Where the model comes from
Atalanta has invested in its youth since the 1970s because the club had no alternative. Bergamo is a wealthy city, but Atalanta was never a wealthy club. The road to Serie A led through players it developed itself and sold.
The central figure is Mino Favini, who ran the youth department from 1991 to 2015 — almost a quarter of a century. Favini had previously worked at Como, where he discovered Gianluca Zambrotta among others, and built a system in Zingonia resting on three things: scouting across the whole of Lombardy with a dense network of observers, patience with late developers, and a development that treated technique and mentality as equally important.
Under Favini, Riccardo Montolivo, Giampaolo Pazzini, Giacomo Bonaventura, Manolo Gabbiadini, Andrea Consigli, Roberto Gagliardini, Andrea Conti, Mattia Caldara and Franck Kessié were developed or decisively advanced. The list of players who came from Zingonia into Serie A runs to well over a hundred names.
After Favini's departure a structure he had built took over. The club has belonged since 2010 to the Percassi family — Antonio Percassi, himself a former Atalanta player, and his son Luca as managing director. In 2022 the American investor Stephen Pagliuca came in. The Percassis have never questioned the academy but invested in infrastructure: Zingonia was expanded, the Gewiss Stadium modernised.
The academy: Zingonia
Zingonia lies around 15 kilometres south of Bergamo. The Centro Sportivo Bortolotti is the training centre of the first team and the youth at once — as at Benfica, Sporting and Lyon, the same place for everyone.
What is consistently described about the development work:
Scouting Lombardy in depth. With around ten million inhabitants, Lombardy is Italy's most populous region, and Atalanta competes there with Milan and Inter. Since Favini the club has built a network of observers reaching into the smallest amateur clubs. The point is not to sign the best twelve-year-old in the region — Milan and Inter do that. The point is to find the one both have overlooked.
Technique and aggression together. Italian development has traditionally had two poles: the technical school and the tactical-defensive one. Zingonia combines both in a way visible in its graduates: players who are technically secure and seek duels. Kessié, Bastoni, Scalvini — players with the ball and with bite.
One-against-one as the foundation. This is the point connecting the academy with Gasperini's later football. Zingonia has always trained a lot of one-against-one, offensively and defensively. When Gasperini arrived and demanded man-marking across the whole pitch, the players from the club's own youth were prepared for it.
Patience. Favini's principle, which the club has kept. Late developers are retained. The step into the first team happens when the player is ready, not when the contract demands it.
Graduates of the Gasperini era: Alessandro Bastoni, who joined Inter in 2017 and became a Champions League finalist there, Giorgio Scalvini, Matteo Ruggeri, Marco Carnesecchi, Dejan Kulusevski, who arrived at 16 from Sweden and later went to Juventus and Tottenham, Roberto Piccoli, Michel Adopo.
Atalanta U23
In 2023 Atalanta became the third Italian club after Juventus and Milan to found a second team playing in Serie C — the third division, against adult professionals, for points. That is an exception in Italy: most clubs have only the Primavera, the U19 championship, and after that a hole. Players are loaned out at 19, often to Serie B or C clubs that do not develop them but use them.
Atalanta U23 closes that hole, as Benfica B does in Portugal and Freiburg II in Germany. It is one of the reasons Atalanta brings more home-grown players into the first team than clubs with twice the budget.
Gasperini: the football and the training
Gian Piero Gasperini came to Bergamo in 2016, aged 58, after spells at Genoa, Inter — where he was sacked after five matches — and Palermo. He was regarded as a good coach with an idea that did not work in Italy. In Bergamo it worked for nine years.
The playing idea
Gasperini's football is unique in Italy and can be captured in three principles.
Man-marking across the whole pitch. Atalanta does not defend the space but the opponent. Every player has a direct opponent he follows — even when that opponent covers long distances. That is the opposite of the ball-oriented defending taught by Rangnick, Klopp and the German school. It demands that every player win his duel and makes the collective dependent on the sum of the duels.
Three centre-backs who push up. Gasperini's 3-4-2-1 has centre-backs who carry the ball far into midfield and wing-backs who play the whole flank. That creates an overload in attack and risk in defence. Under Gasperini Atalanta scored many goals and conceded many — 98 league goals in the 2019/20 season, at times more than Juventus and Inter combined.
Verticality. The ball goes forward as soon as it can. Gasperini's teams do not keep the ball to organise. They keep it to find the next pass in behind.
The training
Gasperini's training is the best-known detail of his work, and it is documented — by players who have described it, mostly with a mixture of respect and exhaustion.
Intensity as a basic principle. Gasperini trains at match tempo or above. Games are short, hard and with few breaks. Players who came from other clubs have repeatedly described the first weeks in Bergamo as physically the hardest thing they had experienced in football.
One-against-one as the core. Because the playing idea rests on duels, the duel is trained. Games are built so that every player has a direct opponent and has to follow him. Defensive behaviour in man-marking is training content in almost every session.
Pre-season as a foundation. Like Klopp — and unlike Frade — Gasperini lays a conditioning base in pre-season. More on that in conditioning without the ball. The training camps in the mountains around Bergamo are notorious. Gasperini has never hidden that his team has to run to play his football, and that the base for it is laid in summer.
Little compromise. Gasperini consistently moved on players who did not go along with his intensity — regardless of name and market value. Over the years the dressing room formed around players who wanted the work.
The record
Nine years, a Europa League title, five Champions League campaigns, one quarter-final, three third places in Serie A, with a club that had never before finished in the top five. Plus players who became top players in the system: Papu Gómez, Josip Iličić, Duván Zapata, Ademola Lookman, Teun Koopmeiners, Gianluca Scamacca, Ederson.
In 2025 Gasperini left Bergamo and took over Roma. His successor was Ivan Jurić, a former player and assistant of Gasperini who had carried his football on at Genoa and Turin.
The Italian context
Atalanta has to be read against the background of the Italian system, which works differently from the German or French one.
The Primavera and the hole after it. Italian clubs have a Settore Giovanile with age groups up to the U19, the Primavera. After that there is no structure. Players are loaned out, often repeatedly, to clubs in Serie B and C that use them as labour rather than developing them as talents. Many are lost that way. Juventus was the first club to found a second team in Serie C, in 2018; Atalanta followed in 2023, Milan in 2024. The rest still has the hole.
Tactics early, technique later. Italian development has traditionally had a tactical emphasis. Twelve-year-olds learn positioning against the ball, distances, shifting. That produces tactically mature players and fewer individualists. Italy has not gone beyond qualification at a World Cup since 2014 — the national team failed at that stage in 2018 and 2022. The debate about whether the development is too tactical and not technical enough has been loud in Italy ever since.
Foreign talents in the youth. Italian top clubs increasingly brought young players from abroad into their youth in the 2010s, often instead of scouting their own. Atalanta did that too, with Kulusevski and others, but the core of the academy remained Lombard.
Against that background Atalanta's achievement is greater than it looks in absolute numbers: the club built a transition in a system without one, and in a country with a tactical emphasis developed players who hold up in the one-against-one.
The criticism
Gasperini's football does not transfer. Man-marking across the whole pitch works when every player can win his duel and the team has been trained in the same direction for nine years. Clubs that have copied it have mostly failed. It is a model for a coach with time and a club with patience.
The injury question. Training that pushes players to the limit has a price. Under Gasperini Atalanta had phases with many muscle injuries. Whether that came from the training, the fixture list or chance is, as at Liverpool, not settled.
The transition after Gasperini. Nine years with one coach is an advantage until he leaves. Whether Jurić can hold the football, and whether the academy keeps producing players who suit him, will be decided in the coming years.
The academy sells. Bastoni went to Inter at 18 and became world class there. Kessié went to Milan, Caldara to Juventus. Atalanta develops well and profits financially, but like Ajax and Benfica the club loses its best players before they reach their peak.
Little published methodology. Favini's work is well documented in the sense that its results are known. How training in Zingonia works in detail is, as almost everywhere, reconstruction.
Application: what you can take from it
This section is our interpretation.
For small clubs Atalanta is the most encouraging example in this series — and Gasperini the riskiest model.
Scout deeper, not wider
Favini's principle: do not find the one everybody sees, find the one everybody overlooks. For an amateur club that means going to the matches of the small neighbouring clubs, not to the tournaments where the performance centres sit. The player who stands out there is seen by nobody else.
One-against-one in both directions
Zingonia trains the duel offensively and defensively. Most youth coaches train it only offensively — the dribbler against the passive defender. Build forms in which the defender can win: a point for winning the ball, a point for preventing the shot. The duel has two sides.
Man-marking as a learning phase
Gasperini's system is built for professionals. But one building block is valuable for the youth: a player who learns to follow an opponent over long distances and close him down understands defending differently from one who only shifts in the space. A phase of man-marking in the U13 or U14 — two or three weeks, not the season — sharpens the understanding of the duel.
Intensity needs time
Gasperini needed nine years to form a team that holds his tempo. A coach who demands intensity has to build it — over weeks, with games that get harder step by step. Whoever demands the ninth week's tempo in the first loses the team.
The transition is the task
Atalanta U23 in Serie C is the answer to the Italian hole after the U19. Germany has the same hole. For anyone with responsibility at a club: the second senior team is the bridge. Treat it that way.
Being small is not a reason
Bergamo has 120,000 inhabitants and competes with Milan. With patience, scouting and a coach who was allowed to stay, Atalanta overtook Italy. After Atalanta, the excuse "we are too small" no longer holds.
What to take away
- Atalanta has been Italy's most productive academy since the 1980s, built by Mino Favini over 24 years: scouting in depth, patience, technique and aggression together.
- Zingonia trains one-against-one in both directions. That made the players ready for Gasperini's man-marking football.
- Gasperini coached for nine years with an intensity unique in Italy, laid the base in pre-season and won the Europa League in 2024.
- Atalanta U23 in Serie C closes the Italian hole after the U19 — like Benfica B and Freiburg II.
- The limits: Gasperini's football does not transfer, the injury question is open, the best players leave early.
- Transferable: scout deeper, train the duel in both directions, man-marking as a learning phase, build intensity, build the transition, do not use size as an excuse.
A small-sided game in which every player has a direct opponent is drawn in Sketch with marking lines in a minute. Deciding whether your team is ready for it takes longer.
FAQ: frequently asked questions
Sources and further reading
- Interviews with Mino Favini on scouting and the development philosophy, scattered across Italian sports media up to 2015.
- CIES Football Observatory: reports on developing clubs, in which Atalanta has for years led the way in Italy.
- Interviews with Gian Piero Gasperini on the playing idea and training 2016–2025.
- Statements by players on the training intensity, among others from Papu Gómez, Remo Freuler and Teun Koopmeiners.
- Reports on the founding of Atalanta U23 and the role of second teams in Serie C.
- UEFA: reports on the 2024 Europa League final.
A note on the evidence: Atalanta publishes no curriculum. The description of the development work rests on consistent statements from around the club and on graduate profiles. Statements about the injury problem are observation, not proven cause and effect.