All good things must come to an end.

It may have gone under the radar due to Inter’s capitulation in the Champions League final last weekend, but Gian Piero Gasperini called time on his nine-year stay with Atalanta.

All the signs point to the 67-year-old taking over at Roma on a three-year deal, replacing Claudio Ranieri in the dugout ahead of next season.

It is a move that marks the end of one of the greatest fairytale stories in modern Italian football history.

We now think of Atalanta as being part of the Serie A elite, regularly contending for a top four-finish and even making the odd fight for the Scudetto. But for the majority of their history that wasn’ the case.

For decades, La Dea was known as the ‘queen of the provinces’, referring to their ability to mix it with the big boys despite hailing from a small town (Bergamo has a population of just 120,000, ranking 35th in Italy’s most-populated cities list and below places such as Foggia and Rimini).

Yet they never really threatened the elite. Their highest finish BG (before Gasperini) was sixth on a couple of occasions, most recently in the 1980s.

There’s a vast difference between mixing it up with the established order and disrupting it. Yet that is what Gasperini did.

It is all the more remarkable now given everything they have achieved, but hiring Gasperini in 2016 was not exactly seen as a coup for Atalanta. He had just come off the back of a lukewarm return to Genoa, his three-year stint nowhere near as successful as his first between 2006 and 2010.

After a failed spell at Inter that lasted all of five games and one with Palermo that finished after 23, his career appeared to be on the way down.

It is hard to envision it in 2025, but Gasperini was in danger of becoming one of those coaches who impressed for a short period before losing his mojo and making the inevitable slide towards managing teams threatened with relegation or those near the top of Serie B. 

Then in his late fifties, he needed Atalanta as much as Atalanta, who’d finished the 2015-16 season in 13th, needed him. And it was the most perfect of marriages. 

Fourth in his first season and third-place finishes in 2019, 2020 and 2021 meant Atalanta were swimming in uncharted territory. The bright lights of the Champions League beckoned.

It can often get lost now in light of the Europa League success last year, but Atalanta were mere minutes away from a Champions League semi-final at the first attempt, losing narrowly to PSG in the eerie silence of the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon during the pandemic.

They lost a key player or two every summer, yet due to the smart recruitment team behind Gasperini, including sporting director Giovanni Sartori, they were replaced and the team rumbled on, Gasperini masterminding one knockout blow after another.

His training is said to be brutal, to the extent that Papu Gomez once relayed that playing matches was a ‘day off’, while Christian Vieri stated sessions would ‘destroy you’.

Gasperini’s philosophy on the game is influenced by the legendary Chinese author Sun Tzu and his military book The Art of War. “Defending makes you invincible, but if you want to win, you must attack. This sums up the spirit and mentality I want my team to have,” he said in a 2020 interview.

Atalanta would concede a lot, but they would often outscore the opposition when they turned it on.

Over the years, AC Milan, Crotone, Parma, Chievo, Bologna and Verona were battered by five; Udinese and Salernitana by six; Torino by seven. 

The second iteration of Gasperini’s Atalanta was a sight to behold. Duvan Zapata’s powerful presence terrorising defenders, the elegance of Josip Ilicic, Luis Muriel producing sporadic moments of maverick genius, Gomez pulling the strings from deep, the lung-bursting runs of Robin Gosens down the left and Hans Hateboer on the opposite side, Ruslan Malinovskyi’s hammer of a left peg and the grit of Marten de Roon in midfield.

The carousel of players every summer would, in the end, deny Gasperini a true tilt at winning a Scudetto. His side often lost ground early in a season with new players needing time to adjust to his rigorous tactical demands, and when they did catch up, Atalanta would be too far behind in the race despite a surging second half to a campaign.

Two Coppa Italia finals were reached, both times losing to Juventus in fairly tight contests. But Gasperini’s magnum opus was the 2024 Europa League campaign.

In 13 games, the only defeat was to Liverpool in the quarter-final second leg after Gasperini had demolished Jurgen Klopp in the first game at Anfield, producing a 3-0 win thanks to a couple of outstanding goals from Gianluca Scamacca.

Now firmly in his third – and indeed final – cycle of players, Atalanta tore through their opponents in UEFA’s secondary competition like a hot knife through some fine Italian burro.

Sturm Graz, Rakow Częstochowa and Sporting Lisbon were swept aside in the group stage, before the Portuguese side were knocked out in the round of 16. Liverpool and Marseille were dismantled before Xabi Alonso’s much-fancied Bayer Leverkusen were torn apart in Dublin when Ademola Lookman carved the unbeaten German side open with a hat-trick of absolute brilliance.

Gasperini continued to make the extraordinary seem ordinary.

If such a thing as the ‘seven sisters’ still exists in Serie A, Atalanta are firmly among the pack, perhaps replacing Parma from the original 1990s version. They have become part of the established order they disrupted all those years ago.

The club, to their credit, are among the most visionary in the Italian game. Not resting on their laurels, the formerly named Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia was restructured to meet modern standards thanks to money made from their Champions League jaunts.

The Gewiss Stadium is now one of the most modern arenas in the country, able to hold 23,500 people and regularly filled to capacity. None of it would have been possible without Gasperini.

Yet at times this season he gave the impression of a man sensing the end was near. So normalised has Champions League football become that Gasperini was asked whether it was now being taken for granted by Bergamaschi.

“I hope and wish not. For me, it’s the ultimate achievement for Atalanta, even if we tried to bluff a little about the Scudetto,” he told Sky Sports in April after picking up the coach of the year award for 2023-24.

Gasperini is known to be a prickly character. He fell out with Gomez during a match against Danish side Midtjylland in late 2020 that led to the beloved Argentine’s departure early the following year, and threw Lookman under the bus this season in the aftermath of the forward’s spot-kick miss against Club Brugge, labelling him “one of the worst penalty takers I’ve ever seen.”

You had to bend to Gasperini’s will – adapt to his system or you were out, no matter how talented.

For nine years, Gasperini and Atalanta enthralled, decimated and inspired Serie A. Clubs now look to Atalanta as the model on how to make the leap from small to big. 

In a goodbye letter to the fans, Gasperini wrote about “putting an end to this wonderful nine-year story” and stated the time was right to go as a new challenge was needed. He will get that, and then some, in the capital with Roma.

Whether Gasperini will be afforded the time to mould the team like he did in Bergamo remains to be seen. Patience is always in short supply in the Eternal City, and Gasperini’s teams don’t tend to start well.

There’s little doubt the inevitable statue will be built in his honour outside the Gewiss. A man who took a yo-yo club and made them a permanent fixture among the Serie A elite, who disrupted the status quo and made Atalanta an inspiration to many.