Atlético Madrid 2020/21 Season Preview: Strengths, Weaknesses, Key Man & Prediction

With nearly ten years, two Champions League final appearances and seven trophies, are the smallest of cracks beginning to appear for Diego Simeone and Atlético Madrid?

The miracle of Anfield notwithstanding, Los Colchoneros were strangely out of sorts during a campaign where they had to adjust to the loss of the talismanic Antoine Griezmann - they were knocked out of the Copa del Rey by lowly Cultural Leonesa, went out of the Champions League with a whimper against RB Leipzig, and before La Liga's restart looked as if they might finish outside of the top four for the first time since 2012.

A bit of a wobble? Or the early signs of something more concerning? So much rests on the window ahead for Atléti, and how Simeone can respond to a disappointing year for the club. Read on for 90min's preview of a season which could be crucial to the destiny of Atlético Madrid.

Strengths

Resilience

From Jürgen Klopp's sad slump to seventh with Dortmund in 2015 to Mauricio Pochettino bowing out of his duties in north London after a 1-1 draw with Sheffield United, when a great manager begins to struggle it can often be a gloomy, fatigued affair.

It feels difficult to imagine something similar happening to Simeone, however, who frequently uses adversity as an excuse to ratchet up the intensity at Atléti, and thrives on coming up with creative solutions when his team's backs are against the wall.

Just look at what happened in Liverpool that fateful March evening, where, yes, Atléti rode their luck to a near-impossible degree, but Simeone did not waste his window of opportunity to do the impossible. With Diego Costa not quite working up top, Simeone showed his chameleon-like ability to adapt to the circumstances of any game and chucked a midfielder up top in Marcos Llorente. And guess what, it worked!

Jan Oblak

If there's one thing that hasn't changed at the Wanda Metropolitano this season, it's that Atlético are really not fond of conceding goals, with just 27 (twenty seven!) conceded in La Liga this season, a pretty decent return for a 'disappointing' league campaign. And they've only had one season with a worse defensive record in the last five.

An enormous part of this impregnability? None other than Atléti's last line of defence, the incredible Jan Oblak, whose save percentage of .771 is second only to Thibaut Courtois' this year (FbRef), and who has been instrumental in protecting a transitional defence with plenty of new faces in it when the chips are down.

His nine saves against Liverpool were as important as anything Llorente or Álvaro Morata did to win the match at Anfield, and he matched Courtois save for save when his team came so close to a shock victory over Real Madrid in January's Supercopa de España. All Atléti have to do now is hope a certain couple of Premier League superclubs in desperate need of a goalkeeper take no notice of him...

Weaknesses

Going Forward

At the back, Los Colchoneros are as always a finely oiled machine, with Felipe, Renan Lodi, Kieran Trippier and Mario Hermoso seamlessly filling the defensive void left by the departures of Juanfran, Lucas Hernandez, Filipe Luís and Diego Godín.

However, unless you spent last summer vacationing under a rock, you'll notice that one of Atlético's forwards made a somewhat high-profile Decision, with Antoine Griezmann swapping the club where he became a legend for a club where the his best position was occupied by the greatest player of all time.

Though Atlético made creditable strides in adjusting to Griezmann's sale to Barcelona by purchasing wonderkid João Félix, his period of adaptation, as well as the lack of a genuinely class number 9 to play alongside (sorry Morata).

There may be plenty of savvy veterans – from Diego Costa to Yannick Carrasco – in Atlético's attacking arsenal, but the failure of the Thomas Lemar transfer has cost them dearly, and the lack of variety or quality in their forward line meant that they were forced to play on the back foot against a vibrant and intense Leipzig side in the Champions League.

Risk of Stagnation

In a broader sense, Atlético need to make sure they keep moving forward in the transfer market, or they risk football's elite leaving them behind.

What business have they done after a mildly alarming season where it looked as if an ageing midfield and a blunt attack might not be the the answer for them? Well...absolutely nothing.

In fairness, Atléti face the same problem as many other clubs in this pandemic-affected transfer window - they have to sell in order to buy (and no, Arsenal fans, this doesn't mean they're desperate to shift Thomas Partey). However, this is to some extent a problem of their own making - if players like Costa, Vitolo and Lemar are difficult to shift, it's because Atléti overpaid for them or paid exorbitant wages to them in the first place.

If Atlético are to push on with Simeone, and maybe even challenge transitional Barcelona and Real sides for a league title, they need to give him the fresh intake of players that his Herculean efforts deserve.

Key Man

The most important component of Atlético's squad refresh, however, might already be at the club, in the shape of the 20-year-old Portuguese prodigy Félix.

Even the most casual observer of Atléti's loss to Leipzig will have noticed the instant change in tone when Félix entered the field in the 58th minute. Suddenly, a stodgy, workmanlike Atlético attack had been transformed into something fluid, direct and, whisper it, actually scary for defenders.

It hasn't, as you'd expect, been simple for the youngster at all, especially with the aforementioned lack of an instinctive finisher to play alongside, but he has shown great character to improve since La Liga's restart, and could well be the exact talisman that Simeone needs.

Prediction

The most important bit of context in determining what Atlético are / aren't capable of right now is that Barcelona are (if you've checked the news), in a really, really, really bad position at the moment, and not one that is likely to improve.

With that in mind, Simeone may not even have to do much to keep Atlético competitive this year, and with a month more of the window to play with, you can't write the club just out of contention just yet.

The best-case scenario, and the one that predicted in the interests of optimism, is that Félix explodes in his La Liga sophomore season, and finally becomes the Griezmann replacement which holds everything together up top. With that, and a few adjustments to the starting XI, Simeone will have escaped near-certain failure by the skin of his teeth yet again - just the way he likes it.

Prediction: Runners-up