Simeone defends his son amid criticism storm: Atletico Madrid and the defensive gamble at Reale Arena

In a press room in Madrid last weekend, Diego Simeone sat down, listened to a question about his son, and answered in the flat tone of a man reading an injury report. He said Giuliano works without stopping, that the boy proves himself through his actions, that he had nothing to add to a debate he considers manufactured by others. He tapped his fingers on the table, glanced toward the next journalist, and pulled the topic back toward Real Sociedad.

That was almost everything the Argentine manager said about his son in a week when Spanish media devoted hundreds of lines to a 21-year-old who has featured in every Atletico Madrid match this season, making three La Liga starts, at precisely the moment the club lost two consecutive games and conceded eight goals in five competitive fixtures.

But if you follow the data instead of the headlines, the story takes a different shape. Atletico's problem does not lie with the Simeone family. It lies in a defensive block that was the club's identity for more than a decade and is now leaking in a way rarely seen under this manager. I sat through the 3-0 defeat to Athletic Club three times in one evening in Bangkok, noting every movement of the back four, and what I saw was not a young player being favoured. What I saw was a defensive block that had lost its common voice, moving out of step, exposing gaps it once never exposed.

The pitch never reads a textbook. And it does not read a press release either.

The away trip to the Reale Arena in San Sebastian this Sunday is no ordinary fixture. Real Sociedad are direct rivals in the race for European places, and a club like Atletico Madrid cannot afford to slide further. Five competitive matches in, the gap to the summit has already become a talking point, even though the season is long. The pressure comes not only from results but from expectation: a club that spent money upgrading its squad in the summer transfer window now has to prove that investment produces stability rather than chaos.

The injury picture complicates everything. Pablo Barrios, the young midfielder considered a key piece in the middle, is out with a muscle injury — the kind any coach knows cannot be rushed without risking recurrence. Alexander Sorloth, expected to provide a solution in attack, remains absent. Two names, two different zones of the team, gone at once. That is the kind of loss a team with real depth can absorb, but with fixtures packed across La Liga and the Champions League, it erodes the ability to change a match from the bench.

At that moment, Giuliano Simeone was not merely starting. He was present in every match, started three times in La Liga, and became the centre of a debate that had nothing tactical about it. Part of the fanbase argues that his starting place is a family privilege. That is the kind of accusation that lands where it hurts, because it is easy to believe, easy to spread, and extremely hard to refute with statistics when a team is losing. But the right question is not whether the manager's son deserves to start. The right question is why a team that once defended through structure now defends through instinct.

Eight goals conceded in five competitive matches is a signal no defensive club can ignore. It does not tell the whole story — it does not say whether the goals came from set pieces, counters, or individual errors. But it says something specific: the defensive structure is not doing the job it was designed to do.

I went back to the Athletic tape. The notable detail was not the first goal conceded but the rhythm of the midfield line in the second half. Atletico defended as a block, but that block stretched and shrank without a shared command. The two central midfielders no longer covered the space in front of the back four. When the opponent switched the ball quickly from flank to centre, the back four had to step out, and immediately the space behind them opened. That is not an individual problem. It is a system running without a cushion.

Pablo Barrios does the work viewers rarely notice: he blocks passes before they become chances, fills gaps before they become goals, moves into positions so teammates do not have to move. In a block-defence system, the screening midfielder in front of the back line is the hinge that keeps the whole door from collapsing. When that hinge disappears, the back four has to cope with fewer layers of protection, and that is when small mistakes become large goals.

Barrios' muscle injury is not just the loss of a player. It is the loss of a function. And in modern football, a function is sometimes more important than a name.

Up front, Sorloth's absence creates a different problem. A tall striker does not only score — he holds the ball, drags the opposing defence, and buys time for the midfield to push up. Without that profile, a team loses the ability to escape pressure with long balls and must play shorter, meaning the midfield receives the ball with its back to goal, under pressure, losing possession in dangerous areas. Every lost ball means the defence faces another counterattack. And so the problem up front becomes a problem at the back, and that loop is exactly what pushed eight goals into the net in five matches.

This is where the Giuliano story becomes interesting if you look with a tactical eye rather than a curious one. He is not an attacking scorer profile. He is a running profile. And for a team struggling with its ability to press from the front, a player who can run and press has a very concrete value.

Distance covered and sprint counts are packaged as effort metrics. But ineffective running also produces pretty numbers. What matters is not how much Giuliano runs but where he runs and whom he drags with him. Reviewing the tape, I noticed a repeated behavioural pattern: every time Atletico lost the ball and the opponent began a counter, Giuliano was the first to track back — not to tackle head-on but to cut the lateral passing lane. He ran into the space between the opponent's midfielders and fullbacks, shrinking the ball carrier's options. That is work that never shows up in goals or assists, yet it is exactly what a manager trying to plug defensive holes needs.

In other words, if Giuliano plays regularly, it may be a functional decision more than an emotional one. A team conceding goals needs players who relieve the defence from the front. Giuliano meets that criterion. The problem is that when a team loses, nobody reads that decision as functional. People read it as relational.

On the tactical side, there is a paradox I always feel when watching the return of the back-three trend across major leagues. The back-three trend is often not a step forward in thinking. It is usually a way for a manager to reduce personal risk when a back four has been breached. A manager adds a centre-back to protect his position with the media, not necessarily to solve the root problem. If Atletico switch to a back three in this period, I would read it as a signal that their problem lies in the quality of the system's operation rather than in the number of players deployed.

Tactics is first of all a system of questions. The question at Atletico right now is not how many defenders to play, but who is responsible for covering the space in front of the back line when the ball travels from flank to centre. If that answer is still unclear, then adding or removing a centre-back only changes the form before the substance.

The debate around Giuliano is convenient in one respect: it lets everyone focus on a personal story instead of confronting a systemic problem. A father defending his son is an emotional subject, easy to summarise, easy to share. A defensive block losing its coordination is a dry subject, requiring tape and patience. And when a team loses, the crowd always picks the easy story.

The real blind spot lies elsewhere. If Atletico beat Real Sociedad with a solid defensive display, the Giuliano story will naturally fade — and conversely, if they lose again, it will explode. That shows the issue is not really personnel. Results are driving the narrative, not the other way around. And the worst thing for a manager is when an individual decision is hung alongside team results, because when the team wins the credit belongs to the collective, and when it loses the first name called is the most controversial one.

Another blind spot: while the public debates Giuliano, few notice that Barrios' absence leaves a far larger structural hole. A good defensive player is often invisible when present and disruptive when absent. Against Athletic, with the midfield losing its ability to screen, the back four was pushed into handling situations it should never have faced: marking in wide open space, deciding in a split second whether to step out or drop, and facing through-balls that the cushion had previously blocked before they were even played.

I was in a similar situation once as a coach, at a lower-league club in Germany. When I lost my screening midfielder, I tried pushing a centre-back up to play as a deep midfielder, hoping to plug the hole. The result was that the defence lost its central spine too, and we conceded easier goals than before the change. The lesson: modern defensive systems are measured by coordination, not by stacking enough bodies. A team can play with five defenders and still expose large gaps, and conversely play with four and stay airtight, as long as the three players ahead know their roles.

For Atletico, Barrios' absence means the midfield must reorganise itself, and that is work that takes more than a week of training. This is the period when struggling defensive teams often get worse before they get better, because in every match they must both hold off the opponent and test solutions that are not yet defined.

The Giuliano story has another layer worth stating clearly. The transfer market is where a player is measured in numbers, while trust is measured in contract length. In transfer windows, people debate a player by looking at his market value. On the pitch, a manager picks a player by looking at whether he follows tactical instructions. Those two views collide regularly, and when the player is the manager's son, the collision becomes many times louder. That noise pushes attention away from where it should sit: a midfield missing its screen, a defence losing coordination, and a team that must rediscover its structure before thinking about anything else.

I do not believe club officials are sitting in meetings planning a contingency for the manager's job — no information confirms that, and I will not speculate further. But I know that at a big club, a prolonged losing run always generates informal corridor conversations. The current pressure is not purely results pressure. It has an extra layer of selection pressure, and two layers combined often produce hasty decisions rather than calm ones.

What stands out is how Simeone handles pressure. He mostly stays silent, offering only a short answer about his son's work rate before redirecting attention to the next match. That is a media-management technique many veteran coaches use: do not confront the question head-on, neither confirm nor deny the story, just shift toward what can be controlled. He cannot control what is written in the press. He can only control what happens on the pitch in San Sebastian.

So what does Atletico need to do to stop conceding?

They need a midfielder who drops at the right moment when the front line loses the ball, who holds position in front of the defence and does not get dragged toward the ball. They need the back four to keep better distances between individuals, rather than stepping out before the ball is controlled. And they need an escape option up front to reduce turnovers with their back to goal, because every such loss is a defensive action in the worst possible state.

None of those three factors comes from changing a name in attack. They come from reorganising the distances between the lines. That is why I believe the Real Sociedad match will reveal more than any press conference about whether Atletico's system can still be fixed.

Theory knows how to ask questions, but only the pitch knows how to answer them. And the answer will not come from a press room in Madrid.

What I will track on Sunday is not whether Giuliano starts — he will almost certainly feature, from the first whistle or the bench, because the team needs his energy in a match where pressure will fall on every pass. What I will track is the position of the central midfielders when Atletico loses the ball, and the distance between the back line and the midfield in the first twenty minutes. If that distance holds under fifteen metres and stays stable, the system is alive. If it stretches again and lets the opponent play through-balls, the problem runs far deeper than any debate currently on air.

Football does not answer questions by commenting. It answers by placing a ball on the grass and letting the rhythm of twenty-two people speak for it. At the Reale Arena, Atletico Madrid will not need to convince anyone about the Simeone family. They only need to keep a clean sheet, and every debate will find another exit. A team can endure criticism about personnel, but it cannot endure forever the loss of its defensive structure. The first is noise. The second is the problem.

After pieces like this, I always return to my old notebook, where I keep observations from past seasons, to remind myself that early-season crises often look identical: a run of bad results, a few injuries, and a convenient personal debate to assign blame. The difference between a team that pulls through and one that sinks lies in whether it sees the real problem or only the easy story. Based on my experience following matches across many seasons, I believe the answer for Atletico will not come from the attack. It will come from the space in front of the back line, where a screening midfielder is missing and a structure is waiting to be named again.