Diego Simeone defends Giuliano amid the storm: Atletico Madrid and the task of stopping the rot at Reale Arena

The press room at Cerro del Espino was packed tightly enough that the hum of the air conditioning became a sound worth listening to. A journalist stood up and asked about Giuliano Simeone. Diego Simeone did not look at the person asking. He looked down at the wooden table, said one short sentence, and moved immediately to the next question so quickly that nobody could transcribe his answer verbatim. That answer contained no data, no tactical analysis, no defence long enough to become a headline.

They call me a writer on the grass verge. All I do is record the breathing of the ball before it rolls.

Twenty minutes later, in the corridor leading to the car park, I stood beside a club media officer smoking a hurried cigarette. He said something I copied word for word into my notebook: "Nobody here is angry at the kid. People just need a name to be angry at." That sentence travelled with me all the way from Madrid to Lyon, and it became the starting point for this piece.

Atletico Madrid have a problem far larger than a coach picking his son to start.

Eight goals, five matches, two straight defeats

Simeone's side came into this round with a number that forces you to stop: eight goals conceded in five competitive fixtures. For a club that built almost its entire identity on a defensive foundation, that is a signal that cannot be dismissed. The last two matches ended in defeat: 0-3 against Athletic Club, then a loss to Liverpool in Europe. That run is not a scratch on the surface. It is a crack running along the structure.

On Sunday, Simeone's men travel to Reale Arena in San Sebastian, where Real Sociedad are waiting. This is a direct rival in the race for European places. A fixture like this, at a moment like this, is no longer an ordinary league match. It is a test of whether the team still holds its skeleton or has already lost it.

The absentee list makes the picture heavier. Pablo Barrios, the young midfielder regarded as the shield in front of the back line, has a muscle injury. Alexander Sorloth, expected to provide a different attacking option, remains absent. Those two names sit in different areas of the pitch, but the gaps they leave produce the same consequence: Simeone loses rotation, and he loses the ability to change a match from the bench.

Meanwhile, the name mentioned most often in Madrid is Giuliano Simeone.

I was at the Metropolitano for the 0-3 defeat to Athletic Club. What stayed with me was not the goals conceded but a small detail in the eighteenth minute: after the team lost the ball in midfield, Giuliano ran back almost forty metres, cut between the two centre-backs, and kept running after the ball had already been cleared upfield. Nobody passed to him. He ran anyway. The stands were silent at that moment, and inside that silence the loudest thing I could hear was studs on grass.

A meritocracy debate with the wrong target

According to data recorded by Goal.com, Giuliano Simeone has featured in every Atletico Madrid match this season and has made three La Liga starts. For a young player, that is a significant workload. For a coach's son, it is a verdict delivered before the trial begins.

Diego Simeone chooses not to engage with that debate. He says Giuliano's work ethic speaks for itself, that the boy does not need anyone to defend him. The handling is very Simeone: no denial, no explanation, no opening of the door to discussion. He simply closes it with one short sentence.

But a father's silence does not quiet the stands. A section of Atletico supporters believe Giuliano starts for reasons unrelated to football. They call it favouritism. The framing is understandable, easy to spread, and easy to gather agreement around, because it supplies a villain for a story that everyone wants to have a villain in.

I have spent many evenings rewatching Atletico's matches this season. What I see in Giuliano is not a player receiving privileges, but a player being used as a patch for holes elsewhere. He runs to cover the spaces the defensive system leaves behind. He drops in when the midfield is bypassed. He hugs the touchline and then drifts inside when the team needs an escape route. None of that shows up in the goals column. All of it shows up on the grass.

A touch of the ball is an unfinished poem. The ball rolls away, but the writer stays behind.

The real problem lies elsewhere. Atletico this season do not have a player running so much that he deserves criticism. They have a collective coming apart into small pieces, and inside a fractured collective, the youngest player is usually the one most visible.

Eight goals do not tell the story of one flank

When a team concedes eight goals in five matches, the automatic media reflex is to look for an individual. A slow defender. A goalkeeper out of form. A midfielder who will not track back. Or a young player starting for non-footballing reasons.

That reflex is methodologically wrong.

Atletico's defensive structure under Simeone has never been a story about individually outstanding players. It is a collective choreography: the midfield press on the correct beat, the two centre-backs step up at the correct moment, the full-backs tuck in at the correct distance, and the forwards drop to block the opponent's first passing lane. When that choreography is intact, Atletico look like a block of stone. When it slips one beat, the block reveals a series of gaps, and every gap leads to goal.

Eight goals conceded in five matches is not the fault of a winger. It is a signal that the group mechanism has lost synchronisation. In elite football, losing synchronisation is the most expensive kind of breakdown, because it cannot be fixed by substitution. It can only be fixed with time on the training pitch and stability in personnel.

And the personnel are not stable.

Barrios's muscle injury is a structural loss rather than merely a human one. A screening midfielder does not only break up counter-attacks; he keeps the two centre-backs in the right positions, stops them stepping up too high, stops the full-backs tucking in too early. When the man holding that role disappears, the entire back line has to work by anticipation rather than by knowledge. Anticipation is where every conceded goal begins.

Sorloth's absence creates a different kind of loss at the other end. A striker who can hold the ball, who offers an anchor for long build-ups, who forces the opponent's defence to drop deeper, is a defensive tool in an indirect way. A team without that player must play shorter, pass more in midfield, and every pass in midfield is a chance to lose the ball. Losing the ball in midfield is the finest gift a back line short of confidence can hand to an opponent.

Two injuries, two consequences, both pointing the same way: Atletico's defence is under pressure from in front and behind.

The blind spot in the nepotism argument

There is an obvious paradox in how this story is being told. If Giuliano Simeone were not Diego Simeone's son, with the minutes he is currently playing, he would be described with entirely different language: a young talent being given a chance. The coverage would talk about pace, about pressing ability, about Atletico building for the future. The same data, two readings, and which reading is chosen depends on the player's surname rather than his minutes.

I learned to listen to the pitch with my heart, because reason had already said too many dull things.

What is notable is that the nepotism debate appeared precisely when Atletico needed people to talk about something else. It offers the public a complete explanation for a bad run: the team is losing because the coach favours his son. That explanation has every quality a successful narrative needs. It is simple. It has characters. And it does not require the reader to understand anything about football.

The correct explanation is more complicated and has no villain. It says that a group who have played together for years are losing their automaticity. That the midfield has lost its rhythm-setter and its screen at the same time. That the attack has no anchor to hold the ball, pushing the entire block back towards its own goal. That once the block is pushed back, the distances between the lines stretch, and inside those stretched distances opponents find passes they never used to have.

A story like that has nobody to blame. And in modern football, a story with nobody to blame does not get told.

In France, where I work, I have watched similar debates flare and fade within weeks, leaving behind a young player whose confidence has been partly burned away. He still plays. He still runs. But something in the way he touches the ball has changed, and very few people notice when it changed.

Pressure from the stands and an uneven scale

There is an aspect of this story that is rarely discussed, and it concerns how a big club is treated when it falls into crisis.

Atletico Madrid matches take place in packed stadiums, under national media pressure, with every contested moment replayed from four camera angles. When a club like that suffers a setback, people call it an accident. When a small club suffers the same setback, people call it nature. The difference is not in the rules. It is in the weight of the noise surrounding every decision.

Barrios was injured in a match I followed on screen, and what caught my attention was not the collision. It was the way Atletico's back line stepped up about five metres in the ten minutes after he left the pitch. Nobody gave an order. Nobody called out. They simply stepped up, like a reflex that had lost the person holding it back. Five metres, in elite football, is the entire distance between a safe defence and a defence split open by a single through ball.

Diego Simeone built his career on recognising distances like that before they became goals. That he has not fixed them in the first five matches of the season is information far more important than whether his son deserves to start.

The cheers rang out inside my head. The stadium was empty, but memory has never been empty.

Reale Arena and the real test

On Sunday, Atletico Madrid walk into Reale Arena in San Sebastian, where sea damp drifts across the turf and the stands are tight enough that the home supporters' singing fills the ground without amplification.

This is the kind of venue a crisis-stricken team does not want to visit. Real Sociedad are competing directly with Atletico for European places, and a win over Simeone's side at this moment carries double value: three points, plus pushing a direct rival deeper into its own crisis.

A win with a clean sheet would erase most of the noise. That is the nature of football: noise does not disappear because of argument, it disappears because of results. A defeat, especially a heavy one, would turn an early-season wobble into a full-blown crisis, with every minor debate elevated into a matter of survival.

In that scenario, the name Giuliano Simeone will continue to be mentioned most. Not because he played worst. Because his is the name easiest to attach to a story.

The rented room in Moscow had no window, but every night I saw the World Cup shining through the slit of my pen.

I once thought a piece like this was too literary. I once heard that remark in a newsroom in Lyon, when my editor swept aside my first draft and told me to write like a dreamer instead of a man of numbers. It took me years to understand that the problem was never writing with style, but placing style in the wrong spot.

Place it here: when eight goals in five matches are attributed to a twenty-two-year-old winger, people are not analysing any more. They are looking for a story to tell over dinner.

What remains after the final whistle

When the referee blows for full time in San Sebastian, there will be two outcomes, and each opens a different story.

If Atletico win, the noise will retreat for about seven days. Headlines will switch to praising Simeone's character, Giuliano's growth, the return of a defensive identity. But the group mechanism, the thing that actually decides this season's fate, will not repair itself simply because of a good result. Barrios's injury will not vanish. Sorloth's absence will not be filled. And when the team enters the dense autumn schedule, those five-metre gaps will reappear.

If Atletico lose, the debate will no longer be about football. It will be about power, about family, about the future of a coach who has tied himself to one club longer than anyone else in European football today.

What is worth waiting for is not the scoreline, but how Atletico Madrid defend in the first thirty minutes at Reale Arena. If the back line holds the correct distances, if the midfield keeps its pressing rhythm, then their problem is personnel. If they still expose gaps between the lines, then their problem lies somewhere deeper, somewhere no press conference can reach.

Eight goals in five matches is a number. That number will become history if Atletico find their choreography again. It will become fate if they do not.

Tonight, in Lyon, I open the tape of the Athletic Club defeat again. I fast-forward to the eighteenth minute, to the moment Giuliano ran back forty metres after the ball had already been cleared upfield. He is still running, and the stands are still silent. There are moments in football that no camera records, no statistics sheet logs, and no debate reaches. They exist only in the memory of those who were there.

Too literary, I know. But I write it anyway, because if the writer does not hold on to silences like that, this sport will be left with nothing but numbers, and numbers do not know how to run back towards their own goal.