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Duvan Zapata: Collecting match balls, breaking records, and driving Atalanta towards the top four
Paolo Bandini |

January 26, 2019

Duvan Zapata has struck 14 goals in all competitions since the start of December. He has found the net in eight consecutive games, a club record for Atalanta, and become the most prolific Colombian ever to play in the Italian top flight. His 13 league strikes in this stretch represent the best seven-game return by any Serie A player since Antonio Angelillo for Inter back in 1958-59.

And still, he might not be the happiest person in his own household. According to Zapata, that title goes to his four-year-old son, Dayton. “He’s always telling me, ‘Dad, you’re famous’,” explained the striker during a recent interview with the newspaper L’Eco Di Bergamo. “Now he’s expecting another football: I brought home the one that I earned from the hat-trick in Udine and he was so pleased.”

Zapata was speaking during Serie A’s winter break. He went on to claim another match-ball in his first league game of 2019, burying four goals past Frosinone. Who needs Father Christmas when your dad delivers as consistently as this?

The goals have not always flowed so easily for Zapata. At 27 years old, this is already the most prolific season of his career. His previous best came in 2011-12, when he scored 16 goals for Estudiantes de La Plata in Colombia. In five seasons since moving to Europe, he had never gone higher than 11.

How to explain such sudden acceleration in the middle stage of a career? How to explain it even in the context of this season? Zapata, who joined Atalanta from Sampdoria in the summer, had three goals in his first 19 games for the club. Two of those came in Europa League qualifiers.

The player has his own theory. “My physical characteristics impose a certain breaking-in period for me at the start of a season,” he told L’Eco di Bergamo, making reference to the fact that he is bigger and heavier than the average centre-forward. That is largely down to muscle mass, though he has been accused at times of carrying extra weight in other areas as well.

“We can add the necessity to get to grips with [manager Gian Piero] Gasperini’s football,” he continued, “and to adapt to the intensity of his training sessions. We have an incredible workload here. But the results are always excellent, so you follow him even more willingly.”

Zapata does indeed look leaner and more mobile than at other times in his career, but that alone remains an incomplete picture. Gasperini has done a lot more than simply help his team get fitter: tweaking his tactics to get the most out of the Colombian’s skillset.

Previous managers have deployed Zapata as a targetman: asking him to play with his back to goal, hold the ball up and bring others into play. It is easy to see why that might seem like the best use of a player who stands over 6ft 1ins tall, is adept at winning aerial challenges and has the physical structure to hold off the strongest of centre-backs.

It is how Gasperini used him to begin with, too. Zapata was replacing Andrea Petagna at Atalanta, a forward who is himsefl yet to reach double figures for goals in a season but who served as a useful pivot for the team’s array of deep-lying forwards and midfield runners, from Papu Gómez and Josip Ilicic through to the now departed Bryan Cristante.

Zapata, however, does not excel at such tasks. Although unselfish, and willing to put himself at the service of the team, Gasperini came to realise that his new signing was more effective when facing goal: putting his explosive running style to the fore.

This was not so much a tactical transformation – Atalanta were using their current 3-4-2-1 from early in the season – as a shift in emphasis. Zapata was encouraged to start drifting left from his central position, with Ilicic going right and Gómez advancing the ball into the spaces they vacated.

The Argentinian then has the option to deploy a through-ball to either of his fellow forwards or spread play out to a wingback for a cross into the box. Both scenarios suit Zapata well.

Against Frosinone, he scored two goals with his head and one with each foot. Nor are goals the sum of his contribution. According to whoscored.com, he is dribbling beyond opponents more often than he has at any point since he arrived in Italy, and providing more key passes to team-mates as well. 

Still, if his finishing ability has been underestimated thus far in his career it might be because previous managers did not make get him in positions to try. Zapata has averaged 3.2 shots per game this season, compared with 1.8 at Sampdoria last season, and 2.1 at Udinese before that.

The shift looks even more dramatic if you hone in on the current scoring run. Zapata took 12 fewer shots in the month of December than he had from August to November combined.

We are not talking about a flat-track bully here, either, picking solely on Serie A’s lesser lights. Zapata’s hot streak began with a strike against his former club, Napoli, and has since included a winner against Lazio and both goals in the 2-2 draw with Juventus.

Not bad for a player characterised by his former manager, Gigi Delneri, as ‘un scarpone’ – literally, a ‘big shoe’, but used in a footballing context a bit like ‘donkey’ would be in English, to denote a player lacking in technical finesse. Gasperini saw things differently. “We always felt certain of his quality,” said the Atalanta boss this week. “Now he is making good on it with a crazy degree of continuity.”

In Bergamo, they prefer to call Zapata ‘il Panterone’ – the ‘Big Panther’. His goals have them dreaming of a place in the Champions League. Atalanta are the most prolific team in all of Serie A this season, outscoring even Juventus, and sit just three points outside the top four

Zapata insists he is far less interested in adding to his personal tally than he is in seeing Atalanta climb up the table. Only little Dayton might disagree with that perspective, as he waits for dad to bring home another matchball.

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