All Atalantini have had to stomach the agony of dropping seemingly winnable points at home for the past two years. So what gives? How can a team that is second in points earned on the road, while doing the double in Rome (albeit an escape act against Roma) put up such underwhelming points in the one place that it should have a theoretical advantage over its opposition?
We may never know the answer, but we can at least propose some questions.
First, how bad has Atalanta actually been on the road, and has it been a bad symptom of the entire Gasperini era?
Sometimes a picture (or a chart) can tell a thousand words, and it doesn’t take a genius to deduce how poor Atalanta’s home form has been the last two seasons. So poor, in fact, that it is below average compared to the rest of Serie A. Yes Atalanta garnered less home points last year than the likes of Sampdoria, Hellas Verona, and Sassuolo. So what caused Atalanta to be so poor compared to recent seasons where its home form was nearly equal to that of its away record?
The most obvious question to ask next- is there any luck involved that sways the home or away form? While expected goal difference isn’t the end-all-be-all of statistics, it still is an excellent proxy for how one would expect the table to look at the end of the year. Take a look at this:
It’s interesting to follow Atalanta’s expected goal differential trajectory throughout the years. In fact some years would make you scratch your head trying to understand how the points stack up so much different than what the metrics would tell us.
Last season, the computers would tell us that Atalanta would have picked up basically the same amount of points at home and on the road. It is true that Atalanta may have been a bit unfortunate at home last year, as there were two matches that Atalanta out earned its opponents by at least 1.7 xG, dropping five points in the process (Empoli and Juventus for those keeping score). But five home points still only brings Atalanta to 11th in the home points earned.
There’s not a full season’s worth of data to draw conclusions yet, but surprisingly Atalanta is overperforming its road expected points. Obviously the Roma match is the main culprit for this, but also earning a point against Juventus while comfortably losing the expected goal battle helps to push that black bar a bit further down.
But at the end of the day, it feels too early to draw any major conclusions about Gasperini’s boys being road warriors and home weenies. Looking back at six years worth of data, rather than two, paints a completely different picture about La Dea’s venue preferences. Is 30 recent home matches enough to draw conclusions about a squad? I’m not sure.
So what does it come down to? The answer may be boring, but sometimes the boring answer is best. The team wasn’t as good last year, and is still shedding the old skin of last year’s transition team. Good teams, and especially good teams that pulverize with offense will win and win often. Just look at those graphs from 2018 through 2021!
But where were we last year? It was the first season without Papu Gomez, it was Josip Ilicic’s swansong, Duvan Zapata began his injury plight, and Luis Muriel lost his knack for electric playmaking and finishing. The saying goes that teams have a three year window for success, and last year’s season looked like a squad trying to cheat theat old adage and squeeze out a fourth year. Even this season, we saw a little bit of the hangover from last year, but obviously 2023 has been a different story and the club has come through with almost brand new personnel all over the pitch (and especially in the all-important attack).
It would be valuable to revisit this article at the end of the season to see if the 2022/23 graph better matches last season’s or the graphs from the golden years. Smart odds would be somewhere in the middle, and for Atalanta’s sake they need to be if the boys want to make the Champion’s League again. And of course, nothing would springboard Atalanta back to being odds on favorites to make the UCL than being proverbial road warriors once again against a hungry Milan side. Until that time, as always, Forza Dea!
