Simeone, the coach who has beaten Flick's Barcelona more than anyone, hosts the league leaders at the Metropolitano

The Metropolitano once again becomes the stage this Sunday for a matchup that's already generating plenty of intrigue on its own. Atletico Madrid and Barcelona are playing for more than just three points: they're battling for the top spot in LaLiga right before the competition pauses for the international break. And as usually happens when Diego Simeone and Hansi Flick face off, this game arrives loaded with recent history worth revisiting.

Because if there's one coach who has figured out Flick's Barcelona, it's the Argentine. Atletico already knocked the Catalans out of both the Copa del Rey and the Champions League last season, two blows that still sting in Barcelona and made it clear that Atletico knows how to hurt them when it matters most.

No one has beaten Flick's Barca as often

The numbers back up that feeling. Since Flick took over on the Barcelona bench in the summer of 2024, no other coach has beaten his team as many times as Simeone. In the 10 meetings played since then, Atletico has won on 3 occasions. To put that in perspective: neither Real Madrid, Real Sociedad nor PSG, the only other teams to have beaten Barcelona more than once, have reached that number. They each managed it twice; no one else has done it three times.

That said, the German coach still leads the overall balance. Barcelona has 6 wins in those ten meetings, though two of them deserve some context: they came in the second legs of the Copa and Champions League knockout ties, when Barca needed to overturn the deficit and, despite winning those matches, failed to advance. Winning the game doesn't always mean winning the tie, and that's a clear example.

With two draws also in the mix, even the goal difference is tight: 20 goals for Barcelona against 17 for Atletico, a razor thin margin that reflects just how even these clashes have been.

LaLiga and the Metropolitano favor the Catalans

If you narrow the focus to LaLiga alone, the picture shifts considerably in Flick's favor: his side has won 3 of the 4 league matches played against Atletico with the German in charge, and they've also strung together the last three wins in a row. And if you look exclusively at what's happened at the Metropolitano, Barcelona's dominance grows even more: 4 wins in 5 visits, with the lone exception being that 4-0 defeat suffered in the first leg of last season's Copa del Rey, before Atletico completed the comeback in the second leg.

The history between these two coaches, though, doesn't begin in 2024. Before arriving at Barcelona, Flick had already crossed paths with Simeone while in charge of Bayern Munich, back in the old Champions League group stage format. That meeting produced a result that's hard to forget: 4-0 for the Bavarians in the first match, while Atletico managed to salvage a road draw in the return leg (1-1).

With all that history behind them, this new chapter arrives on Sunday. First place on the line, the Metropolitano as the backdrop, and two coaches who already know each other inside and out.