Atletico Madrid Handed a Humbling Lesson That Hints at Even Tougher Times Ahead

The opposition were obviously better, their players more revered and more expensive to both purchase and then keep at the club thanks to their huge wages, but there can be no doubt about this.

Atletico Madrid’s 3-0 defeat at home to Real Madrid on Saturday was by far and away their worst loss of the season, and given their increasing status in world football over the past few years, it was perhaps the worst for several campaigns.

It basic terms, it was a third defeat in their last four matches in La Liga, with the nine points dropped in those games the exact figure that they trail leaders Real by in a table that has become increasingly difficult to look at over the past few weeks.

Toward the end of October, Atleti were travelling back from Russia, having just beaten FC Rostov 1-0 in the Champions League. It was an eighth win in nine matches in all competitions, with their only dropped points coming in a 1-1 draw at Barcelona—a result never to be sniffed at.

Everything was rosy in the Atletico garden. Manager Diego Simeone looked as though he’d settled on a preferred, more expansive way of playing and several performers—most notably the burgeoning talent that is Yannick Carrasco—were coming to the fore.

Now, things are rather different.

Because while the defeats at Sevilla and Real Sociedad were regrettable, they generated nowhere near the level of navel-gazing and introspection that will follow after the Madrid derby defeat at the Vicente Calderon on Saturday evening.

There are, of course, several reasons for that.

This was—pending the completion of La Peineta, the new stadium that Atletico Madrid have committed to playing in from the beginning of next season—the last Primera Division derby at the Vicente Calderon.

Atleti would’ve been desperate to put on a show and bloody the noses of their aristocratic rivals at their storied home ground just one more time. It didn’t happen.

But there was no hard-luck story. This wasn’t an evening of stressing and straining every sinew or of the blood-and-thunder, Cholistic football that Simeone has instilled in his team …

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