3 Areas for Antoine Griezmann to Improve on to Become an Atletico Madrid Great
As he prepares to come back to his club following a hectic summer, there is huge excitement among Atletico Madrid fans over the return of Antoine Griezmann.
A Euro 2016 star with hosts France, Griezmann’s month-long efforts couldn’t quite keep the Henri Delaunay Cup in the country, but as the tournament’s Golden Boot winner and best player, there’s little doubt the 25-year-old enhanced his reputation as one of the best forwards on the planet.
He could get even better, though.
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As he enters his third season as an Atletico player, Griezmann has been a major reason why the club has transformed into a major European force. As such, the grass elsewhere doesn’t seem greener for him, as it has done for the great Atletico forwards of the recent past. He’s not distracted, and he seems happy to commit his future to the club and to manager Diego Simeone.
The Frenchman knows he is in the best place to improve his game, but how would he go about that?
Here are three areas both he and Simeone might be looking at.
Consistency
Griezmann scored 22 league goals in each of his first two seasons at Atletico Madrid, so in that regard, he’s pretty consistent. But in both campaigns, he suffered from elongated periods without a goal, and his barren spells tended to coincide with disappointing results for his club.
In 2014/15, Griezmann had five spells of five or more matches in which he failed to score in domestic competitions. Last season, he had only had one such spell but suffered from a fairly slow start to the season, scoring just four times in his opening 10 Primera Division games.
It was undoubtedly an improvement, and you wouldn’t find anyone who would claim Griezmann went backward as a player last season. But his displays in his quieter periods could often be a little bit off, and he showed the issue in microcosm at the European Championship.
Finishing as the tournament’s top scorer, four of his six goals at the tournament came in the wins over the Republic of Ireland and Germany in the knockout phase, masking what had been a fairly quiet group stage for him, during which he was substituted in the two matches he started and began one game on the bench.
In that clash, against Albania, he managed to score a crucial goal in the 90th minute, showcasing he can still be effective when not quite firing. But with so much riding on him in Atletico’s eyes this season, he can’t afford too many of his quieter spells.
Consistency is what separates the best players from the very good, and as Griezmann approaches the former category, it is something he has to keep in mind.
Assists
According to WhoScored.com, of the top 10 goalscorers in La Liga last season, only two players assisted fewer goals than Griezmann (five)—Ruben Castro of Real Betis (four) and Borja Baston of Eibar (three), the two players who scored the fewest goals (19 and 18 respectively) of those in the top 10.
Griezmann has the misfortune of playing in a division alongside the world’s best, with Luis Suarez, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Karim Benzema and Neymar all scoring and assisting more goals than the Atletico man, but that can be put down to a couple of factors.
Most crucially of all is the simple fact Los Colchoneros score fewer goals than Barcelona and Real Madrid—they notched 63 to Barca's 112 and Real's 110 last season—purely down to the way they play. Those players mentioned above all have the advantage of playing with great attacking team-mates who are almost as good or even better than themselves.
Alternatively, Griezmann has been playing in a team with whom he is the go-to man for goals, with a single-minded mentality encouraged in the pursuit of victories.
But the addition of his fellow Frenchman Kevin Gameiro this summer will spread the strikes around somewhat, and the former Sevilla man’s movement around the penalty area means he’ll be relying on service from all angles.
If, as anticipated, Simeone opts to play both Griezmann and Gameiro together more often than not—and certainly in Atletico’s bigger games—then of the two, it would surely be Griezmann stationed deeper, accepting the ball from midfield and always looking forward.
If that is the case, he’ll need to improve on last season’s tally of league assists, his total of five less than half that of Ronaldo (11) and less than a third of Messi and Suarez (16 each).
These comparisons are unfair because Griezmann is being asked to play a different type of game to those three superstars, but if he is to eventually be seen as a worthy rival to their kind, he’ll need to become more of an all-around player. Improving his rate of assists would be a good place to start.
Strength
He might not be a universal favourite of the supporters of either France or Arsenal, but Olivier Giroud’s role in securing Griezmann’s Euro 2016 Golden Boot cannot be overlooked.
In the matches against the Republic of Ireland and Germany, Giroud’s role in occupying the defenders and taking the physical fight to them allowed his strike partner to flourish, demonstrating his many qualities as he foraged for the ball in dangerous areas, creating attacking opportunities and ruthlessly taking them.
But Griezmann—quite small in stature at 5'9"—doesn’t have such physical back-up at club level. And he can sometimes be bullied by bigger, stronger defenders who refuse to give him the space in which he flourishes.
A little like Messi, his frame almost makes him the antithesis of the modern elite player, something that makes his success so welcoming. But Messi has been conditioned to a remarkable degree, meaning injuries are rare and he can routinely see out tough, draining matches.
Griezmann has quite often been substituted throughout his career, running out of steam later on in matches and consequently being unable to make continued impacts upon them.
It is in this regard his strength could be improved.
No one is expecting, or even wanting, Griezmann to come back from his break having gone up a shirt size and added a huge amount of bulk to his figure, but he will know more than anyone just how much both last season and the European Championship took out of him. And if adding a little more strength would aid him, then of course he’d do that.
He has withstood the stresses and strains of being an elite player pretty well so far, but with each achievement, he becomes more and more of a marked man, and there will be greater challenges ahead.
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