Atletico de Madrid: the bitter side of glory

The Europa League is always a fun tournament but this year it took a different spin with the presence of Manchester United, Shalke04, Manchester City, Valencia, and Ajax. Add to that a fantastic Athletic de Bilbao and you could see why at times it felt more interesting than the Champions League. But none of those teams won the cup. Instead, Atletico de Madrid reclaimed the cup they won 2 years ago with a stellar Falcao and an unbeatable Courtois.

This cup has a lot of merits for Atletico de Madrid both inside and outside the pitch. From a technical point of view, this team is completely different from that of Quique Sanchez Flores in 2010. There are only two survivors from that team: Perea and Dominguez. To me that’s remarkable. It’s hard to build a winning team and to do it in less than two years is even more amazing. Add to that the fact that Simeone didn’t even start the season as the coach and the story becomes even more amusing. Atletico won the final being loyal to their beliefs and playing very smart defensive game without being cowards on the pitch.

But leaving all the euphoria and all the celebrations for the title aside you can see that not everything is happiness for the club. Yes the won the cup, but they missed finishing 4^th in La Liga, which means they are not in the Champions League next season. So what’s the big deal? Just entering the champions league gives clubs the approximately the same prize money as winning the Europa League. That’s right, Atletico de Madrid could have lost the Europa League final but made it to the Champions League instead and they would have gotten a better money prize. But it’s not only about the money prize; clubs get funding from television contracts and basically the better the team is positioned for the next season the bigger piece of the pie you get.

From a fan point of view that doesn’t matter because a title is a title and you want your club to be a champion. But now Atletico is going to be forced to sell key players to avoid red numbers in their balance sheets for the year. This means goodbye Diego because even though he’s on a loan, it cost the team 5 millions to keep him. This also means goodbye Falcao and possibly Adrian as well because funds are needed.

Atletico will be doing the right thing, which is spending no more than their income so they can pay their debt even at the expense of the team. It’s a short term sacrifice for a better future but it’s hard to sell this to fans who, understandably, want to raise cups instead of finishing 4^th in La Liga.

So congratulation Atletico for this well deserved cup, a sugar coat for a mission half accomplished.