper than I thought. Not really up front much at the start.
- Hermoso – he’s supposed to be a center-back, right? – kept popping up way higher on the left, almost like a winger sometimes. It was weird.
- And then Koke and Barrios? They sat really deep, barely crossed the halfway line, especially when Athletic had the ball. They were glued in front of the center-backs.
Took me a while, looking at the same phases over and over.
What actually turned out
Turns out I was half-right expecting a back five, but it was messy. It started looking like 5 at the back, but not always! When Athletic pushed hard down the wings, one of the wing-backs – usually Molina on the right – would drop deep, deep, almost making it a six. Hermoso on the left stayed higher. Griezmann dropped deep a lot making it more like a 5-4-1 shape without the ball. Morata was left up front by himself, looking pretty isolated most times. The shape kept changing depending on where Athletic attacked! We weren’t rigid at all. More like a blob shifting around, trying to clog up the dangerous areas. Hard to pin down an exact formation number because it kept morphing. It wasn’t a perfect 5-3-2 or a strict 4-4-2; it was just Simeone making everyone work like dogs to close spaces. Watched about 20 minutes worth of defensive phases just to be sure. My notebook was a total mess of arrows and scribbles by the end.
Kinda obvious now…
After all that effort? The reason nobody could agree on the formation is because it wasn’t a fixed one! Everyone tries to slap a number on it – 5-3-2 or whatever – but Atlético doesn’t work like that under Simeone against tough teams like Athletic. It’s all about being solid, compact, and shifting as a unit wherever the ball goes. Positions are fluid. It’s a mindset, not a fixed grid. It took watching carefully and tracking every single run by hand to really see it. Way more work than I thought, but actually seeing it click made total sense. Just shows, sometimes you gotta do the boring stuff yourself to see what’s really happening. Box scores lie.
