Trading places: Antoine Griezmann and Joao Felix thriving at Atletico Madrid and Barcelona

A hat-trick would do it, carry Antoine Griezmann into immortality as the greatest goalscorer in the history of Atletico Madrid. The three goals he needs, on current form, will come soon enough. But it would be a piquant touch if he edged closer to the landmark on Sunday, at Barcelona, the club who interrupted his long romance with Atletico.

Griezmann is not a prolific scorer of hat-tricks, although he did register his fourth in Atletico colours in October at Celta Vigo, part of the golden sequence of performances that, when it isn’t featuring goals, is showing off the ever broader repertoire of a player who, at 32, appears more in command of his game than ever. He’s the forward who has evolved into an accomplished midfielder when the circumstances demand; in his delivery of passes in open play or from a dead ball, there is ever greater finesse and variety.

Most of all, Griezmann looks utterly at one with his environment, and with the plans and strategies of his boss. He and Diego Simeone, Atletico’s head coach, go back a long way. When Griezmann lines up against Barcelona, in La Liga’s heavyweight clash of the weekend, he will be doing so for the 360th time under the long-serving Simeone.

Their time together could have stretched even longer, Griezmann long ago overtaken Luis Aragones’s record of 173 Atletico goals, a landmark set almost 50 years ago. But in 2018, four years after moving to Madrid from Real Sociedad, the France international became restless. He wanted to be somewhere with a better guarantee of trophies. He wondered if a different club, and a different coach, might provide a better platform for his creativity than the Atletico of Simeone, with its basic template of dogged defence and counter-attack.

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