Atalanta’s run ends in Champions League heartbreak after lifting virus-ravaged Italian region

PSG superstar Neymar, whose salary is reportedly higher than that of Atalanta’s entire roster, helped set up both of his squad’s tallies. After the Italian side nearly got a first-half lead to hold up, PSG’s Marquinhos scored in the 90th minute and Eric Choupo-Moting notched the game-winner in the third minute of stoppage time.

“At this moment, it’s quite painful,” said Atalanta midfielder Marten de Roon. “Tomorrow, I will be proud of our team and club, but at this moment I feel disappointment.”

Atalanta has been a source of pride and uplift for the residents of both the province of Bergamo and its capital city of the same name, starting even before the pandemic. Its third-place finish last year in Serie A, Italy’s top soccer league, was the club’s best ever. Atalanta repeated that feat this year and advanced further than ever before in the Champions League after European soccer resumed in June following a three-month hiatus to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Italy itself went into a stringent national lockdown in March, but by then the pandemic had engulfed Bergamo. Late that month, as Italy set worldwide marks at the time for coronavirus cases, the town of Bergamo had accumulated the most deaths (per Reuters), more than Milan, its much bigger neighbor to the west in Lombardy.

Obituaries went from two pages to 10 in Bergamo’s main newspaper, and of a local crematorium, a municipal official said, “It never closes, and still we don’t manage.”

For March, deaths were up 568 percent in Bergamo compared with its average over the previous five years. The extent of the spread was also reflected two months later in a nationwide study of antibody tests, which determined that a quarter of all residents in the province had come into contact with the virus, while Lombardy had almost twice as high an overall percentage, 7.5, as the next hardest-hit region.

With Italy’s lockdown contributing to a decline in coronavirus rates from several thousand per day in March to a few hundred by June, Atalanta’s manager said his team was ready to “help Bergamo start again, after all of the pain and the mourning.”

“Bergamo is suffering from a deep sadness that you can feel everywhere, in the streets, in the eyes of the people, in the bars and in the restaurants, in the silences of my staff member who lost his father,” Gian Piero Gasperini told an Italian newspaper at the time (via goal.com). “Everyone is going forward, with strength but with intense pain. It will take years to fully comprehend what happened here, because this was truly the center of the hurt.

“Every time that I think about it, it feels absurd: the historic peak of sporting joy coincided with the city’s greatest pain.”

In fact, many experts came to believe that Atalanta’s success directly contributed to the intensity of the outbreak in Bergamo. The team played the first Champions League knockout-round game in its history on Feb. 19 in Milan, and tens of thousands of Bergomaschi, as the residents are called, packed into buses and then a stadium to watch their beloved squad take on Spain’s Valencia.

Atalanta’s 4-1 victory had those residents shouting and hugging in joy, both in Milan and back home, only for the game to be subsequently regarded as a super-spreader event. The head of pulmonology at a Bergamo hospital described the match as “a biological bomb.”

When the second and final leg of that series was played on March 10, it was in an empty stadium in Valencia as Spain began its efforts to stop the spread. A week later, Valencia announced that “around 35 percent” of its team had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Gasperini subsequently revealed that he was infected some time shortly before that game took place and he told an Italian newspaper (via talksport.com) that as he suffered symptoms, he was terrified of possibly having to go to a nearby hospital in Bergamo, which “sounded like a war zone.”

On Wednesday, after the stinging defeat to PSG, Gasperini said he felt “great regret.”

“We came very close, it was very close,” said the 62-year-old manager (via Agence France-Presse). “It looked as if we could do it, pull off a great achievement.”

Many in Bergamo might say the team has already accomplished a laudable feat, to judge from recent comments by the town’s mayor, Giorgio Gori.

“The city can find a reason for optimism in the story of Atalanta,” he told the New York Times. “It can be a sign of the rebirth of the city.

“It is not possible to forget what has happened. It is too close, too painful. Too many families have lost a parent or a brother or a sister. These victims are not statistics: They are each personal stories to a family. But we need to think of what comes after, too. Everyone knows where Bergamo is, for this tragedy. We need to build positive associations.

“Bergamo can be known for covid,” the mayor continued. “But it can also be known for Atalanta.”