Atletico have given Alvarez until Sunday, and a deadline is the wrong tool for this

The facts of this standoff have barely moved since June. Julian Alvarez wants to leave, Atletico Madrid will not sell him to the club he wants to join, and everyone has spent three months saying so in slightly different words. What changed on August 28 is that Atletico put a clock on it. He has until Sunday to decide whether he opens his mind to Arsenal or stays where he is.

A chief executive does not usually talk like this

Atletico’s position on Barcelona has been repeated to Alvarez privately and stated publicly often enough that it cannot reasonably be misunderstood. They will not do that deal. That leaves Arsenal, or another season at the Metropolitano.

What stood out was how the club’s chief executive framed it. “Julian is really struggling. There were people who misled him, who left him confused, and the truth is that I deeply regret it,” Miguel Angel Gil Marin said. He went on to call Alvarez a great person and an excellent footballer, and to say that he is “completely confused” and going through a very difficult situation both personally and professionally.

Read that as a negotiating position and it makes no sense. Clubs in the last week of a window talk about value and plans, not about their own player’s mental state. It reads much more like a man who has given up trying to manage the story and has decided to say what he actually thinks, including the part where somebody else is blamed for filling the player’s head.

He has stopped training

Alvarez did not train with the squad for a third day running, and Diego Simeone confirmed he will not travel for the game at Sevilla. Simeone put it down to the player not being in good health at the moment, and added that from the moment Alvarez returns to training he will do everything he can to make him feel important. It has been reported in Spain that the absences are an attempt to force a move before the window shuts on September 1.

Both things can be true and it does not really matter which is closer. A forward who misses three consecutive sessions in the final week of a transfer window has stopped pretending, whatever the stated reason. That is the point the story has reached.

The problem with setting a deadline here

A deadline works when someone has a choice in front of them and will not make it. Alvarez’s situation is not that. The option he wanted was taken off the table by his own employer, and what remains is a club he has shown no particular enthusiasm for. It has been reported that he was reluctant to return to England after his Manchester City years. Marca now report that City themselves have a late interest in taking him back, which, if you have followed any of this, is almost funny.

Arsenal, for their part, have not moved. Their position is that nothing has changed, that they think a deal is unlikely, and that they will not open negotiations until the player shows real interest in being there. So the deadline is effectively asking Alvarez to talk his way into a club that has not bid for him, by Sunday, having spent the summer wanting to go somewhere else entirely. I would not want to be the person explaining that to him.

He probably stays, and that is the worst version

People close to the situation in Spain think that the longer this drags without clarity, the more likely he ends up staying. That sounds right to me. His contract runs to 2030, the release clause is reported at around 500 million euros, and Atletico turned down an offer of 100 million earlier in the summer. Nobody is paying the clause and Atletico do not have to accept anything less.

Which means the most probable outcome is the one nobody has planned for. On August 23 his own supporters booed him at the Metropolitano, and the club decided at full time that he should not go near them. If he is still an Atletico player on Tuesday, that is the relationship both sides have to rebuild, in public, with a season already under way. Simeone’s line about making him feel important is presumably the first move in that repair job. It might take rather more than one.

Read where we stand on the rest of the window