Rubén Uría: 'They didn't want to pay for the No.9 Atlético needed'

Rubén Uría says it is time to stop kidding ourselves: Atleti have a good team and a good squad because the recruitment has been good, but in the best transfer window in years the No.9 that would have been the icing on the cake never arrived. Uría is adamant: 'They didn't want to spend the money.'

Rubén Uría compares Atlético's situation to that of a sick person who self-medicates: you only know what you have if you go to the doctor and they tell you. In his view, whether the team wins or loses, eyes are closed to problems that need to be identified. Uría focuses on fitness and the transfer market, which he sees as two key areas for improving the team's performance and aiming for the very top.

On fitness, he believes several players struggle badly to finish matches at full strength, notes that some are almost always taken off around the hour mark, and asks whether this is part of a defined workload-management plan aimed at arriving in good shape for the spring... or whether some players simply cannot keep up the pace when playing two matches a week. Uría says it is not a problem with the fitness coach and absolves Luis Piñedo, but insists a solution must be found so that Atleti have more stamina and a higher tempo.

Uría also sets out Atleti's other problem: in what he considers the best transfer window, with Mateu Alemany operating well in the market, the icing on the cake was missing. The goalscoring striker being called for was not a whim but an insurance policy in case Julián was not at his best. So what happened? 'They didn't want to spend the money. That's the truth,' Uría concluded. Last summer, the El Club Uría show explained that intermediaries had offered Victor Osimhen to Atlético de Madrid on several occasions, that the club turned the offer down, and that it was also unwilling to sell Alexander Sorloth or Julián Alvarez during that transfer window.