Where the model comes from
Atalanta have invested in youth since the 1970s because the club had no other choice. Bergamo is a wealthy city, but Atalanta were never a rich club. The path to Serie A led through players developed and sold by the club itself.
The central figure is Mino Favini, who headed the youth department from 1991 to 2015 – almost a quarter of a century. Favini had previously worked at Como, where he discovered Gianluca Zambrotta and others, and built a system in Zingonia that rested on three pillars: scouting across all of Lombardy with a dense network of scouts, patience with late developers, and an education that treated technique and mentality with equal weight.
Under Favini, Riccardo Montolivo, Giampaolo Pazzini, Giacomo Bonaventura, Manolo Gabbiadini, Andrea Consigli, Roberto Gagliardini, Andrea Conti, Mattia Caldara and Franck Kessié were developed or crucially nurtured. The list of players who made it from Zingonia into Serie A includes well over a hundred names.
After Favini's departure, a structure he had built took over. The club has belonged to the Percassi family since 2010 – Antonio Percassi, himself a former Atalanta player, and his son Luca as CEO. In 2022, American investor Stephen Pagliuca came on board. The Percassis never questioned the academy; instead, they invested in infrastructure: Zingonia was expanded, and the Gewiss Stadium was modernised.
The academy: Zingonia
Zingonia is located around 15 kilometres south of Bergamo. The Centro Sportivo Bortolotti serves as the training centre for both the first team and the youth sides – just like at Benfica, Sporting and Lyon, the same facility for everyone.
What is consistently described about player development there:
Scouting in Lombardy with depth. With around ten million inhabitants, Lombardy is Italy's most populous region, and Atalanta compete there with Milan and Inter. Since Favini's time, the club has built a network of scouts extending into the smallest amateur clubs. It is not about signing the best twelve-year-old in the region – Milan and Inter sign that player. It is about finding the one both overlooked.
Technique combined with aggressiveness. Italian youth development traditionally has two poles: the technical school and the tactical-defensive one. Zingonia combines both in a way reflected in its graduates: players who are technically assured and seek out duels. Kessié, Bastoni, Scalvini – players with quality on the ball and real bite.
One-v-one as the foundation. This is the link connecting the academy with Gasperini's later football. Zingonia has always trained a lot of one-v-one, both attacking and defending. When Gasperini arrived and demanded man-to-man defending all over the pitch, players from the club's own youth system were prepared for it.
Patience. Favini's principle, which the club retained. Late developers are kept. The transition to 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 reached the Champions League final there, Giorgio Scalvini, Matteo Ruggeri, Marco Carnesecchi, Dejan Kulusevski, who arrived from Sweden at 16 and later moved to Juventus and Tottenham, Roberto Piccoli, Michel Adopo.
Atalanta U23
In 2023, Atalanta became the third Italian club after Juventus and Milan to establish a second team playing in Serie C – the third tier, against adult professionals, playing for competitive points. This is an exception in Italy: most clubs only have the Primavera, the U19 championship, followed by a void. Players are loaned out at 19, often to Serie B or C clubs that do not develop them, but simply use them.
Atalanta U23 closes this gap, just like Benfica B in Portugal and Freiburg II in Germany. It is one of the reasons why Atalanta promotes more homegrown players to the first team than clubs with twice their budget.
Gasperini: The football and the training
Gian Piero Gasperini arrived in Bergamo in 2016 at the age of 58, following 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 philosophy
Gasperini's football is unique in Italy and can be summarised in three principles.
Man-to-man across the entire pitch. Atalanta do not defend zonally, but directly against the opponent. Every player has a direct opponent whom they track – even when that opponent makes long runs. This is the opposite of the ball-oriented defending taught by Rangnick, Klopp and the German school. It requires every player to win their duel and makes the collective dependent on the sum of individual duels.
Three centre-backs who push forward. Gasperini's 3-4-2-1 features centre-backs who advance deep into midfield in possession, and wing-backs who cover the entire flank. This creates numerical overloads in attack and risk in defence. Under Gasperini, Atalanta scored a huge number of goals and conceded plenty – 98 league goals in the 2019/20 season, at times more than Juventus and Inter combined.
Verticality. The ball goes forward as soon as possible. Gasperini's teams do not keep possession merely to organise. They keep it to find the next penetrative pass into depth.
The training
Gasperini's training is the most famous detail of his work, and it is well documented – by players who have described it, usually with a mixture of respect and exhaustion.
Intensity as a core principle. Gasperini trains at match tempo or above. Drills and game forms are short, fierce and feature minimal rest intervals. Players arriving from other clubs repeatedly described their first few weeks in Bergamo as physically the toughest experience of their footballing lives.
One-v-one at the core. Because the playing philosophy relies on duels, the duel is what gets trained. Game forms are structured so that each player has a direct opponent and must track them. Defending behaviour in man-to-man situations is a training focus in almost every session.
Pre-season as the foundation. Like Klopp – and unlike Frade – Gasperini lays a physical conditioning foundation during pre-season. More on this under Conditioning without the ball. The training camps in the mountains around Bergamo are notorious. Gasperini has never concealed that his team must run to play his style of football, and that the groundwork for this is laid in summer.
Little compromise. Gasperini ruthlessly discarded players who could not match his intensity – regardless of their name or market value. Over the years, the dressing room was built around players who embraced the hard work.
The track record
Nine years, one Europa League title, five Champions League qualifications, one quarter-final, three third-place finishes in Serie A, with a club that had previously never finished in the top five. Alongside this, players who developed into top-class performers within the system: Papu Gómez, Josip Iličić, Duván Zapata, Ademola Lookman, Teun Koopmeiners, Gianluca Scamacca, Ederson.
In 2025, Gasperini left Bergamo to take over Roma. His successor was Ivan Jurić, a former player and assistant to Gasperini, who had continued his style of football at Genoa and Torino.
The Italian context
Atalanta must be viewed against the backdrop of the Italian system, which operates differently from the German or French systems.
The Primavera and the void afterwards. Italian clubs have a Settore Giovanile with age groups up to the U19 level, 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 cheap labour rather than developing their talent. Many get lost in the process. Juventus became the first club to establish a second team in Serie C in 2018; Atalanta followed in 2023, Milan in 2024. The rest still face that void.
Tactics early, technique later. Italian youth development has traditionally had a tactical focus. Twelve-year-olds learn positional play out of possession, distances, shifting across. This produces tactically mature players, but fewer individualists. Italy have failed to progress past World Cup qualifying since 2014 – missing out on the tournament in 2018 and 2022. The debate over whether development is overly tactical and lacks technical emphasis has been raging in Italy ever since.
Foreign talent in youth ranks. During the 2010s, top Italian clubs increasingly brought young players from abroad into their academies, often in place of scouting locally. Atalanta did this too with Kulusevski and others, but the core of the academy remained Lombard.
Against this backdrop, Atalanta's achievement is greater than the raw numbers suggest: the club created a bridge in a system with no transition, and developed players capable of winning one-v-one duels in a country with a tactical bias.
The criticism
Gasperini's football cannot be easily transplanted. Man-to-man marking across the whole pitch works when every player can win their duel and the team has been coached in the same direction for nine years. Clubs that 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 their limits comes at a cost. Under Gasperini, Atalanta experienced phases with numerous muscular injuries. Whether this was down to training, the match schedule, or chance remains unresolved, just as with Liverpool.
The post-Gasperini transition. Having one coach for nine years is an advantage, until he leaves. Whether Jurić can sustain this brand of football and whether the academy continues to produce players who fit it will be decided over the coming years.
The academy sells. Bastoni joined Inter at 18 and became world-class there. Kessié went to Milan, Caldara to Juventus. Atalanta develop talent brilliantly and benefit financially, but like Ajax and Benfica, the club loses its best players before they hit their peak.
Little outward methodology. Favini's work is well documented in terms of its outcomes. However, the precise day-to-day training methods in Zingonia remain largely a matter of reconstruction, as is true almost everywhere.
Application: What you can take away from this
This section is our interpretation.
For smaller clubs, Atalanta is the most encouraging case study in this series – and Gasperini the riskiest role model.
Scout deeper, not wider
Favini's principle: do not look for the player everyone sees, but the one everyone overlooks. For a grassroots club, that means: attend the matches of small neighbouring clubs, not the tournaments where the professional academies are scouting. The player who stands out there is seen by no one else.
One-v-one in both directions
Zingonia coaches the duel both offensively and defensively. Most youth coaches only train it offensively – the dribbler against a passive defender. Design drills where the defender can win: award a point for winning the ball, a point for stopping the shot. The duel has two sides.
Man-to-man as a learning phase
Gasperini's system is built for professionals. But one building block is valuable for youth development: a player who learns to track an opponent over long distances and hold them up understands defending differently from one who only shifts zonally. A phase of man-to-man defending at U13 or U14 – two to three weeks, not an entire season – sharpens the player's understanding of duels.
Intensity takes time
It took Gasperini nine years to mould a team that could maintain his pace. A coach who demands intensity must build it up – over weeks, using drills that become progressively tougher. If you demand week-nine tempo in week one, you lose the squad.
Transition is the challenge
Atalanta U23 in Serie C is the answer to the Italian void after U19. Germany faces the exact same void. If you hold responsibility at a club: the second senior team is your bridge. Treat it as such.
Being small is no excuse
Bergamo has 120,000 inhabitants and competes with Milan. Through patience, scouting, and backing a coach over the long term, Atalanta surpassed Italy's giants. After Atalanta, the excuse "we are too small" no longer holds.
Key takeaways
- Atalanta has been Italy's most productive academy since the 1980s, built by Mino Favini over 24 years: deep scouting, patience, technique combined with aggressiveness.
- Zingonia trains one-v-one in both directions. That prepared players for Gasperini's man-to-man brand of football.
- Gasperini coached for nine years with an intensity unmatched in Italy, laid the foundation in pre-season, and won the Europa League in 2024.
- Atalanta U23 in Serie C bridges the Italian gap after U19 – just like Benfica B and Freiburg II.
- The limitations: Gasperini's football cannot be readily copied elsewhere, the injury question remains open, and the best players leave early.
- What you can apply: scout deeper, train the duel both ways, use man-to-man as a learning phase, build intensity gradually, build the transition pathway, never use being small as an excuse.
Drawing a drill where each player has a direct opponent takes one minute in Sketch with assignment lines. Deciding whether your team is ready for it takes much longer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sources and further reading
- Interviews with Mino Favini on scouting and youth philosophy, published across Italian sports media up to 2015.
- CIES Football Observatory: Reports on training clubs, in which Atalanta has led Italy for years.
- Interviews with Gian Piero Gasperini on playing philosophy and training methods, 2016–2025.
- Player testimonies on training intensity, including accounts from Papu Gómez, Remo Freuler and Teun Koopmeiners.
- Reports on the founding of Atalanta U23 and the role of B teams in Serie C.
- UEFA: Reports on the 2024 Europa League final.
Note on factual sources: Atalanta does not publish an official curriculum. The description of youth development is based on consistent accounts from club insiders and the profiles of graduates. Statements regarding injuries are observational, not established cause and effect.