Don’t feel sorry for Gallagher, his new club are everything Chelsea are not

There was a time when an Atletico Madrid footballer being suddenly relieved of a few days of pre-season training would have been regarded as a mercy. The brutality of the club’s summer camps, overseen by the long-serving fitness coach Oscar “The Teacher” Ortega, used to be notorious — auditions where the real test was not so much whether an exhausted player threw up his breakfast but when and how quickly he’d be back running up the steep hills designed to ready his body for all the chasing and harrying required at Diego Simeone’s Atletico.
Conor Gallagher spent a few days shadowing Atletico’s pre-season, but last week had to interrupt the initiation to travel back to London while the other parts of the jigsaw around his transfer from Chelsea — it was to be the tall striker Samu Omorodion moving the other way; it is now to be the feathery João Félix — were being negotiated.
He had spent enough time there to hear from club veterans that while the physical demands of the new fitness guru, Luis Piñedo, are still high, the approach to the new campaign has altered in its details. The Atletico that Gallagher has joined, after a bumpy transfer saga, will be tough. They will prize stamina as much as they value elaborate passing sequences, but the plan is to be more streamlined than in the past.
Part of the challenge of having the same head coach for more than a dozen years, especially one whose methods have been as effective as Simeone’s, is to avoid stasis. Another part is taking care that too bold a stride away from the tried-and-tested does not put at risk all the momentum that, under Simeone, has utterly resurrected Atleti, from a second division club at the turn of this century to Champions League finalists twice in the past ten seasons.
Atletico lost ten league matches last season, an unprecedented number on Simeone’s watch, and a natural response was to wonder if the whole warrior, backs-to-wall routine had become too compromised by efforts to move on, to cultivate a more proactive playing style.
Atletico, La Liga winners twice in the past ten seasons, still finished in Spain’s top four. They still made the last eight of the Champions League. Simeone is still talking of “transformation”, of “renewal”, and his manifesto has been persuasive enough for a clutch of players at, or approaching, the peak of their powers to have wanted to join.
It’s been an eye-catching transfer window through the spine of the side: In come Robin Le Normand, a centre back who helped Spain to the European Championship title last month and whose distribution is as much an asset as his defensive vigilance; Alexander Sorloth, a centre forward who, for Villarreal, was one goal shy of being La Liga’s top scorer last season; above all, there’s the Argentina forward Julián Alvarez, at 24 already a World Cup winner, Copa América holder, and serial medal winner in his time at Manchester City, to whom Atletico have committed an initial €75million (£64million).
Now add Gallagher, the signing the coach had grown most impatient for. He’d have liked to have Gallagher available for Monday’s La Liga opener away to Villarreal and, after the 2-2 draw, all but sketched out the gap the England midfielder is urgently earmarked to fill. “We’re close to getting the player we need,” he said. “He’s the one that hopefully balances the team.”
Simeone told Gallagher how important he would be to the balance of his new-look Atletico while the 24-year-old was in Madrid this month, and how determined he was to push the deal through when it stalled. He barely needed to spell out that the club he is joining can be everything, in terms of clarity and strategic thinking, that Chelsea are not.
For all the emotional wrench of Gallagher leaving the club he has been associated with since childhood, the team where 16 years of apprenticeship had earned him the captaincy, there will be comfort in arriving at a place of such contrasting stability. Since Gallagher was an 11-year-old coming up through the ranks at Chelsea, they have changed manager 15 times; Atletico have had one head coach over the same period.
When Gallagher makes his debut for the La Liga club, he is likely to be taking his immediate bearings from Antoine Griezmann and Koke, who have played 339 matches together. Over his past 18 months aboard the Chelsea whirligig, Gallagher found himself mix-and-matched with half a dozen new midfield partners.
He has been involved with Chelsea long enough to have picked up that the modern Atletico nourish a special loyalty from players too. There are a few Simeone disciples who spent time at Chelsea while Gallagher was growing up there. Some, such as Diego Costa, successfully carried into Stamford Bridge the Simeone brand of snarl and aggression; others, such as Fernando Torres, Filipe Luis, or the luckless Saúl Niguez, made less impact. But here’s the thing: Costa, Torres, Luis and Saúl all went back to Atletico and to contentment there, at least for a while.
Gallagher did hear Félix complain, during the Portuguese’s loan spell at Chelsea during the 2022-23 season, about the restrictions of the Simeone style — that he found playing there too geared to resistance and counterattack. It’s a gripe of limited relevance to a busy midfielder accustomed to serving an England team who habitually cede possession, and whose powers of ball-recovery and pressing are among the qualities admired by his new club coach.
More pertinent to Gallagher would be the advice of his former team-mate, and a predecessor as Chelsea captain, César Azpilicueta, who sees this, his second season at Atletico as one of “big expectations, because of the level of players coming in”.
There’s an encouraging English precedent. Kieran Trippier joined Atletico five summers ago, Simeone having identified the full back’s work rate and excellent delivery — particularly from set pieces — as a good fit for a side who went on to win La Liga in Trippier’s second season there. Like Trippier, Gallagher ticks plenty of the right boxes for a coach who knows what he likes, and cares little if it’s not to everybody’s taste. He is also a coach who, a very long time ago, stopped looking over his shoulder in fear of getting the sack.