Diego Simeone stood in front of the cameras after the 2-0 loss to Bayern Munich and offered the tidiest explanation available: football is a game of moments, mistakes happen, and Bayern are simply the better side. "They're better teams than us and we have to keep working to compete with them," he said. That's a convenient thing to say when the mistake everyone's talking about belongs to Robin Le Normand, who dithered on the ball in his own box and got robbed for the opening goal. It's a lot less convenient when you're the one who put Le Normand there, left Jonathan David on the bench, and started Alexander Sørloth and Julián Álvarez up front while Kang-in Lee waited with him.
The selection invited the trouble it got. Simeone built his plan around a deep, compact block meant to frustrate Bayern and hit them on the counter, and for a scoreless first half it mostly worked. But holding that shape for ninety minutes against a team with Bayern's technical quality, even without Vincent Kompany on the touchline and missing Luis Díaz, Jamal Musiala and Serge Gnabry to injury, was never realistic. Conceding that much territory for that long just hands the other side more chances to punish a mistake. Lennart Karl found his in the 54th minute. Konrad Laimer found a cleaner one in the 74th. By then Atlético had lost the rhythm of the game, and the shot count showed it: nine attempts to Bayern's nineteen.
When the goal went in, Simeone panicked. He threw on three substitutes at once: Le Normand off for Koke, Sørloth and Baena off for Ademola Lookman and Lee Kang-in. It was a manager admitting, in real time, that his first XI was wrong, and trying to fix it after the damage was done. Lookman didn't come on until the 59th minute, which raises the question of why he wasn't in the lineup from the start against a Bayern side missing three attackers of real quality.
And then there's Giuliano, who played the full ninety minutes without being substituted, while his team looked flat and short of answers from the moment they fell behind. Maybe he deserved to stay on; nobody outside the Metropolitano can prove otherwise with a stat sheet. But when the manager deciding who comes off shares a surname with the player staying on, the benefit of the doubt runs out fast, and Simeone has done nothing to earn it back.
The defense is that parts of this team did their jobs: the back four mostly held its shape, breaking down only in one moment. Fine. But a manager doesn't get credit for the players who executed his plan while dodging blame for the plan itself. Atlético sit in the lower half of the 36-team league phase table after four games, a stretch that also snapped a nine-game unbeaten run, and Simeone used his press conference to talk about Bayern's quality, leaving his own choices unexamined. He's protecting himself, and protecting his son, while the team he picked wrong pays for it on the pitch.
