Sweet relief for Simeone as Atlético finally win amid doubts about evolution | Sid Lowe

Happiness was this once; now there is only relief but it is something. In fact, for a little while on Saturday night, it feels like everything. At the end of each game when the final whistle goes, so does Diego Simeone: sprinting down the tunnel and straight up the stairs, not a word to anyone and not outrun by anyone either, no stopping and no looking back. This time, though, is different. Juan Martínez Munuera brings Atlético Madrid’s 2-0 win over Villarreal to a close a little before 11pm, 63,312 fans erupting; a little after 11pm, at the top of the steps under the stand where the fourth official awaits his colleagues and the visitors trudge past tearing off tape and turning right, there’s still no Simeone.

Usually the first through, not even slowing here once he’s safely out of sight of supporters and cameras, a figure in a skinny black suit dashing past a pair of security guards, down the corridor to the left and into an empty dressing room, this time Atlético’s manager is outside under the lights instead. He heads on to the pitch, embracing his players. He screams at Koke, his captain, crushing him with a cuddle. Pulls Antoine Griezmann close and whispers something in his ear, only he has to shout to be heard over the noise. High fives his son Giuliano, who is also one of his wingers. And then joins the rest of them celebrating before the south stand, communion complete.

“This was not just another game,” he says later.

Maybe it should have been – it is only week four of his 15th season, the 743rd game since he took over with a 0-0 draw at Málaga two days after Christmas 2011 – but Simeone is right. He had needed this, they all had. Three games in, Atlético had not won. Beaten on the opening weekend, they came into Saturday’s match with only two points and go into the weekend 17th, having slipped seven points behind Real Madrid and five behind Barcelona before August is over. It is no quirk of a cruel fixture list either: that’s next. They have played Espanyol, Elche and Alavés. Coming up are six games in 17 days, including Liverpool and Real Madrid, starting with unbeaten Villarreal, who they have only defeated once in five home games.

It is, one paper says, a final. Which admittedly they say just about every game, even literal quarter-finals, semi-finals and meaningless group games, but still. Lose and the league has gone, most agree, and it’s not even really that; it’s something deeper. There is, Simeone admits, an “anxiety” about the place, a tension, that goes beyond just the results even while ultimately it is all about that – especially for him. He has started to feel the pressure, if started is the word, weighed down over a managerial spell that is three weeks away from being the longest in Spain’s history, a victim in part of the transformation he brought, a sense of having begun something that might have left him behind.

Diego Simeone celebrates with his Atlético players on the pitch instead of heading down the tunnel at the final whistle as he usually does. Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images

A victim of something certainly, things not the same as they once were. “When I came I was happy,” Simeone told Cope radio station in an interview five days before Saturday’s game. “I was happy when we won. Today, winning is a relief, you understand? A relief. And I don’t like that. But that’s the responsibility I have.” There was reflection but also, he added, a reality – and right now that’s not what it is supposed to be. Atlético spent €173m on eight players this summer. Only Real Madrid spent more. Add last season’s €188m outlay, and it’s more than €360m in two summers. Over the last five years, the total is above €500m. No one in Spain has spent more. And while the net spend is different – Madrid lead there – that comes with demands, as does being Spain’s best-paid coach.

“We have built a team that enables us to dream,” the club’s CEO, Miguel Ángel Gil, insists. Whether that is actually true is debatable: eight came in this summer but eight went out too; Koke and Antoine Griezmann are 33 and 34 now, in theory getting phased out, almost impossible to truly replace; and looking at the arrivals, waiting to see how good Thiago Almada and Álex Baena can be, it’s not so clear that the starting XI is as strong as it was last year, let alone better. Madrid and Barcelona, meanwhile, are still Madrid and Barcelona.

And yet it is true that the old underdog discourse, which Simeone says he has dropped now, no longer stands up like it did, that the Robin Hood of football thing doesn’t hold. Simeone’s success provided a platform for the growth of the club, securing 13 top-four finishes in a row at a club that had only two of them in the previous 16 years, but also created a new normal, higher aspirations. Demands are made, although some would argue not forcefully enough. As the coach puts it: “the team was ahead of the club, now the club is ahead of the team ”, and they must catch up.

No one expects Atlético to win the league, their two titles truly remarkable achievements, but they are expected to compete for it. It is five years since they won anything, a decade since the Champions League final, longer since they lifted the cup. Last season they won 15 league games in a row, went top … and then fell apart. Some pointed to that penalty; plenty pointed to Simeone, insisting that if the club has moved on, the coach has not. Nor is it just about results. There may be no club, Barcelona apart, where the way they play occupies people as much as it does about Atlético. Every season it seems there’s talk about how with these players, this investment, Atlético might evolve only for them to evolve back again, or so it goes. A circular debate on style ensues, ebbing with results but always there and partly based on assumptions that don’t really hold either, the same old cliches and conversations on a loop, the same arguments from the same tribunes and the same trenches.

Nico González runs off to celebrate in front of the crowd after helping to give Atlético Madrid their first league win of the season. Photograph: Diego Souto/Getty Images

Simeone hears them all, of course. “What is ‘defensive’?” he asked this week; “we like pizza,” as an old line of his runs. This season those conversations came early and Simeone stepped into the midst of it, the fact that he gave an unexpected set-piece interview almost as telling as the things he actually said. “It’s a good time to talk,” he began. “You shouldn’t hide. You. Should. Not. Hide. Let me make that clear.” What followed was a call to arms to the people he says Atlético need, he needs, and to his players as well. There was a line about not wanting eulogies when he is gone but support when he’s still there. “We’re alive,” he said.

He got it too. Villarreal’s visit was projected as a kind of plebiscite, and for all the noise it was only ever going to have one result: on the day set up to celebrate the supporters’ clubs, music and giant paellas outside the Metropolitano, they were on his side. His name was chanted from the start and as he paraded the touchline he was conductor again. On the pitch, his team responded too. Led by Koke and Griezmann – “I get emotional thinking about them; they are living history of Atlético Madrid,” Simeone said – they scored early, through Pablo Barrios. And although that was no guarantee having led in all three previous games, and while Alberto Moleiro had two wonderful chances to draw Villarreal level, this time Atlético did secure the win.

Nico González had arrived on Monday, Atlético’s eighth signing finally done on deadline day, flown to join the Argentinian national team on Tuesday, not come back until the following Thursday, and was presented on Friday. Now, having trained just twice, he scored the second here, everybody able to breathe again, the roof blown off. “I knew it would be good; but I didn’t expect it to be this good,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a weight off, but we needed three points,” Barrios admitted. “Stay calm, it’s just the start,” Koke said, which he could say now. “This felt like a referendum, but Simeone will sleep easy now; this win might stop some of the wildly exaggerated conclusions,” wrote former Atlético striker Kiko Narvaez. However absurd they are no one is entirely impervious to it all, the significance shown at the final whistle when Simeone headed off in a different direction to normal, able to let go under the lights and with his people.

“I experienced the same relief I have experienced for a long time, borne of the responsibility we feel for the club and the team,” Atlético Madrid’s manager said. “I thought it was a good time to enjoy the tiny little window we get before tomorrow morning at 10am when we’ll be back thinking about Liverpool.”