Re: UEFA Europa League 2023/24 Season

Atalanta played with a defensive strategy and appeared aggressive by committing more fouls against their opponents who were trying to build dangerous attacks. This kind of strategy basically works in some games, but not in many games. Xabi Alonso doesn't have much experience dealing with problems like that in important matches like finals, so he will definitely have difficulty not conceding goals while he really wants his team to score goals.

Of course, from these match statistics, we can learn that not all teams that are able to dominate possession of the ball and have good passing accuracy are able to score goals to win the match. Sometimes a good strategy in many matches will also be broken by a team that only defends and takes advantage of counter attacks.

They weren't defensive in my opinion, they man marked Bayern Leverkusen players man to man all throughout the game. Same way they defended was the same way they attacked, thanks to them goalkeeper who did some brilliant and excellent goalkeeping duty for the club that night.
Another thing was that they was completely poor they Bayern Leverkusen at defending and the goalkeeper also didn't help matters, two goals scored are goals I feel like he should have done well to catch or save.

Bayern Leverkusen weren't really possessive of the game, Atalanta made it difficult for them to even operate in the midfied. Jeremy Frimpong did well to cause some creativity from the right side of the wing but these Atalanta worked together to fix shiit up

Atalanta didn't play defensively, they preferred to play a tough game. This style of play made the opponent unable to play the passing game as they wanted. After scoring the goal, they started to play more relaxed. They didn't get the pressure they expected from their opponents and this led to a more relaxed game.

Leverkusen tried to dominate the game but failed to do so for most of the match. They conceded an unexpected goal and couldn't recover. Leverkusen's winning streak was definitely coming to an end and it ended in this game.

Every good tactic has a way to solve it. That's the beauty of football. Gasperrini's strategy against Leverkusen was very effective. The reason is, he knows that the individual quality of the Leverkusen players is only mediocre, so implementing the highpress man to man marker strategy is very difficult for the Leverkusen players. However, the results would be different if Atalanta's opponents were of the same class as Real Madrid, which has players with more individual qualities.

Gasperini's strategy in the final match succeeded in making Xabi unable to move, this is the first time he has met a team with tactics like Atalanta from Leverkusen's 50 unbeaten matches. Meanwhile, Gasperini is “bored” against teams like Leverkusen in the domestic league. Gasperini really benefited because he already had a "solution" to Xabi's tactics, thanks to Inzaghi's (Inter) tactics being often defeated, a solution was found. because Xabi's tactics are "similar" to Inzaghi's tactics at Inter, even though Serie A is different from the Bundesliga, these tactics work well. This is what I see as why Leverkusen lost to Atalanta even though in terms of performance before the match Leverkusen was the favorite to win.