Youth, muscle and attitude: Lecce win at Atalanta validates Baroni methods

On paper, it looked like a game Atalanta should win. They had been rounding into form since the start of 2023, piling up goals and muscling their way back into the fight for Champions League places. Last weekend, a 2-0 win at Lazio leapfrogged them into fourth, so Sunday’s fixture at home to 13th-placed Lecce should have been straightforward by comparison.

Football matches, however, are not played on paper. Nor, as the Lecce manager, Marco Baroni, reminded us recently, are they played on a video game console. “There are some PlayStation maestros out there who think our system of play doesn’t work,” he said after a 2-0 win at last-placed Cremonese this month. “They’re wrong.”

A 59-year-old manager with more than 15 clubs on his coaching CV, Baroni has been around the block enough times to know his own mind. He has heard the grumbles about his 4-3-3 all season, and for much of the last one as well. Lecce stand accused of being too predictable, too rigid, too defensive. Baroni could not give two hoots.

He led Lecce to first place in Serie B using the same formation and has them on track to survive their first season back in the top flight. This despite the smallest wage bill in the division – barely a sixth of what Juventus spend – and regularly fielding teams with the youngest average age.

It is common to see promoted sides cling to experience, reinforcing their squads with veterans who have avoided relegation before. Monza, bankrolled by Silvio Berlusconi, marked their arrival in Serie A this season by raiding Napoli, Inter and Verona for Andrea Petagna, Andrea Ranocchia and Gianluca Caprari.

Lecce have taken a different approach. Without a billionaire owner to ease things along, they have relied on the contacts book and scouting network of their director of football, Pantaleo Corvino, a man with a long-established reputation for unearthing talent. During a previous stint at Lecce, he brought Mirko Vucinic, Cristian Ledesma and Valeri Bojinov to Serie A for the first time.

Baroni has trusted his judgment, throwing new arrivals straight in at the deep end. Of the 27 players who have appeared for Lecce in the league this season, 11 had played in Serie A previously and even among that group there were several with fewer than 10 starts in the division.

The manager has introduced us to a cast of colourful new characters. There’s Morten Hjulmand, the youngest captain in Serie A at 23 years old, signed from Admira Wacker in Austria two years ago for a whopping €170,000. Or how about Federico Baschirotto, the centre-back with a bodybuilder’s physique, who went viral on TikTok after recreating his muscle-flexing goal-celebration when delivering a school assembly.

There was one marquee signing: Samuel Umtiti joining in an improbable loan move from Barcelona. He has formed a formidable defensive partnership with Baschirotto, helping Lecce concede the fewest goals of any team in the bottom half of the table, but missed Sunday’s game with a hamstring injury.

Instead, it was the turn of Assan Ceesay, the 28-year-old Gambia centre-forward signed from FC Zurich, to take centre stage. In the fourth minute, a throw-in was lobbed toward him from inside Lecce’s half and Ceesay took a clumsy first touch, but managed to get his toe to the ball again despite having Berat Djimsiti in front of him and Merih Demiral behind.

A third Atalanta player then arrived but somehow Ceesay eluded them all, slipping through the gap, cutting inside, and arrowing a shot into the far bottom corner from more than 30 yards out. This was his first start since October, his place recently occupied by another summer signing, Lorenzo Colombo, and this was first goal since then too.

The rest of the game would not be so easy on the eye. Lecce became a team of two halves, the front three accompanied by one midfielder at a time to harry Atalanta high up the pitch, while the rest camped cautiously inside their own half, making sure their opponents would never get a free run into the area when they broke through the press. There was an awful lot of time-wasting.

It worked. Lecce doubled their lead with just over a quarter of an hour left to play, with Alexis Blin, yet another Corvino discovery, heading home from a corner. Atalanta pulled a goal back, Rasmus Højlund blocking the goalkeeper Wladimiro Falcone’s attempted clearance straight into the net, but the home side were too late to rescue a point.

It was the second time Lecce had beaten these opponents this season. They have made a habit of surprising the top-four contenders with draws against Napoli, Milan and Roma, as well as a win over Lazio. If you ask Baroni he will tell you tactics have little to do with it, saying it all comes down to his players’ workrate and mindset.

“The only thing that interests me is their attitude,” he said on Sunday. “That’s the one thing you can never do without. I tell them all often that you can lose, win or draw, but you can not get your attitude wrong. As a promoted side that is fundamental.”

His opposite number, Gian Piero Gasperini, might agree, so wound up by his team’s lackadaisical start that he had stripped out of his jacket in an attempt to convey urgency even before Ceesay scored that early opener. His team cannot afford another slow start when they face Milan at San Siro on Sunday.

Lecce, now 10 points clear of the relegation zone, will hope to carry their momentum into a game against direct rivals Sassuolo. On paper, it looks like an easier game. And we all know how much that means.