The following is an extract by Chris McMenamy from the magazine TIRO: Atalanta and published by Tiro Football. It is available for purchase here.
If this reads like a love letter that’s because it is. I’m giving you fair warning not to expect detailed analysis of Josip Iličić’s strengths and weaknesses, instead I’m taking my chance to give much deserved flowers to a footballer I’ve enjoyed watching perhaps more than any other, at least in a team I don’t support.
Football discourse deals in polarised absolutes, often failing to grasp that this is just a game to be enjoyed. Whether you prefer the entertainment of an open game or the gritty siege mentality of a 1-0 defensive masterclass, there’s something for every taste. You just have to know where to look.
My personal preference is to watch a player with grace, flaws and an ability to make the game look effortless in ways we can’t truly comprehend. Josip Iličić fits that trend, especially during his peak years in Bergamo between 2017 and 2020.
A 6 ft 3 wide attacker with the grace of a ballet dancer and precision of a laser. The ball stayed hit when Iličić put his foot through it, nothing ever done without intent despite his languid style perhaps saying otherwise.
His career reads like a Greek tragedy rewritten by an arthouse director. A late bloomer whose career reached its peak moments before circumstances out of his control forced him to almost abandon the game that gave him such joy.
A bold director would set the scene in Valencia on 10 March 2020, scoring four times as Atalanta knocked their hosts out of the Champions League in the competition’s first game to be forced behind closed doors by an intensifying COVID pandemic.
It had hit the city of Bergamo hardest, making it a ground zero for the disease in Europe. Thousands of Bergamaschi lost their lives throughout the grim year that was 2020, but Atalanta still went to Spain for a game that is now remembered as Iličić’s footballing zenith. His world came crashing down shortly after, the images on TV of Italian army personnel loading dead bodies into trucks triggering awful memories from his childhood.
Iličić was born to a Croat family in Bosnia just as the breakup of Yugoslavia began in the late 1980s. His father was murdered by a Serbian neighbour when Iličić was just a year old, prompting his family to leave the country for safer pastures in Slovenia. Seeing the bodies of those from his adopted home of Bergamo depressed Iličić to the point that he was struggling to play when football returned from COVID lockdown in the summer of 2020, so he left for Slovenia with Atalanta facing a Champions League quarter-final, the biggest game of his career to date. He didn’t play another game that season.
He’d been quietly discussed as a potential Ballon d’Or candidate prior to the enforced break, having scored for fun in a landmark Atalanta season but found himself dealing with much bigger issues than football, which famous Milan coach Arrigo Sacchi aptly once described as “the most important of the least important things”.
But rather than ponder what might have been had Iličić not been struck down by an unfortunate string of events, I’d much prefer to celebrate the ultimate romantic footballer in a time when those who take the field are often asked to be robots.
Iličić came to Atalanta in 2017 as a 29-year-old enigmatic attacker who had blown hot and cold across seven seasons in Serie A with Palermo and Fiorentina. But his new team’s boss Gian Piero Gasperini knew him from a brief spell together at Palermo four years earlier and believed that he’d found the man to take his new Atalanta attack up a notch.
He wasn’t wrong. Iličić was Atalanta’s top scorer with fifteen goals in a tough 2017/18 season and things only got better the next year when Gasperini added new signing Duvan Zapata into the mix. La Dea had Papu Gomez’s Argentine flair, Zapata’s physicality and aerial threat, then Iličić’s elegance as he painted his masterpieces.
Accused of inconsistency and laziness prior to his days at Atalanta, sometimes fairly, but Gasperini weaponised his laissez-faire approach in a team built on hard work. Iličić focused on finding space, a key tenet of their attacking philosophy, and was often deadly when he found some room to manoeuvre.
He was a luxury in a team of physical freaks, making his interventions quite divine. Atalanta’s wing-backs would make lung bursting runs, supported by the tireless midfielders and somewhere in the chaos of rapidly moving chess pieces — then the knight Iličić would strike.
The eighteen-month period from September 2018 was Iličić at his most imperious. Cristiano Ronaldo won the official MVP award in 2018/19, but Iličić was the people’s champion. This was a season that began with him in hospital with a serious lymph node infection and mental health struggles as he came to terms with the sudden death of Fiorentina teammate Davide Astori, but he rallied to fire Atalanta into the Champions League, even scoring hat-tricks at Chievo and Bologna along the way.
Iličić arguably played his best football in 2019/20, scoring for fun in whichever way pleased him — a Zidane-esque volley against Parma, a free-kick from the halfway on the way to a hat-trick against Torino. He played like he had the world at his feet and for six months he did.
He returned from his mental health issues early in the 2020/21 season and had a decent campaign, but eventually succumbed again towards the end of 2021. Gasperini managed to get him fit enough to appear late on in the last game of 2021/22, just to allow Iličić the adoration of his adopted home one last time as an Atalanta player. He terminated his contract and went home to Slovenia early in the 2022/23 season.
Football’s full of people asking what might have been had the cards not fallen the way they did, but it’s better to view Iličić’s career as similar to a band that released two unforgettable albums and called it quits.
He’s a stark reminder that footballers are human beings and not impervious to the afflictions of life, but more than anything, he’ll always be Josip Iličić. Now I’m off to watch one of his seemingly endless YouTube highlight reels because I fancy feeling pure joy.
About the Magazine: Tiro is an Italian football zine. The second edition featured forty-eight pages of football, culture, food and every other aspect of Bergamasque culture all combine to create Atalanta, the football club that is the city’s pride and joy.
About the Author: Chris McMenamy is the founder of TIRO Football, a platform dedicated to Italian football, established in 2020. He is also a Staff Writer at The Square Ball, the award-winning Leeds United fanzine, which also produces a podcast and blog. Alongside this, he works as a freelance writer and copywriter, with experience across print and digital formats.
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