A Bittersweet End to the Season

The 2010-11 season closed with a win that changed nothing. Sergio Agüero’s first hat-trick for Atlético Madrid ended a run of four straight defeats and settled a 4-3 result in Mallorca, but the club finished seventh and went into the Europa League through two preliminary rounds.

“It was a bittersweet victory as we were unable to avoid the preliminaries,” goalkeeper David de Gea told the club’s official site. “When you depend on other results, you already know that not only do you have to win, but you have to wait for your opponents to fail.” While Atlético led 2-0, results elsewhere still offered hope; neither Athletic Bilbao nor Sevilla obliged.

It was also the last match of Quique Sánchez Flores’s eighteen months in charge. “Each team ends up in the spot they deserved,” he said afterwards. “We’ve experienced a lot of joy winning the Europa League and next year the team will play in that competition. We left two titles, and progress; a consolidated team with a promising future because of the people of the youth system.” He asked the club to keep backing what he called grassroots football.

Agüero’s afternoon was the record-keeping story. The three goals took him to 99, 100 and 101 in red and white, matched his personal best of 27 in a season from 2007-08, and set a new league high of 20. Amid constant talk of an exit he had celebrated without much visible joy, which he later explained on his own site as respect for opponents fighting relegation. “I’m proud of having achieved this total of 101 goals with Atlético Madrid,” he wrote, in the past tense, as several readers noticed at the time.

Juanfran scored his first goal for the club in the same match, three months after joining, and dedicated it to his father. Mario Suárez, back at Atlético after two seasons at Mallorca, was left with mixed feelings: disappointed by seventh place, relieved that his former club had survived.

The squad returned for a final session before a friendly at Alcorcón and then broke up, with Forlán, Godín, Agüero, Perea and Elias released for the Copa América. The Europa League play-off round waited on 28 July, and the summer that followed, with Agüero to Manchester City and Falcao in the other direction, reshaped the club. The full sequence is in the club history pages and the archive.