Atletico Madrid 1996–2009: The Double, Relegation and the Return

No era in the club’s history covers a wider range. It opens with the only Double Atletico Madrid have ever won and, within four seasons, ends with the club in the second division. Both facts belong to the same fourteen years, and neither makes sense without the other.

1995–96: The Double

Under Radomir Antic, Atletico won La Liga and the Copa del Rey in the same season: the ninth league title and the only Double in the club’s history.

The cup half was a 1–0 win over Barcelona after extra time in Zaragoza. The league half ended a nineteen-year wait, the longest championship drought the club has had.

The side is remembered through two players in particular: Milinko Pantic, the Serbian midfielder, and Kiko, both of whom sit in the legends gallery on the strength of that season. It was not a squad assembled over years; it was a team that came together and won everything available to it, once.

The Fall

Four seasons later, Atletico were relegated.

The 1999–2000 season produced two things at the same time: a demotion from La Liga and a lost Copa del Rey final. A club that had been champions of Spain within living memory went down while contesting a national final in the same spring, a combination the cup record shows is not just unusual for this club but rare anywhere.

The club spent two seasons in the Segunda División and won it in 2001–02, returning as champions.

That line, Segunda División in 2001–02, is the only promotion on the honours list, and it is the entry that gives the rest of the list its scale. Everything the club has won since 2010 was won by an institution that had been in the second division a few years earlier.

The Years After the Return

Promotion did not bring a trophy. The remainder of the era produced no major honour: seven seasons back in La Liga without a championship, and a Copa del Rey final lost in 2009–10.

What it did produce was players. Fernando Torres came through the academy and became the club’s captain before leaving in 2007; Sergio Agüero arrived in 2006 and Diego Forlán in 2007. All three are in the legends gallery, and the last of them would decide the match that ends the era.

The Double Squad

What makes 1995–96 unusual is that it was not the peak of a long build. Radomir Antic’s side won the league and the cup in the same season and did not defend either, and within four years the club was relegated.

Two players carry the memory. Milinko Pantic, the Serbian midfielder, and Kiko, the forward, are both in the legends gallery, both remembered almost entirely for a single season’s work. A club that has won eleven championships has produced few sides that are recalled as vividly as that one, and none that dissolved as quickly.

What Relegation Actually Cost

The 1999–2000 season is the low point of the club’s history by any measure, and its consequences ran well past the two seasons in the second division.

A relegated club loses its European qualification, its television income, its bargaining position in the transfer market and, usually, its best players. Atletico came back up as champions of the Segunda División in 2001–02, which is the fastest realistic recovery available, and still needed a further eight seasons to win anything.

That interval, 2002 to 2010, is the part of the era that gets least attention and explains the most. It is where the academy produced Fernando Torres, where Sergio Agüero arrived in 2006 and Diego Forlán in 2007, and where the club rebuilt a squad capable of winning a European final without winning anything in the meantime.

The Handover

The era ends with a losing Copa del Rey final in 2009–10 and, in the same season, a European trophy that belongs by every meaningful measure to the next era. Forlán, signed in the fallow years, scored both goals in it.

The Era’s Real Ending

The trophy that closes this period technically falls in its final season, and it belongs to the next era by every measure that matters: the 2010 Europa League, won in Hamburg, the club’s first European trophy since 1962 and its first major honour since the Double.

Read as a whole, 1996 to 2009 is the story of a club that won everything domestic available in one season, lost its place in the top division within four, spent two years earning it back, and then needed most of a decade to become a side capable of winning again. The club history places it as the low point and the turn.