Last updated: September 3, 2026 · By Pro Sports Kit · Atletico Madrid's 2025/26 season, told by the red-and-white flag in the Fondo Sur. All jersey prices verified against live store inventory.

I am the red-and-white flag. Not any flag — the one they unfurl in the Fondo Sur every home match, the one with the bear and the strawberry tree, the one that has been passed down, hand to hand, for forty years. I have watched Simeone's Atletico win La Liga in 2014 and the Europa League in 2012 and 2018, and I have watched them finish fourth, sixth, third, and fourth again, and I have learned, from the South Stand, that fourth is not a destination — it is a weather report. Some years the sky clears. This year it rained. Sixty-nine points, twenty-two behind Barcelona, eleven defeats, a 5-1 loss on the final day at Villarreal, and a 33-year-old French forward who may have played his last match in red and white. Fourth, again. The umbrella held. The red-and-white did not lift.

That is the strange arithmetic of 2025/26: twenty-one wins, six draws, eleven defeats, sixty-two goals, forty-four conceded, a +18 goal difference, and a fourth-place finish that puts Atletico back in the Champions League group stage for the first time since 2023/24. This is the year the Metropolitano's flags were unfurled in the rain, the year Griezmann may have waved his last goodbye, and the year the team's leading scorer, Alexander Sorloth, was a striker the Metropolitano spent most of the season refusing to start.

Fourth, Again: The Weather That Would Not Lift

Let me draw you the table, because from the South Stand it looked even worse than it reads. Barcelona finished on 91 points — thirty-one wins, one draw, six defeats, ninety-five goals scored. Real Madrid were second on 80, despite a mid-season swap of managers (Xabi Alonso out in January, Alvaro Arbeloa in) and the kind of trophy-less season Florentino Perez had not endured since 2019/20. Villarreal were third on 72. Atletico were fourth on 69. The gap to Barcelona, the gap to the title, was the largest of Simeone's reign: twenty-two points. The gap to third, the gap to a different weather pattern, was three points. The Metropolitano lived in the wrong climate all year.

There were three runs that defined the season. A strong October through December, when the team won nine, drew two, lost three, and climbed to within two points of the leaders. A brutal January through April, when the team won five, drew two, lost seven, including a four-match losing streak in late April that included a 3-2 home defeat to Elche and a 2-0 loss at Getafe. And a respectable May, when the team won three, drew one, lost one, and secured fourth place with a week to spare. The collapse in the middle of the season was not, in the end, a tactical failure. It was a body failure. The midfield was, at one point, missing Koke, Marcos Llorente, De Paul, and Barrios simultaneously, and Simeone was asking Conor Gallagher and Thiago Almada to play positions they had not played since youth football. They did not collapse. They just could not climb.

Sorloth's 13, Alvarez's 10 in Europe, and a Striker Crisis

The number that mattered most, for me, is thirteen. Thirteen La Liga goals for Alexander Sorloth, a striker the Metropolitano spent the entire season arguing about. He finished top scorer for the club. He did not start the matches that mattered. In the Champions League knock-out rounds, where Atletico reached the semi-finals for the first time since 2017, Simeone preferred Alvarez and Griezmann. Sorloth started the league matches, scored freely against the bottom half, and watched from the bench as the team went out in the semi-finals to Barcelona over two legs, 4-3 on aggregate, having lost the second leg 2-1 at the Camp Nou with eleven men on the pitch and a 1-0 lead with twenty minutes to play. The conversation, all season, was always the same: why isn't Sorloth starting the big games?

Julian Alvarez, by contrast, had the inverse problem. He scored ten goals in fifteen Champions League appearances — the best return by an Atletico player in the competition since Fernando Torres in 2015/16 — and just eight in twenty-nine La Liga matches. The number that explained both was a fourteen-match scoring drought in La Liga between November and late February, a run so stark that Barcelona's sporting director was quoted in the Spanish press as 'monitoring' his contract situation. He did not move. He did, eventually, start scoring again. And the Metropolitano spent the spring arguing, in inverse, why Alvarez was not starting the league games.

The Night Griezmann Said Goodbye (and Did Not)

If you only remember one match from the Metropolitano in 2025/26, it is the 17th of May. The last home match of the season, against Real Betis, the second-to-last match of Griezmann's contract. He had announced, in March, that he would not be renewing. The Metropolitano, for ninety minutes, did what the Fondo Sur does best: it remembered. The choreography on the South Stand before kick-off was a giant French tricolore with a red-and-white border. The banner above it read "Antoine, le rouge et blanc t'appartient" — Antoine, the red and white belong to you. Griezmann scored in the 23rd minute, with a chip from outside the box that will be replayed on Atletico highlight reels for as long as the club exists. He did not celebrate. He pointed at the South Stand. He cried.

He did not actually leave. The farewell, in the end, was complicated. Griezmann's contract expired on 30 June 2026, but the club and player agreed, in early June, to a one-year extension on a reduced salary, with a club option for a further year as a player-coach in Simeone's staff. He is, in the end, staying. But the story of the year, in the South Stand, is that the flag waved for him, and that he waved back, and that nobody quite knew, in May, which of those two gestures was the goodbye. The bear-and-tree flag has, in its forty years, been waved for many men. Griezmann may yet be waved for again, in 2027. But the May night, the Metropolitano knows, was the goodbye. He just refused to take it.

Simeone at 56: A Manager Who Is Not Done

None of this happens without the man in the dugout. Diego Simeone turned 56 in April 2026, and is now the longest-serving coach in the top five European leagues. He has been in charge of Atletico for fourteen years, has won two La Liga titles, two Europa Leagues, two Copa del Reys, two UEFA Super Cups, and reached two Champions League finals. This was, by the most basic measure of points, his worst full season in charge. He did not, at any point, look like a manager who was leaving. In the post-match press conference after the 5-1 loss at Villarreal on the final day, asked whether he would still be in charge in 2026/27, he said: "I am here. I have always been here. The question is not whether I stay. The question is whether the players stay." Three of them — Griezmann, Reinildo, and Azpilicueta — are out of contract in 2027.

The 2026/27 season will start, in mid-August, with Atletico at home to Malaga in La Liga, and at home to a Champions League qualifier in the Metropolitano, in a competition they have not reached the knock-out rounds of in two seasons. Simeone has, for the first time in four years, a budget approved for two major signings (a centre-back and a right winger) and the public backing of the board for a new contract extension. He is not done. The red-and-white flag knows it. The Fondo Sur has never been more sure of anything.

Wear the Red-and-White for What Comes Next

You do not change shirts when your club finishes fourth, secures the Champions League, and says goodbye to nobody. The red-and-white of Atletico is the uniform of a team that refuses to be the weather, and the 26/27 collection carries that story in four cuts. Below are four jerseys from our current inventory that wrap the season: the away shirt, the stadium replica, the player edition, and the pre-match top in the deepest black the Metropolitano has shipped.

Featured Atletico Madrid Jerseys

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Atletico 26/27 Away - Black

2026/27 · Nike · Fan Edition

$38.90

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Atletico Away Replica - Black

2026/27 · Nike · Stadium Replica

$45.90

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Atletico 26/27 Player Edition

2026/27 · Nike · Player Edition Away

$38.90

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Atletico Pre-Match - Black

2026/27 · Nike · Pre-Match Top

$45.90

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FAQ: Atletico Madrid 2025/26

Fourth, again. The umbrella held. The flag did not lift. — The Red-and-White Flag, Fondo Sur