The Five Principles of Gasperini's Atalanta
A technical breakdown of La Dea — and the players who make it tick.
In May, Gian Piero Gasperini made history.
Bergamo had, during his reign at the city’s beloved Atalanta, been ravaged as the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. The club’s only major silverware - not counting Serie B titles - came in 1963. It was a club and city in need of a hero. Enter a journeyman Italian manager with a point to prove.
In this comprehensive breakdown, Stephen Ganavas uses rare and bespoke data to unpack exactly what Gasperini’s Atalanta do with and without the ball, the profiles they’re looking for as they eternally rebuild a side continually picked apart by rivals, and the tactical intricacies of a magnificently assembled team of supposed misfits.
All hail La Dea - The Goddess.
In this analytical epic:
How a journeyman manager became a city’s icon
The five key principles that make Gasperini’s underdogs tick
The players, signed or developed, that bring the masterplan to life
…including the most dangerous outlet winger in the world
Welcome, dear readers, to Bergamo.
When 66-year-old Gian Piero Gasperini sprinted onto the field at full-time of Atalanta’s Europa League triumph, it was the culmination of a lifetime of graft.
He’d spent his whole life in football. He joined Juventus’ academy as a boy in the 1960s and made a couple of Coppa Italia appearances for the Bianconeri, before embarking on a fairly unremarkable career that mostly bumped between clubs in Serie B and Serie C.
For the longest time, his 30-year managerial stint looked similarly meandering. It again started with a decade-long spell in the Juventus youth sector, then Crotone, whom he promoted from Serie C to Serie B, and Genoa, whom he promoted to Serie A.
Looking back, Gasperini’s 2008/09 Genoa team is something to behold. They finished fifth in Serie A, only six points behind second-placed Juventus and level on points with fourth-placed Fiorentina.
But the names are something special.
Here’s a few:
Thiago Motta (current Juventus coach, would go on to have a second wind in his career, winning the Champions League in 2010 with Inter)
Ivan Jurić (has managed Genoa, Hellas Verona and Torino in Serie A)
Raffaele Palladino (new Fiorentina and former Monza manager)
There were some other pretty good players too:
Diego Milito (would win the Champions League with Inter)
A very young Stephan El Shaarawy (still starting on occasion for Italy, 16 years later)
Domenico Criscito (26 Italy caps, and really good on FIFA 12)
Salvatore Bochetti (five Italy caps, now coaching)
Sokratis Papastathopoulos (apparently played for Arsenal)
But as Gasperini soared amongst these auspicious names, disaster loomed. He was sacked by Genoa late in 2010. His luck appeared to turn when Inter hired him in the summer of 2011, but that turned sour quickly. And I mean quickly.
After four defeats and a draw in his first five games, Gasperini was gone. He joined the Maurizio Zamparini merry-go-round at Palermo - he was sacked twice in a month, don’t ask - returned to Genoa for a few years, and then finally… finally… landed in Bergamo in 2016.
Atalanta’s Gasperini era had begun. Eight years later, it’s at the height of its power.
For a managerial reign to last eight years is an achievement by itself, and hints at a generational run for a club with limited resources. But as Gasperini’s dynasty stretched, a worry that it would end without silverware grew - a gloomy spectre hanging over every kick.
That would've been a travesty. Not only have Gasperini’s Atalanta been a constant feature near the top of the Serie A table, they have made numerous runs in Europe and reached three Coppa Italia finals.
However, after that third final ended in defeat to a meagre Juventus team that was crawling towards the finish line last season, the reality that it would never happen began to set in.
They had a Europa League final still to play, of course. But to claim that trophy they’d have to do what 51 other teams had failed to over the course of 361 days: beat Xabi Alonso’s juggernaut, Bayer Leverkusen.
Well. Ademola Lookman scored a hat-trick, Atalanta dominated, and Gasperini finally won the prize his story deserved. History.
I - INTENSITY
How do Gasperini and Atalanta do it? How has a club handicapped by financial constraints taken on European and domestic giants and won? It starts, as all success in football does, with recruitment. We’ll look at that, and how it shaped an underdog story that will be told in Bergamo for generations. Let’s start with the fundamentals on the pitch.
A perfect one-word descriptor for Gasperini’s teams is ‘intensity’. They make things happen.
But what does intensity look like? How can we quantify it?
I think people default to physical and athletic aspects of the game, and that is certainly obvious in the way this team presses man-to-man and looks to choke the opposition. But there are also some interesting ways this team demonstrates intensity with the ball, too.
I am going to bundle together a few metrics from our friends at SkillCorner that I think define Atalanta as a team. I’ll make it as simple and straightforward to follow as possible, I promise.
Let’s start with the easy stuff. How much running do Atalanta do, and at what level of intensity?
I’ve pulled out a few interesting metrics here, and will dissect them one-by-one.
Please note: the Atalanta stats in this piece are presented on a per player basis, or per player that plays in a specific position. As you will see on the graph below, the average Atalanta player runs 8,753 metres per 60 minutes ball in play, not 8,753 metres as a team.
Here is a straightforward one: distance covered, in total, with the ball (TIP), and without the ball (OTIP). Comparing them to teams in the top five leagues, they rank above average in both phases, but are particularly energetic with possession. This one’s not too surprising — they have a lot of very mobile players, and their attack is movement oriented rather than ball dominant.
Next, let’s see some faster stats.
Again, if you were expecting Atalanta’s performance in these metrics to be right at the tippy-top of European football, you will be a little surprised…
We’ll start with running distance, which is distance covered between the speeds of 15 and 20 km/h.
They rank quite high for their off-the-ball work. No shocks there; they don’t press crazily high, but are very active in positioning to cut balls off through midfield. To do this, they get a lot of running output from their wingers, who are very diligent in their off-ball work as the most important part of the press in the first phase. Here are Atalanta’s wingers’ running numbers:
So, here’s the first key principle for a Gasperini team — and I will be building these up into a package as we go along:
Wingers who are active out of possession.
Keep in mind, being ‘active’ doesn’t necessarily mean running around with reckless abandon. Here are the higher speed running stats for Atalanta wingers:
In fact, as a team, they are quite settled. They move a lot without the ball, but don’t lose their shape. They don’t force themselves to chase lost causes, which also means they don’t spend too much energy making big efforts to run back in transition.
There is one position that is a big exception here. In Gasperini’s three-man defence, a huge onus is put on his wing-backs to cover a lot of space out wide.
So that brings us to our next key principle:
Athletic wing-backs, who can comfortably cover their entire flank, especially defensively - to provide wingers with added freedom to press high and block central spaces.
I won’t spend too long here, because we will start to track over already covered ground, but here are Atalanta’s wing-back numbers compared to other team in Europe’s top-five leagues:
Atalanta’s wing-backs must get forward, but they must get back in even greater measure. This is crucial to any three-man defensive scheme really, not just Gasperini’s.
II - INTENSITY, BUT DIFFERENT
There’s another aspect of intensity that is equally important, in my humble opinion: the way you use the ball.
For a team that finished fourth in Serie A, Atalanta ranked middle of the pack for possession. They like to make things happen quickly, and will take risks to seek maximum damage while the opposition’s structure is out of shape.
But their intent and desire to strike the opposition quickly and at their weakest moment leads to a remarkably efficient attacking profile, despite the risky approach. After all, this was the third highest scoring team in Serie A last season with 72 goals, and Gasperini’s side have scored between 65 and 98 (!!!) goals in Serie A for the last six seasons.
But again, what does intensity look like?
It all starts with their ability to take risks under pressure. Against this Atalanta team, if you lose the ball and send too much pressure to win it back quickly, they will play through you, over you, or around you, and make you pay.
I’ve picked out a few fun metrics to paint what this means.
Let’s start off with how many pressures Atalanta players receive, and what proportion of those pressures are high/medium/low.
OK, so right off the bat, Atalanta players face a lot of pressure. But that’s what they want. They want teams coming to them. The very interesting aspect of this for me is that the ratio of low and medium pressures they face is quite high.
With a bit of extra digging, I noticed that this stat correlated very strongly with the best teams in Europe’s top five leagues.
I can’t quite pin down exactly why this stat seems to correlate strongly with good teams, but I have a few hypotheses.
They have good players that teams don’t want to aggressively press.
They move the ball quickly and don’t allow teams to apply on-ball pressure as easily.
This is especially true for their wing-backs and wingers, who are 98th and 91st percentile for low pressures received per 30 TIP, and 98th and 79th percentile for low pressure ratio respectively. These players will draw you wide to the ball, but they will try to move it past you before you can functionally apply high degrees of pressure.
This metric is a bit more abstract, and harder to quantify, so I am not going to apply a key principle here — I lean towards this being a metric that shows that Atalanta (and other teams) are good, not why they are good. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Now we are going to step into a question that really does have meaning: how good are Atalanta’s players at creating high impact under high pressure?
I arc back to the intensity thing. When Atalanta players are pressed hard, they take that as a trigger to push the pace.
The next metrics are dangerous and difficult pass completion under high pressure. We are going to look at two aspects: volume and efficiency. How many of these passes do Atalanta attempt per 100 high pressures, and at what rate do they complete them?
Let’s start with dangerous passes.
Dangerous passes are a pass to a dangerous run. A dangerous run is a run with more than 2% chance to lead to a goal within 10 sec if the player performing the run was to be served the ball.
Wow. High volumes, high rates, and a ridiculous completion rate.
And now for the difficult passes.
As defined by SkillCorner, a difficult pass is a pass that should be expected to be completed 65% of the time, or less.
Again, fairly high volumes, decently high rate of attempts and completions per 100 high pressures, and an exceptionally high completion ratio.
This brings me to my next key ingredient:
Midfielders, wingers and strikers that can take risks, and have the quality to combine under high pressure. This does not mean they have to retain the ball at a high rate, but that the trade-off for not doing so needs to be offset by the impact they create with their risk-taking actions.
Atalanta have lots of players that fit this mould: Teun Koopmeiners, Ademola Lookman, Charles De Ketelaere, Gianluca Scamacca, etc. More on them later.
This boils down to great recruitment and/or development, and then putting those players into positions where they feel free to express their individual quality. The way Atalanta move the ball quickly also helps. It means that attackers find themselves in space more often, and everything snowballs from there.
There is one more fundamentally important point here: Atalanta do not cross the ball much.
They rank in the 30th percentile for pass attempts to cross receiver runs (although complete them at an incredible rate, which leads me to believe a lot of these are cut-backs/low crosses). Even still, they complete these passes at a sub-30% rate — they are high risk, high reward, and without a clear target to aim at, Gasperini clearly instructs his team to avoid trying them too often.
It should be noted that this will have a general flow on effect to the completion ratios on both the dangerous and difficult passes we mentioned above. The good news for Atalanta is that there are only two teams who qualified for the Champions League next season amongst the top 40 clubs in Europe’s top five leagues for pass attempts to cross receiver runs per 30 TIP: Brest and Inter. The best teams generally do not cross the ball that often.
III - LINKING UP
Atalanta’s attacking game is all about quick link play. One of the best ways to demonstrate this ties into our next key principle:
Attacking players that can link with midfield runners.
There’s a reason Teun Koopmeiners scored 12 goals in Serie A last season. Gasperini encourages his midfielders to run from deep and get into areas to receive from attackers that have stretched the defensive lines.
This translates into another SkillCorner metric: passes to support runs.
Atalanta’s strikers are amongst the most proficient in Europe at finding these runners.
Their wingers do the exact same thing when they are able to get high and wide on the flanks, and when they cut inside:
This ties into another key principle:
Midfielders who will make support runs to attack.
This is all pretty self-explanatory, but it definitely asks something a little different from strikers than what is conventional. They need to be selfless, and they need to be actively looking for runners, rather than being too entranced by pushing forward and attacking goal.
The result for Atalanta was that Gianluca Scamacca and Charles de Ketelaere were amongst the best dozen players in Serie A for assists with six and eight, despite only playing ~1,500 and ~2,000 minutes respectively.
It’s a dynamic, fluid attack where people dish off and receive from their team-mates in equal measure.
IV - PIECES ON THE BOARD
And so we come to the players.
One of Gasperini’s great qualities is making alterations to his tactical approach to suit the players at his disposal. He had Robin Gosens scoring nine and 11 goals in consecutive Serie A seasons by packing numbers onto the right side and freeing up the other for the German to constantly attack the back post for headers and tap-ins.
Now, as noted above, things are a little different. So let’s do a quick overview of some of Gasperini’s players and how they suit their manager’s approach.
Before we do that, let’s refresh our key principles:
Wingers who are active out of possession.
Athletic wing-backs, who can comfortably cover their entire flank, especially defensively to provide wingers with added freedom to press high and block central spaces.
Midfielders, wingers and strikers who can take risks, and have the quality to combine under high pressure. This does not mean they must retain the ball at a high rate, but that the trade-off for not doing so needs to be offset by the impact they create with their risk-taking actions.
Attacking players who can link with midfield runners.
Midfielders who will make support runs to attack.
Here are four players that Atalanta have signed or promoted from their academy since 2021 that typify Gasperini’s approach:
Wing-back: Matteo Ruggeri
Midfielder: Teun Koopmeiners
Striker: Gianluca Scamacca
Winger: Ademola Lookman
Let’s go through each piece and look at how they fit on Gasperini’s grand game board.
🇮🇹 MATTEO RUGGERI
Promoted from academy after loan to Salernitana in 2022
Can Matteo Ruggeri cover his entire flank adequately both in and especially out of possession?
Yes.
He is not the quickest, but he does not need to play as a high attacking outlet — Gasperini has wingers for that. While Ruggeri isn’t the flashiest player, he clearly has a big engine in what is arguably the most athletically demanding position on the field in terms of pure running power.
🇳🇱 TEUN KOOPMEINERS
Signed in 2021 from AZ Alkmaar for €14 million
In midfield, Teun Koopmeiners needs to provide support runs for his attackers, and also to be a high-damage, risk-taking passer under high pressure in midfield.
The completed dangerous passes under high pressure per 100 pressures stat is really interesting; just look at the company he shares amongst midfielders in Europe’s top five leagues…
Phil Foden, Martin Ødegaard, Pedri, Florian Wirtz, Jude Bellingham, Kevin de Bruyne… pretty good company.
Next: support runs. This one is vitally important in making Koopmeiners a dual-pronged threat as a goal scorer to pair with his creative work.
Another note on this one is that (a role-dependent) Charles De Ketelaere and Ademola rank very highly in this metric, and it all revolves around the player that feeds them the ball…
🇮🇹 GIANLUCA SCAMACCA
Signed in 2023 from West Ham United for €25 million
Gianluca Scamacca. It’s been a while since I wrote about one of my all-time favourites, but here we are. What does he do different at Atalanta compared to Italy and West Ham?
Simple: Gasperini swarms him with runners to link up with.
If you isolate Scamacca, he is not really an effective hold-up player. Give him runners and team-mates to work with, and you have a high-level link-up striker. He isn’t crazily efficient, but his positioning and subtle movement to engage as a fulcrum of the attack is very good if you can get players up around him.
Just look at the sheer output here:
And, as we noted as a key principle for Gasperini’s attackers before, he must do this all playing under high pressure. Can he?
Of course he can.
🏴 ADEMOLA LOOKMAN
Signed in 2022 from RB Leipzig for €9 million
Last but not least, the Europa League final hat-trick hero: Ademola Lookman.
So, what does Gasperini need from his wingers?
Again, executing dangerous passes under high pressure is critical. But they also must get through their off-ball work, and I will throw in a little extra treat on how Lookman’s off-ball running profile contributed to his great success this season.
There’s a lot he needs to be able to do, and he can do most of it.
Let’s start with what he doesn’t do…
Lookman is a player that Gasperini takes liberties with. Often in a 3-4-3 set-up, he gives Lookman the freedom to push higher, get out in transition, and at times put himself in striker-y positions.
But he is not a total passenger. Instead of his defensive style fitting into a more structured approach, Lookman is more of an effort presser, who harasses the defensive line but mostly then floats around.
However, whichever player plays on the other side of that rotating cast on the other flank has to act as a counterweight to ensure gaps are plugged into midfield.
What makes this all worth it is what Lookman can do as soon as Atalanta win the ball back.
As soon as that happens, he turns into the most dangerous wide outlet runner in Europe.
He is the number one winger in Europe for receiving the ball when he makes a dangerous run in behind.
Lastly, can he do all those creative things that Gasperini needs from him under high pressure?
Not only can he do it, but he can do it at some of the highest volumes at an elite efficiency amongst wingers in Europe. He is a pretty special player in the role Gasperini has carved for him.
V - THE SWARM
Gasperini and Atalanta’s recruitment staff have done a great job turning over their squad, making big-money sales, unearthing new, reasonably priced talent, and adjusting their game plan to suit.
As I noted before, Gasperini used to put a lot of emphasis on his wing-backs attacking the box and scoring goals. When Robin Gosens was sold to Inter, that changed.
Now, Gasperini’s attack hinges on his swarm of athletic, creative, and interchangeable combo-forwards and attacking midfielders.
Some clubs can afford to mould their squads to great managers, but sometimes great managers need to adapt themselves to their squad. At Atalanta, they’ve decided that the best chance of being competitive is by amassing the best talent their money can buy. After that, it's up to Gasperini to work his magic. To tinker. To carve out new roles, with different responsibilities, carefully playing the balancing act between his ideal vision of football, and the talents of the players at his disposal.
At the ripe old age of 66, he has earned his mastery.
Atalanta were never supposed to hang around the top eight teams in Serie A for this long, let alone be competitive in Europe.
Now, after eight years, and (finally) a trophy to hang their collective cap on, it really feels like they belong: a club with a great coach, a sustainable vision, and now a true sense of self-belief in the fact that these lofty heights are their home.
That was big, that was long, that was insightful. You should have gleaned a greater insight into what defines Gasperini’s Atalanta after reading all of that.
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