Atalanta Aims at a Champions League Finish as Bad Luck Fades Away
The Team’s stats show a lackluster season plagued by probabilistic bad luck that is unlikely to be repeated.
One Italian team has come to embody the role of the feel-good story of the soccer world in the last few years.
Atalanta has moved up from fighting to avoid relegation, in 2015–16, to qualifying consistently for the Champions League. This drastic improvement is thanks in part to a series of good transfers, outstanding player development, and elite coaching by Gianpiero Gasperini.
All the pieces seemed to come together as the team found itself minutes away from qualifying for the Champions League semifinal in 2020, before being knocked out by giants — both in renown and wallet — PSG at the 93rd minute.
The impressive surge of Atalanta was stunted in the most recent season following a disappointing Serie A result, with many analysts now claiming their Cinderella run has come to an end.
But is this really the case? Let’s look at the numbers
In the past season, the team from Bergamo failed to qualify for all three European Cups, having finished eighth overall in the Serie A standings, just three points below Fiorentina, which seems to be the next up-and-coming Italian team, and has already invested significantly in the current transfer window to improve on their already solid position.
Several explanations can be offered for Atalanta’s decline in 2021–22, ranging from injuries to their most important players to some transfers which saw two centerpieces — Romero in the summer and then Gosens during the campaign — leave the club.
However, if we look past these aspects, and dive deep into the numbers, it seems that what Gasperini’s team was missing the most last season was a pinch of stochastic luck rather than raw ability.
Notwithstanding the repeated injuries to their strikers Zapata and Muriel, which have been among the most efficient scorers when healthy, Atalanta finished with a goal difference of +17, more than double than Fiorentina, and higher than Roma, which finished above them in seventh place and sixth place, respectively.
While this stat is not significant on its own when it comes to describing the performance of the team, we can look at it combined with the teams’shot differential, which measures the difference between the shots created and conceded by a team per game.
As we can see from the table above, Atalanta last season was the leader in Serie A for shot differential, with 2nd-place Inter being the only team coming close.
Why are these statistics relevant?
In a low-scoring game such as soccer, shooting 8 times more than your opponent is an unusually high figure, especially considering the average number of goals in a serie A match last season was 2.86, and the average shot-to-goal conversion rate in Serie A was around 9.4%, meaning a goal was scored every 10.6 shots. This indicates that shooting 8 times more than your opponent is likely to give you a 1-goal advantage almost every match day, which puts you in a great position to win games.
Another indicator of the relation between a high shot differential and success in the season can be found by looking at the standings of Serie A teams in the last few years.
Since the beginning of Atalanta’s European run in 2016–2017 no team in Serie A which recorded a shot differential above 7 has ever fallen out of the Top 3 spots, with the lone exception of Napoli in the 19–20 season, and none with shot differential above 6 failed to qualify for a European cup. Out of those 5 seasons, Atalanta qualified 4 times for the Champions League and once for the Europa League, moreover, in all of those years they actually had a lower shot differential compared to 2021–22, but still earned more points in the table.
Given all of the above, the fact Atalanta consistently shot much more frequently than their opponents — and still finished outside of the top spots in 2021–22 — shows a lack of luck and an unusual draught of episodes going in their favor: this is reinforced by the fact that they are tied for first in Serie A with Roma for shots hitting the woodwork.
There are also other stats hinting at Atalanta’s stochastic misfortune: together with Roma, they are the only team in the Top 8 to have a negative G-Xg metric. This means that the shots they created in their games should have statistically resulted in more goals than the amount they actually scored in their last Serie A campaign, underlining once more their bad luck.
Let’s also look at Atalanta’s goal conversion percentage. This year they dropped to eleventh in the league, with 10.26%, following two years in which they were second and first in this statistic, as they converted 14.49% and 13.8% of their chances respectively. With the number of shots they create, even a slightly higher goal conversion rate would have brought a much higher standing in 2021–22.
This drop in the goal conversion is possibly where the prolonged absences of Atalanta's key players and stars, Muriel and Zapata, shows its impact statistically: the two strikers started, only 17 and 20 out of the 38 Serie A games, respectively.
Moreover, with injuries and lack of play time, individual efficiency also likely takes a hit. Consider Muriel: in 2021–22 he had a respectable goal conversion percentage of 13%, only 5% below Serie A top scorer Ciro Immobile and only a couple of percentage points below other celebrated scorers like Vlahovic and Lautaro Martinez. But that 13% is much lower than Muriel’s own deadly 24% from 2020–21.
Looking at Zapata instead, we see that he was still the striker who shot and scored the most for Atalanta in 2021–22, thus it is not far-fetched to believe that some additional appearances from either of the two strikers would have resulted in a higher amount of shots, goals scored, and, ultimately, points on the table.
PREDICTION: 4th spot in Serie A 2022–23
Considering all of those factors and their impact on Atalanta’s last season, seeing them finish only 3 points short of a spot in a European cup last year, should be interpreted as a hopeful — as opposed to discouraging — sign by fans and analysts alike. They maintained their captivating style of play and highly productive offense and kept performing significantly better on various key statistics than their competitors.
Compared to other teams Atalanta’s system seems also much more sustainable over the years, as they have steady improvements in their game and stats each season, no matter the players available and the starting lineup. 2021–22 was the Serie A campaign in which they performed best according to most metrics, yet they failed to replicate the results of previous seasons.
Now, Atalanta is heading into 2022–23 with the same manager, Gianpiero Gasperini, a healthy core squad, and keeping its star players, in addition to a less stressful schedule as they do not have to compete in European cups. Gasperini’s side should be able to maintain form and continue to play their signature aggressive style of offensive-minded soccer, possibly at an even higher tempo. Even if they were just to keep the same level of performance as in 2021–22, it is statistically improbable for them to finish in the 8th spot again. Thus, it should not come as a surprise to anyone if, come May 2023, they are solidly in the Champions League scramble, or even fighting for the top position of the league.
