Simeone Is Playing Lookman At Number Nine Because He Has To
Madrid · Friday 21 August 2026
Atletico Madrid opened their La Liga season with a 2-0 win over Malaga and Ademola Lookman started as a central striker. Diego Simeone has since explained the decision, and the explanation is the least glamorous one available: he did not have anybody else.
Julian Alvarez was unavailable. Alexander Sorloth was injured. Atletico went into their first competitive fixture of the campaign without either of the players the squad was built around at that position, and the manager moved his most direct attacking threat into the middle.
Lookman is not a nine, and that is the interesting part
Lookman's career has been built from wide areas and from the half-space between a full-back and a centre-back. It is where he did the damage at Atalanta, and it is where the African Footballer of the Year award in 2024 was earned. His first Atletico season produced nine goals and four assists in 24 appearances, which is a respectable return for a player adapting to a new league and a famously demanding tactical system.
| Measure | First Atletico season |
|---|---|
| Appearances | 24 |
| Goals | 9 |
| Assists | 4 |
| Goal involvements per appearance | 0.54 |
His debut season after arriving from Atalanta in January.
Asking that player to be a centre-forward changes almost everything about his job. A wide forward attacks space that already exists. A centre-forward has to create it, mostly by occupying two defenders who are actively trying to make sure he does not receive the ball at all. The running is different, the body position on receiving is different, and the tolerance for going twenty minutes without a touch is different.
What Simeone is actually asking for
The Atletico system does not need a classic target man, which is what makes this less absurd than it first sounds. Simeone's front line has always been asked to press from the front, occupy centre-backs, and be the first line of defence as much as the last line of attack. A quick, low-centre-of-gravity forward can do a version of that job, provided the midfield accepts it will have to arrive in the box more often to compensate for the loss of a genuine aerial presence.
The 2-0 over Malaga does not settle anything either way. Malaga are not a side that tests a Champions League squad's structural choices, and a season-opening win at home is the least informative result in football.
The question is not whether it worked against Malaga. It is whether Simeone still fancies it at the Bernabeu in November.
What it means for Nigeria
The Super Eagles have their own version of this problem and it points in the opposite direction. Nigeria has a genuine, elite, orthodox centre-forward in Victor Osimhen. What Nigeria needs from Lookman is precisely what Atletico currently cannot let him do: run at defenders from wide and arrive late into the box.
A season spent learning to play with his back to goal is not wasted for a national team, because a forward who understands the centre-forward's job makes better runs around one. It is a genuine risk, though, if it comes at the cost of the sharpness in the wide areas that made him Africa's best player.
There is also a fitness dimension nobody enjoys discussing. Central forwards in Simeone teams cover an enormous amount of ground defensively. Nigeria's next competitive window will be arriving at the end of a season in which Lookman may have been doing that work every week.
How long this lasts
The honest answer is that it lasts until Alvarez and Sorloth are both available, at which point Lookman almost certainly returns to the left. That could be weeks. It is unlikely to be months.
What will be worth watching in that window is whether he scores the kind of goals a number nine scores rather than the kind a winger scores. Tap-ins, near-post flicks, headers from six yards. If those start appearing on his record, Simeone has found something genuinely useful, and a player who can do both jobs at that level is worth considerably more than a player who can do one.
If instead he spends the next month isolated between two centre-backs and touching the ball twelve times a game, Atletico's summer will start to look like a squad-building failure rather than a tactical experiment, and it will not be Lookman's fault.
Reporting: Pulse Sports Nigeria, Legit.ng, Afrik-Foot and ESPN.
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