Atletico Madrid has the potential to maintain its position as last season to target third position. Because 1 and 2 are still ideal positions for Real Madrid and Barcelona. If you look at Atletico Madrid's ambitions last season, they didn't just stumble, but they were too confident and didn't realize that players who couldn't control their emotions only had a bad impact on the team's performance.
Why always real and barcelona? Any team that capable enough to be consistent during the season will become a winner. It's not always real madrid and barcelona. The club like atletico, villareal were also having competence to be a winner in la liga as well.
I think that you're over confident if la liga will always be winning by barcelona or real madrid. La liga was not about these two teams.