Lautaro Martínez wants 2025 to start in the best way. The forward of the Argentine National Team will begin this Thursday the defense of the Super Cup title with Inter Milan, which can achieve a historic four-time consecutive championship. Opposite will be Atalanta, with Mateo Retegui and current leader of Serie A, with whom they will face in a very attractive semifinal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The match will be played starting at 4:00 p.m. (Argentine time), with television from DSports and the Disney+ platform.
On Friday it will be the turn of the second semi-final, between a Milan that has just changed its coach and a Juventus of Nicolás González that has fallen behind in the Italian league. On Monday the 6th, the final will decide the ‘super champion’ of Italian football.
It will be the fifth edition of this ‘Supercoppa’ in Saudi Arabia and the menu is very tempting for the ‘tifosi’.
The first semi-final seems from the outset to be an ‘early final’ as it faces what appear to be the two best Italian teams of the moment, an Atalanta that commands Serie A with 41 points and an Inter that is third, with 40 points. In between they have Naples in their league (2nd, 41), which is not present in this Super Cup.
Inter, the current champion of Italy, were the winners of the last three editions of their country’s Super Cup and will try to rely on their experience and pedigree against an Atalanta that only won two trophies in its history, an Italian Cup in 1963 and the Europa League achieved on May 22, 2024.
“We are facing the strongest team in our championship. It is an important test to see if we have progressed,” warned Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini, whose team qualified for this Super Cup as a finalist in the last Italian Cup. where they lost the final against Juventus.
Atalanta recently had eleven consecutive victories in Serie A, until last Saturday the streak was ended with a 1-1 draw against Lazio.
In the second semifinal, on Friday, two teams that have disappointed in the first round of their national championship will face each other.
AC Milan, runners-up in Italy in the 2023-2024 season, is 14 points behind leader Atalanta, while Thiago Motta’s Juventus has only lost one league game this season but collects draws, which relegate it to sixth place.
The Milan bench will be one of the focuses of interest. The new Portuguese coach of the ‘Rossonero’ team will sit there, the Portuguese Sergio Conceiçao, who succeeded his compatriot Paulo Fonseca on Monday, who was fired after just six months in the position.