Atletico Madrid 1950–1965: Herrera, Ben Barek and the First Cup

This is the era in which Atletico Madrid became a permanent fixture near the top of Spanish football without often being at the top of it. Two league titles, three cups, a European trophy and four runner-up finishes, a haul that would satisfy most clubs, and one that established the particular reputation Atletico have never entirely shaken.

Helenio Herrera

The two championships came first, in 1949–50 and 1950–51, under a manager who would later become one of the most influential figures in European football. Helenio Herrera went on to build the Internazionale side of the 1960s; he won his first titles here.

The player most associated with them is Larbi Ben Barek, the Moroccan-French forward who remains one of the earliest genuinely international stars to play for the club. He appears in the legends gallery alongside the post-war generation.

Back-to-back titles were, by then, the club’s established pattern: 1940 and 1941, now 1950 and 1951. Both pairs came in a decade’s first years, and both were followed by long stretches without a championship.

The Four Near-Misses

What the era is really made of is second places.

Atletico finished runners-up in La Liga in 1957–58, 1960–61, 1962–63 and 1964–65. Four times in eight seasons the club was the second-best team in Spain, and each time somebody else was better.

That record deserves more weight than it usually gets. A club that finishes second four times in eight years is not an occasional overachiever having a good decade. It is a consistently excellent side operating in an era when Real Madrid were winning European Cups. The league record shows twenty-one top-two finishes across the club’s history; four of them fall inside this era alone.

The Cups

Where the league would not yield, the Copa del Rey did. Atletico won it in 1959–60 and retained it in 1960–61, for the club’s first back-to-back cups, and won it again in 1964–65. Three in six seasons.

They also lost the 1955–56 and 1963–64 finals, which is characteristic: this is a club that reaches finals. The cup record is exactly level across twenty finals, and this era contributed heavily to both columns.

1962: Europe

The single most significant result of the period came in the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Atletico beat Fiorentina 3–0 after a replay to take the trophy in 1962, the club’s first European honour, and one with a detail attached that supporters have always enjoyed: the Cup Winners’ Cup was the only major European trophy Real Madrid never won.

They reached the final again the following season, in 1962–63, and lost it.

Forty-eight years passed before the club won another European trophy. That gap ended in Hamburg in 2010, and the European record shows how tightly the club’s continental success is clustered at either end of it.

The Shape of the Era

Fifteen seasons, and the pattern inside them is the one that recurs through the club’s whole history: excellence that does not quite convert.

Count the top-two league finishes, champions in 1949–50, 1950–51 and 1965–66, runners-up in 1957–58, 1960–61, 1962–63 and 1964–65, and the club was among the two best teams in Spain seven times in sixteen years. Count the trophies actually won and it is three leagues, three cups and one European title.

The gap between those two numbers is not bad luck. It is what it looks like to be a genuinely strong club during a period when Real Madrid were winning European Cups in sequence, and it explains why the 1962 Cup Winners’ Cup carried a significance out of proportion to the competition’s status. It was the one major European trophy Real Madrid never won, and Atletico had it.

Herrera and What Came After Him

The manager is worth a second mention because of what he did next. Helenio Herrera left and built the Internazionale side that won consecutive European Cups in the 1960s, which places Atletico’s back-to-back championships of 1950 and 1951 at the start of one of the most consequential managerial careers in the European game rather than as an isolated success.

The club did not replace him with anyone comparable, and the fifteen years that follow are carried by squads rather than by a single figure, which is part of why the era reads as consistent rather than dominant, and why the next one, organised around a stadium and a generation of players, looks so different.

The End of the Era

The last act was a league title. Atletico won La Liga in 1965–66, the club’s fifth, and the last won at the old Metropolitano ground, which had been home from 1923 to 1936 and again from 1943.

That autumn the club moved to a new stadium on the banks of the Manzanares, and the next era is named after it.