DUBLIN, Ireland — It was Michael Jordan who once said that he “never lost a game, I just ran out of time,” but as much as Xabi Alonso and his Bayer Leverkusen players might want the same to be true of their failure to complete an unprecedented unbeaten treble, the reality is that they ran out of ideas long before the clock and Atalanta beat them in the UEFA Europa League final.
Leverkusen had become the team that just doesn’t lose under Alonso this season. Unbeaten champions of a 34-game Bundesliga season, DFB-Pokal finalists and also in the final of a European competition — not a single defeat, anywhere — they were attempting to become the first team since European club competitions begin in 1955-56 to sweep the board without losing a game.
Until they arrived in Dublin, attempting to seal the second leg of an unbeaten treble, they had played 51 games without defeat in all competitions, a timespan of 361 days stretching back to a 3-0 defeat against VfL Bochum on May 27, 2023. But that run came to a crashing end with another 3-0 loss against Gian Piero Gasperini’s under-estimated Atalanta. And the harsh truth for Leverkusen is that it wasn’t even close.
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From start to finish, Atalanta dominated. Alonso had spoken before the game of how Gasperini’s team like to drop off and play deeper, but if he was expecting the same approach in the Aviva Stadium, it was a huge miscalculation as Atalanta pressed incessantly in the final third of the pitch and forced Leverkusen into mistake after mistake and part two of Leverkusen’s treble never looked likely to happen.
History was made in Dublin, but it was Atalanta’s Ademola Lookman, rather than Leverkusen, who wrote his place in the record books by becoming the first player to score a hat trick in a Europa League/UEFA Cup final since Jupp Heynckes for Borussia Monchengladbach in 1975.
No player had scored a hat trick in any European final for an Italian club since AC Milan‘s Pierino Prati achieved it in a 4-1 win against Ajax in the 1968-69 European Cup/UEFA Champions League final. So Lookman, who left the pitch holding the match ball as well as his winners’ medal, deserves all the acclaim he will receive in the coming days.
Atalanta are an outstanding team, brilliantly coached by Gasperini. They have convincingly beaten Napoli and Roma in Italy and Sporting CP and Liverpool in Europe this season, have secured Champions League qualification for next season, and have now become the first, and only, team to beat inflict a defeat on Leverkusen this campaign.
“I think we wrote history, also for the way we won it,” Gasperini said. “It was just extraordinary. We defeated Liverpool, Sporting [Lisbon] who won the championship. When we faced Liverpool, they were first in the Premier League. And now the German champions. Incredible. The boys were extraordinary, a memorable performance.”
But while this was Atalanta’s night, nobody outside of their home city of Bergamo would truly have expected that to be the outcome. Leverkusen have been so incredibly effective this season. They went into this final having scored after the 90th minute on 17 different occasions and when they have faced defeat in recent weeks, they have repeatedly pulled themselves out of the fire.
