‘Simeone, live match by match’; From the Palermo neighborhood to the history of Atlético

“Your son is going to be known worldwide,” a seer told nilda gonzalez, the mother of Diego Simeon, when the coach of Atlético de Madrid was “little”, he had just started in the lower categories of Vélez; orA phrase that marks the starting point of the docuseries ‘Simeone, living game by game’, from the tour of the Palermo neighborhood in Buenos Aires to the history of the rojiblanco club and the Argentine national team through six episodes of 40 minutes each that premiere this Wednesday in ‘Primer Video’.

Last season, when Atlético became champions of the League under the leadership of Simeone, the only team that has won the championship in the last 17 years Real Madrid and Barcelona, is the common thread of the journey through the life of ‘Cholo’, as a footballer, as a coach, as a father and as a son, between images, videos, goals, moments, around his statements and the people who have accompanied him in that life path.

“Actually, I never wanted to undress, but it came Tony (Munoz, teammate of his at Atlético de Madrid, champion of the double, friend and executive producer of Wakai Sports) and made me understand that I’m older now and I had to tell a little about how this moment came about, because everyone sees the coach dressed in black who He has surely had a lot of success in recent times, but to get there there is a very long way to go, on a personal level, on a coaching level, on a footballer level and I think it is explained clearly,” Simeone said during the telematic presentation on Monday.

introduced her Gustavo Lopez, former teammate in the national team and friend, who has shared hours and hours with him to convey to the viewers everything that the docuseries transmits. “I felt safer. To transmit, remember and tell them what they do not know me as I am, it had to be someone very close to me, someone who really knows me and Gustavo López knows me very well,” Simeone said.

“He changed everything”, expresses during the documentary Koke Resurrection, the captain of Atlético champion in 2020-21, the only footballer who has continued in the squad since Simeone came to the rescue of a drifting team at the end of December 2011. A decade later, no coach has won as much as him in the club history. Neither in games nor in titles. Not even a myth like Luis Aragones.

“What Cruyff did with Barcelona, ​​Atlético de Madrid has done with Cholo”, says Pep Guardiola, coach of Manchester City, among the numerous testimonies through which the series circulates, which begins in the run-up to the last League match last year, the day before traveling to Valladolid, where the goals of Angel Correa and Luis Suarez culminated Simeone’s second League. His eighth title on the rojiblanco bench.

Then go back to the past. At the beginning of the season, thinking about Simeone’s football 24 hours a day, his daily routine, 6-1 against Granada, when “a different energy was felt”, according to the center-back Stefan Savic, to everything that lived in a past Magical League, but also to the Simeone who dreamed as a child of playing football at his home in the Palermo neighborhood in Buenos Aires, to the footballer who emerged in Velez, who made the leap to Pisa when he was only 20 years old, who inherited the number ’10’ from Diego Armando Maradona to be champion with Argentina in the Copa América in Chile 1991, which he played for Sevilla, Atlético, Inter…

And the one who has made history at Atlético de Madrid, but also the father, the person, the son. “My parents (Nilda and Carlos) are the ones who gave me all the tools I have. I am what I am thanks to them,” said Simeone on Monday, who also spoke about his family, his five children and his wife, Carla Pereira: “We have managed to build something in which I believe a lot, which is the team in family, at work, in friends, with everything that makes you strong. The invisible is stripped a little, that people do not see and that is every day, in the person who has to lead, live together, transmit, convince and win every day”

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