The Milan reject, the Verona centre-back, the Genoa striker, the Salernitana director. To build a masterpiece you don’t need high-sounding names: the Scudetto miracle of Percassi, Gasperini and D’Amico

The destiny that is written in the stars has crew cut hair, koala eyes and slightly protruding incisors. He has the talent of the Argentines’ Flaco, a thin, frail physique, but two shoulders that Bergamo and Gian Piero Gasperini have forged week after week. It’s with these that Charles de Ketelaere finds the strength to overwhelm the ball and Theo Hernandez and to score the goal he sees, certifies and confirms that Atalanta is a serious candidate to win the 2024/2025 Serie A Scudetto. The mocking sign of fate is that it is he, the promised Kakà who was not the golden child, a Rossoneri meteor, dumped by the AC Milan project, who strikes at the heart once and for all the residual ambitions of Paulo Fonseca’s team. As if to certify another truth once again. There are no exceptions from the Goddess Eupalla’s Olympus aside, players who are absolutely strong and good for every season. There are excellent and good players who, if placed in the right environment, in the context, in the locker room, in the city, with their teammates, with the coach, with the system, in the perfect moment, become functional. And they perform ten times better than elsewhere.

All the men of the Goddess masterpiece
It is the great secret of Atalanta, the project of the Percassi family, Antonio and Luca, football in the blood for a lifetime, Bergamo in the skin always, Atalanta as a manifesto of philosophy and ambition with feet firmly planted de hotanot with your head de hurain the sky and in the clouds. The Percassi represent Bergamo well, Atalanta equally well, Gasperini too, even if he is their adopted son albeit at a gray age. With Tony D’Amico now the armed wing of the market, in a harmonious project that lives on harmonies and agreements, on clashes and arguments, on positive anger, on constructive face-to-face meetings, the Goddess has done practically nothing wrong anymore. And the blows of the last sessions confirm it, and the unspoken desire to dream as big as one can, denied out of sincere humility rather than modest parsimony, is now a cry that is about to explode. Scudetto.

The functionality of the Atalanta market
Yes, they can. Because Atalanta was created with reason. Functionality. D’Amico picked up the Swede Isak Hien in his Verona, who he took from Djurgarden in Sweden. Let’s go quickly, because the Goddess is not a shopping list but of players who are pieces of a perfect domino. Lazar Samardzic arrives from Udinese, not from Real Madrid. And so Mateo Retegui, who in one afternoon and one night was brought in after Gianluca Scamacca’s injury. Paid, yes, but with the sweat of the results obtained. And then Ederson, from Salernitana. Or Sead Kolasinac, a free transfer who seemed to be on his way after Marseille. Odilon Kossounou from Leverkusen but also Marco Carnesecchi and Matteo Ruggeri, who went on loan to gain legs, shoulders, gloves and bones, in Cremona and Salerno. B and A, the elevator of life, to reward merit. It is the masterpiece Atalanta, where no high-sounding names are needed to shout it, now ever louder. Scudetto, Yes, they can.