Diego Simeone, the coach who keeps asking if Atlético is worth it and stays

Diego Simeone

Photo: Barcex / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 28, 1970 Buenos Aires
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	La Liga ×2 · Copa del Rey 1995-96 · Europa League · Copa América
Individual awards	Outstanding Citizen of Buenos Aires

On the night Antoine Griezmann said goodbye to the Metropolitano, Diego Simeone admitted something that coaches who have held a job this long rarely say into a microphone. He sometimes wonders whether it is worth carrying on, he said, and every time he finds that it is. The admission closed a season that took Atlético Madrid to a cup final and a Champions League semi-final and left them with nothing. By the autumn he was back on the touchline with a rebuilt squad and a new majority owner, still asking his players to run until it hurts.

Simeone turned a team that lived in the shadow of Real Madrid and Barcelona into one that beat both of them to the Spanish title, twice, with a style built on compactness, set pieces and a collective tolerance for pain. What nobody has seen yet is whether that style can outlive the gap in money that Simeone himself now points to when Atlético go out of Europe.

When he was 14, his youth coach Victorio Spinetto started calling him Cholo, because the boy’s energy reminded him of Carmelo Simeone, a former Boca Juniors player and Argentina international who was no relation. Simeone grew up in Buenos Aires, where he was born on 28 April 1970, and made his first-team debut for Vélez Sarsfield in 1987.

He described his own way of tackling as playing with a knife between his teeth. Pisa brought him to Italy in 1990 and went down in his first season; Sevilla took him to Spain two years later. At Atlético, from 1994, he captained the side that won the league and cup double of 1995-96. Inter followed, with the UEFA Cup of 1998 in a team led by Ronaldo, and then Lazio, where Sven-Göran Eriksson’s side won Serie A and the Coppa Italia in 2000. After a second spell at Atlético he finished at Racing Club in 2006.

For Argentina he became the first player to reach 100 caps, finishing with 106, and he won the Copa América in 1991 and 1993. He captained the team at the 1998 World Cup, and the round of 16 against England produced the moment most outsiders remember. David Beckham, on the ground after a challenge from Simeone, flicked a leg at him and was sent off. Simeone later said he had made the most of the contact to get Beckham dismissed.

He began coaching at Racing within weeks of retiring and, at Estudiantes that same year, won the club’s first league title in 23 years, beating Boca Juniors in a deciding match with ten men for most of it. River Plate gave him the 2008 Clausura; within months, with the squad thinned out, River were bottom of the table and he resigned. At Catania in 2011 he kept a small Sicilian club in Serie A, with a narrow, counter-attacking shape that would become his signature.

Atlético hired him two days before Christmas 2011. By May the club had won the Europa League. A year later it beat Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey final at the Bernabéu, its first derby win over its neighbours in 14 years. In 2013-14 Atlético won La Liga with 90 points, sealing it on the final day at Camp Nou with a Diego Godín header, making Simeone the second man after Luis Aragonés to win the league for the club as player and as coach.

The two Champions League finals are where his record turns from a list into an argument. In Lisbon in 2014 Atlético led Real Madrid until the 93rd minute, conceded the equaliser and lost 4-1 after extra time, and Simeone later admitted he had been wrong to start an injured Diego Costa. In Milan two years later Atlético lost to the same opponent on penalties.

The standard complaint about Simeone’s football is that it waits. A side built to absorb pressure can look as if it has accepted a ceiling, and that is how those two finals read to his detractors. His touchline temper has cost him as well: he watched the 2018 Europa League final against Marseille from the stands, suspended after being sent off in the semi-final at Arsenal. Yet the coach supposedly locked into one idea has kept changing it. When injuries piled up in the autumn of 2020 he switched to a back three for the first time at the club, and that season Atlético averaged the majority of possession for the first time since their 2014 title, and won the league again.

A Luis Suárez goal at Valladolid sealed that title on the last day of the 2020-21 season, months after Simeone passed Aragonés as the coach with the most wins in Atlético’s history. He is La Liga’s longest-serving coach and, after Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, only the third manager to reach 100 Champions League matches with one club. The Prime Video docuseries Simeone. Vivir partido a partido, released in 2022, built its story around the 2021 title.

Last season Atlético knocked Barcelona out of the Copa del Rey and the Champions League, then lost the cup final to Real Sociedad on penalties in Seville in April 2026 and went out of the Champions League semi-finals to Arsenal, 2-1 on aggregate, in May. “There’s nothing to say, we’re out,” Simeone said in London, before praising the financial resources that let Arsenal compete at that level. Three days earlier he had reached 1,000 matches as a manager. Apollo Sports Capital had by then become Atlético’s majority shareholder, and Griezmann left for Orlando City in the summer.

The rebuild he calls a construction phase brought in Morten Hjulmand, Cristian Romero, Lee Kang-in and, on loan from Juventus, Jonathan David. After a 3-0 defeat at Athletic Bilbao and a 2-1 loss at Anfield, Atlético beat Osasuna 4-0 and then Real Madrid 2-1 on 20 September at the renamed Riyadh Air Metropolitano. Afterwards he told José Mourinho, who had complained about the referees, that coaches must not cross the line of respect, “even if your name is Mourinho, Simeone, Flick or Pellegrini.” By early October Atlético were second in La Liga.

Football runs through the family. Giovanni and Giuliano Simeone, two of his three sons with his first wife, Carolina Baldini, are professionals at Torino and Atlético; the middle son, Gianluca, stopped playing in 2025 and now works as an agent. Simeone married Carla Pereyra privately in 2019; they have two daughters.

His contract runs to June 2027. Whether he signs again will say less about Simeone’s appetite than about whether a club now controlled by an American investment fund still wants to win the way his teams have always won, by making the opponent suffer more than they do.

Tags: sports, athletes, football managers, La Liga, UEFA Champions League, Atlético Madrid, Diego Simeone, Argentina national football team, Antoine Griezmann