Diego Simeone Is on a Voyage to the End of Goals

Switching to five at the back has Atlético Madrid on pace to be an all-time great defense. Here's how the new shape works.

Six goals against. Six! We’re nearly halfway through the season and Atlético Madrid has conceded less to the entire country of Spain than Liverpool did in an hour and fifteen minutes to Aston Villa. Atleti’s on top of La Liga and on pace to allow 14 league goals all season, which would be the lowest figure in a top league since … maybe ever?

It's hard to overstate just how historically good this defense has been so far. Chelsea’s 15 goals against in 2004-05 could be within reach. According to Wikipedia the La Liga record is also 15 goals conceded, set by Real Madrid back in 1931-32—when the season was just 18 games long.

So what, you say. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and nobody ever scores on Atlético Madrid. But what if I told you they haven't done it the way you think? That the jpeggy old mental picture of Diego Simeone’s 4-4-2 block you’ve kept in your brain’s camera roll since like 2013 is finally out of date? After a decade of success with Atleti, the greatest defensive coach of his generation has ripped up his formula and embarked on a magical journey of self discovery, and so far it looks like it’s made his team even better. Let’s get you caught up.

How It Started

You could make a pretty good case that Atlético Madrid ditched the back four for the sake of its attack, which had been in a rut the last few years. This squad’s three best progressive passers—the guys who get the ball from one end of the field to the other—are Koke in midfield, Mario Hermoso at left center back, and Kieran Trippier on the right side of the back line. In the old 4-4-2, Trippier was saddled with defensive duties and Hermoso was often left on the bench behind defenders who are better in the box. In a back five, all three progressive passers can play where they’re best while Yannick Carrasco dribbles up the left sideline and Marcos Llorente probes the right midfield channel to give Trippier his favorite target. José Pérez has already written about the new-look Atleti’s “possession circuit,” so I’ll leave that side of the ball for the further reading section at the end of this post.

But back at the start of the season not everything was copacetic with Atleti’s defense, either. Getting stomped 4-0 by Bayern Munich in their Champions League group was a wake up call. When it became obvious early in the first half that Kingsley Coman on Trippier was a mismatch, Joshua Kimmich and Niklas Süle started spamming final third switches over Atleti’s narrow block to pick out Coman on the weak side. Even when Atleti had the ball, the threat of Bayern’s aggressive transitions made it tough for Trippier to get upfield without exposing his center back pair. The 4-4-2 block was getting beat horizontally and vertically. The immovable defense had met an unstoppable attacking force, and boy did we find out who wins that paradox.

Simeone might have been able to swallow a loss to the champions of Europe, but coughing up four more goals the following week to the mighty trio of Salzburg, Osasuna, and Lokomotiv Moscow convinced him that something had to change. In early November he sized up his roster and decided it was time to go five at the back. “Right now we think Carrasco at wingback strikes the right balance between defending well and attacking how we want,” he told reporters a few weeks into the experiment. “The players are the key.”

Switching to a back five can change a lot of stuff about how a team plays soccer, but I want to focus on Atlético Madrid’s defensive block for a couple reasons. One, because it’s the part of the game they’re famous for. Two, because it’s the phase that was least in need of fixing but now the most in flux. Europe's most dependable, least adventurous defense has suddenly started reinventing itself on an almost weekly basis, and it’s still not clear what it’ll look like when things settle down.

How It Works

So far Atleti’s most common new defensive shape has been a 5-3-2 where Carrasco drops from the left side of the midfield line to the left side of the back line, like so:

At the tip of the formation, not much changes for the front two. Luis Suárez still ushers play from the center circle to the wings at a gentle trot, less an angled press than a polite suggestion that perhaps you would feel more comfortable somewhere over there by the sideline. His partner, usually João Félix, tends to drop underneath a little bit to shade a defensive midfielder. These guys might spring into action to press a backpass, but most of the time they’re just chilling until the next attacking transition.

The second line is where you start to notice a difference. The old midfield four could get aggressive at the corners if it wanted, applying pressure to the outside of the opponent’s back line, which will usually shape itself into some kind of concave three to play around Atleti’s front two. A 5-3-2 doesn’t really have the width to press that high. Instead the ballside midfielder will play a shepherding role like Suárez, staying in front of the opponent’s ballcarrier in the halfspace and encouraging the easy pass out to the wing. The guy in the middle, almost always Koke, will shift over to that side as well to provide backup, while the third mid stops just short of the center line. This shift is so smooth that things don’t look much different around the ball than if they’d been playing in a passive four. Sure, there’s a hole over on the far side of the midfield that an opponent could conceivably hit a flat switch into, but he’d have to be a crazy good passer, somebody like Toni Kro—*finger to ear*—oh he did? Damn, that sucks.

But what Atleti gives up in midfield width by switching to a back five, they make up for by having, well, five at the back. This is useful in a few ways. For one, the far post switches Bayern abused to pick out Coman are now covered with an extra man. In the middle, three center backs won’t get outnumbered by the narrow inverted winger-striker-inverted winger trio most teams favor these days, and any one of the center backs is free to leave the line to track a dropping forward without worrying too much about leaving a gap behind him. You wouldn’t have thought it could get harder to break through the heart of Atlético Madrid’s defense, but it has.

The real sea change, though, is how Atleti defends the wings. Remember how the forwards and outside mids sit off the ball a little bit in the 5-3-2 to nudge possession toward the sideline? That’s where the wingback is waiting to spring the trap. Atleti’s wider back line forces the outside attacker (sometimes a winger, sometimes a fullback) to drop off the front line a little bit to receive with his back to goal. The receiver’s negative body shape and the predictability of circulation patterns make it easy for the wingback to press the wing pass from behind, with the sideline there to help out as a second defender.

Now, Atleti could and did press these wing passes in pretty much the same way with fullbacks in the old 4-4-2 block. Where the back five really makes a difference is in what happens after the outside back steps to the winger and the defense has to close the gaps behind him. This part involves rotations that are going to be a pain to describe, so let’s just go to the tape.

How It’s Going

Okay I know that was a whole lot of tactics noise, so I made you a handy little cheatsheet to keep track of what’s changed in the 5-3-2 block.

Pros

• More center backs to clog the middle
• More back post coverage
• Wingback pressing traps on the sideline
• Better rotations to seal the seams

Cons

• Hole on the far side of midfield allows switches
• Can’t press as high with wide midfielders
• Carrasco starts transitions deeper as a wingback

That’s a pretty good tradeoff, especially when you consider that there are ways to cope with the 5-3-2’s cons. In a high block Atleti still uses a 4-4-2 shape for that extra bit of aggression, only dropping Carrasco into the back line after they’ve retreated into their own half. And with all the passing talent the 5-3-2 fits on the field, they can afford to slow down their attacking transitions a little bit to give Carrasco and Llorente time to join the attack. Defending midfield switches is still sort of a problem, but the expected value on those passes isn’t really worth losing sleep over.

It’s working better than anyone could have hoped. The more deliberate attack is on pace to score 73 goals, more than any Atlético side since they won La Liga in 2013-14. If their defense keeps locking things down, they could wind up with an even better goal difference than that team, which would make them the best in club history. Tactics aren’t everything—this would be a talented squad in any formation—but it looks like they’ve found a shape that brings out the best in them.

Still, it’s not perfect. Simeone wants perfect, and he’s willing to keep tinkering until he finds it. Against Real Madrid last month, Kroos’s midfield switches and Atleti’s sputtering attack made the coach revert from the 5-3-2 back to a 4-4-2 around the half hour mark (it didn’t really help, and he later criticized his own tactics). Against Real Sociedad the next week, Atleti tried a 5-4-1 block, which in theory pairs the benefits of having wingers with the defensive solidity of a back five, but the attack struggled to create chances without a second striker. The most extreme experiment yet was a 6-3-1 block against Sevilla, whose attack is so heavily dependent on wingbacks that Simeone threw everything he had into a double-XL back line to cut them off. The man’s on a vision quest, okay? He’s not constrained by your bourgeois norms.

There’s no telling if Simeone’s pilgrimage will come to rest on the 5-3-2 block, but with João Félix returning to full fitness and the Lyon striker Moussa Dembélé joining in the winter window, it seems like the shape we’re most likely to see from Atleti when the Champions League picks back up next month. If they make another deep run because nobody can figure out how to score on the new system, you’ll know why. Just watch how they defend the wings. ❧

Further reading:

• José Pérez, Behind Enemy Lines: Atlético de Madrid (Managing Madrid)
• Atletico 2.0: Proactive, Possession, Passing & Panache: In-depth Analysis (One Nil)
• Santiago T. Peredo, Atlético de Madrid Del 4-4-2 al 3-5-2: ¿La evolución del Cholismo? (Marca)

Image: Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey