Ademola Lookman: 3 reasons Atletico Madrid move may not work out

Super Eagles star Ademola Lookman was substituted in the 58th minute of Atletico Madrid’s 3-0 defeat at Athletic Club on Saturday, Afrik-Foot reports.

The 28-year-old started the LaLiga fixture on the left flank of Diego Simeone’s front line but was unable to impose himself before being withdrawn for Arnau Ortiz as part of a four-change reshuffle after Athletic Club scored twice inside three minutes of the second half through Nico Williams and Robert Navarro at the start of the second half.

Oihan Sancet added a third in the 90th minute to complete Atletico’s first LaLiga defeat of the 2026/27 campaign, and former Arsenal and West Ham midfielder Stewart Robson used his ESPN analysis to point specifically at Lookman’s contribution.

“They didn’t have the ability, individual brilliance, and combined effect of two or three players linking with each other to break Athletic Club down,” Robson said.

“It was a poor second-half performance. Lookman didn’t really get involved in the game.”

The criticism landed a week after Lookman had scored his first LaLiga goal of the season in Atletico’s 3-1 win at Sevilla.

It also points to underlying factors that his €35 million move exposed him to when he was desperate to exit Atalanta after the AFCON 2025 tournament in Morocco.

3 reasons the Atletico Madrid move may not work out

1. Atletico’s tactical role is not where Lookman succeeded at Atalanta

The most important tactical concern is positional, and it is exactly the concern Robson’s post-match line about Lookman being uninvolved captures.

Lookman’s Atalanta breakthrough was built on operating as an inverted left-sided attacker who occupied the left half-space, received possession between the opposition full-back and centre-back, and drove into the box to shoot or create on his stronger right foot.

That specific role, closer to a supporting striker than a touchline winger, is what produced his 2023/24 Europa League final hat-trick against Bayer Leverkusen and his 20-goal, six-assist 2024/25 season.

Simeone’s Atletico does not deploy him there. In the current 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1, Lookman is either forced wide as a touchline winger with defensive tracking responsibilities against the opposition full-back, or, as in the opening two matches of 2026/27, pushed into a makeshift centre-forward role.

Neither role gives him the receiving zone or the freedom to cut inside from the left half-space that made his Atalanta output possible, and the San Mamés display was a live demonstration of what happens when the role does not fit.

The half-space itself is not vacant at Atletico. Álex Baena is the natural creative outlet operating in that inside-left channel in Simeone’s system, and as such, Lookman is left to either play out wide or come inside as an emergency centre-forward that his profile does not naturally suit either.

2. His career-long defensive weakness may not be fixable in Simeone’s system

The second concern is the one both his current and former managers have publicly identified.

Simeone’s system is built on defensive discipline, low blocks and every attacker fulfilling significant off-ball tracking duties. That specific demand is the exact area Lookman has been publicly criticised for across his entire career.

Former RB Leipzig head coach Ralph Hasenhüttl, who oversaw Lookman’s 2018 loan spell before his return in 2019, collapsed under Julian Nagelsmann, weighed in on the issue.

“Working hard off the ball was tough for him and maybe too much, which is why maybe he struggled,” the Austrian manager told Sun Sport.

Hasenhüttl added that Lookman’s real strengths were “dribbling and finishing,” but that the off-ball demands overwhelmed the rest of his game.

That eight-year-old assessment was repeated, almost word for word, by Simeone earlier this year.

The Argentine publicly acknowledged the same problem in the aftermath of Lookman’s arrival.

“Above all, he scores goals; in principle, he scores more goals than he contributes to the build-up play, so he can improve in terms of his play and defensive work,” Diego Simoene said in quotes revealed by Into the Calderon.

“We need him to adapt to the way the team operates in that area.”

Two coaches, working eight years apart in different tactical systems, independently arrived at the same diagnosis: it means that the pattern is a career-long weakness.

Fixing it inside a Simeone side that structurally demands more off-ball defensive work almost as much as the attacking output would seem counterproductive.

3. Simeone’s track record with creative flair-based attackers is not encouraging

The third concern draws directly on Atletico Madrid’s recent history under Simeone.

The Argentine has been in charge at the Metropolitano since 2011, and across the 15 years since, the club’s most prominent attempts to accommodate a flair-based creative attacker have produced almost uniformly disappointing results.

The clearest example is João Félix. Atlético paid a club-record €126 million to sign the Portuguese in 2019 on the strength of exactly the kind of dribbling and improvisation that defines Lookman’s game, only for Félix to spend four largely miserable seasons oscillating between marginal contributions and loan exits, before ultimately being sold off to Chelsea.

While Félix had problems of his own, his failure to succeed at the Metropolitano is an example of why flair doesn’t thrive under Diego Simeone.

Antoine Griezmann, the closest thing Simeone has ever had to a settled creative attacker across those 15 years, truly thrived at the club after fundamentally reshaping his own game to include Simeone-friendly features like tracking back, helping out in build-up from the back and a hybrid number-nine drop-off role.

That kind of positional and stylistic adaptation, taken on across five years of gradual buy-in, is a very different proposition from a 28-year-old two-footed inverted winger being asked to make the same change after seven months.

The pattern shows that Atletico’s system prioritises machines who can do the dirty work over creative flair-based wingers.

Lookman is the latest test of that pattern, and nothing about the San Mamés display suggests he will be the one to break it.

Anfield next, but the Ademola Lookman problem remains

Atletico open their Champions League campaign at Anfield on Wednesday, and the trip to Liverpool now doubles as Lookman’s opportunity to respond to his San Mamés anonymity.

However, the three concerns above will not disappear regardless of what happens at Anfield. The half-space role that fits his profile is not available at Atletico Madrid.

The defensive weakness his manager has publicly diagnosed is a career-long pattern rather than a fixable coaching detail, and the historical pattern of creative flair-based attackers struggling to fit Simeone’s system is over a decade in the making.