LAST UPDATE | 1 Feb 2023
WELCOME, THEN, TO the age of Mattletico.
It might be a short-lived epoch, given Doherty’s contract runs only to the end of the season. It is intriguing nonetheless: an Irish player appearing anywhere outside of the UK is still enough to give us all a frisson of the unfamiliar.
Doherty will become only the ninth senior Irish international to play in La Liga, and first since Steve Finnan’s ignoble stint at Espanyol.
It was initially expected that Doherty would join Atleti on loan until the rest of the season, but late last night Spurs announced they had terminated Doherty’s contract entirely, which had 18 months to run.
Football.London report today that the cancelling of Doherty’s contract came as a shock to the rest of the Spurs dressing room, but its ripping up is less a reflection on Doherty than it is on the Chaotic State of Spurs.
New Fifa rules state that a club can’t have more than eight senior players out on loan at any one time and Djed Spence’s loan move to Rennes earlier yesterday hit the limit, with Harry Winks, Tanguy Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso, Joe Rodon, Sergio Reguilon, Destiny Udogie, and Bryan Gil already out on temporary deals.
The fact that Spurs had to cancel the contract of a full-back with 18 months left to run as they already had another three full-backs out on loan is no compliment to their general level of organisation. But then again, their Sporting Director Fabio Parataci might be forgiven for feeling a little distracted at the moment: he was given a 30-month ban from Italian football in January, one of a suite of punishments handed down by an Italian prosecutor as part of an investigation into alleged false accounting.
Doherty’s time at Spurs was a curious thing but it was by no means a failure. Wing-back is a demanding position in any Antonio Conte team, physically and technically, given they carry a creative burden other managers hand to their central midfield players. Doherty has always been uniquely suited to playing that role and thus his best form coincided with Spurs’ best spell under Conte, and he excelled across the second half of last season. His wings were then clipped by Matty Cash’s rough tackle at the start of April, and the subsequent knee ligament injury ended his season early, ruled him out of Ireland’s quadruple-header, and stunted his pre-season.
His status at Spurs never fully recovered, though nor was it destroyed to the extent that Conte’s infamous “I am not stupid, I don’t want to lose” comment last October suggested. After that criticism, Doherty went on to start three of Spurs’ next four games.
He started the North London Derby as recently as 15 January, but the arrival of right wing-back Pedro Porro meant he would likely spend the rest of the season scrapping for a spot on the bench with Emerson Royal, the clumsy Brazilian to whom Conte seems bafflingly manacled.
The fact Doherty is signed up with Jorge Mendes’ Gestifute agency certainly opens doors, and so he has decision to finish his season in Spain. He is a key player for Ireland, so Stephen Kenny will want him to play regularly or, failing that, at least play more often than he would have played at Spurs.
That is no guarantee. Firstly, there is no doubt Doherty is good enough to play at this level as Atletico, like Spurs, are fighting for a place in the Champions League next season, though doing so at a lower level than Spurs.
On the surface it appears Doherty has been signed as a back-up right-back, with the Brazilian Felipe – a centre-back who occasionally covered there – becoming Nottingham Forest’s 1387th signing of the season on deadline day.
Diego Simeone has generally swapped between a 4-4-2 and 3-5-2 this season, though has spent recent weeks leaning once again to a back four. Doherty will find it difficult to dislodge incumbent right-back Nahuel Molina, who is that rare thing: a World Cup winner who has instantly returned to excellent club form, assisting three of Atleti’s last seven goals. Given Atleti’s better results have come with a back four in recent weeks, wing-back opportunities may be scarce. Should Simeone play a back three across the rest of the season, Doherty will find competition even fiercer: Molina has played at right wing-back this season, as has Marcos Llorente and even Antoine Griezmann.
Doherty may have a better chance of finding game-time at left-back, where the less impressive Reinildo is first-choice ahead of another Spurs loanee, Reguilon. He will also have fewer opportunities to play. Where Spurs remain in the Champions League and domestic cup, Atletico are out of both, and so have just 19 league games left this season.
Atletico aren’t even in the Europa League knockout stages, having contrived to finish bottom of a soft Champions League group, behind Porto, Club Brugge, and a crisis-ridden Bayer Leverkusen.
The sole ambition is to salvage Champions League qualification for next season, and are fourth at the moment, three points clear of Villarreal and Real Betis. Qualification is vital: Atleti’s financial issues have been overshadowed by Barcelona’s but are very serious. They sold off a third of the club in 2021 to reduce their billion-euro debt, and spent last summer skirting around the upper edges of La Liga’s salary cap.
There is a creeping feeling that this may be Diego Simeone’s final season at the club, with the jettisoning of Joao Felix taken as the latest proof he could not evolve the style of play to something befitting their superclub status. This conjures a picture of the manager as a victim of his own success; his final year a kind of operatic tragedy in which Simeone’s uncompromising style both made the club capable of enduring greatness while forbidding them from achieving it.
Matt Doherty’s job is to play more than a supporting act in the drama.
