The Europa League is the trophy nobody, if you really ask them, wants to keep for more than a year. It cannot help but be that way when participation in the tournament necessarily means that another pursuit, the Uefa Champions League, has proved a step too far.
But that’s the wider picture, the theory. Try telling any of the eight participants left with a genuine shout of a place in the semi-finals by the end of Thursday night that it ranks as a second-rate prize.
A peculiar quality of this Cup, the one that eight teams get relegated to from the Champions League in December, the one the others qualify for the previous May or August when they have usually fallen short of the top-four, top-three, top-two or first place finish in domestic divisions they strived for is that, after much tinkering with the format, and even the name, over the last 15 years, it is at last acquiring a distinct, proud character.
There are some traditional heavyweights involved, notably at Anfield, where Borussia Dortmund take on Liverpool. There are many more competing for a semi-final spot for whom it has an apparently magnetic attraction. Of the quarter-finalists, all but two — Villarreal and Sparta Prague — have picked up gold or silver medals this century in the Europa League, or at least in the Uefa Cup, as it used to be called.
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It has become European club football’s site for provincial muscle-flexing. While the last eight in the 2015-16 Champions League had clubs from the capitals of France and Portugal and two from Madrid, only Prague represent a national capital city in the remaining line-up.
Yet only Villarreal, and perhaps Sporting Braga, have what could be described as a small-town backing.
Both of those clubs are used to punching above the weight of their relative populations. Sporting Braga, who take a 2-1 deficit against Shakhtar Donetsk to Ukraine, finished second in the 2011 staging of the Europa League. Liverpool, meanwhile, won it in 2001, in a final, against Spain’s Deportivo Alaves, that remains one of the classics of this millennium, 5-4 the final score.
Shakhtar won the last competition under the old rubric, the Uefa Cup, in 2009. Borussia Dortmund, who carried the tag of competition favourites into this round but have a task to sustain that through the second leg against Liverpool with the score at 1-1 after 90 minutes, were finalists 13 years ago. In 2012, Athletic Bilbao, who travel to Sevilla tonight, lost the final 3-0 to Atletico Madrid.
In other words, there is considerable expertise, and a lack of stage-fright among the contenders. All are close. In no tie is any team more than a goal ahead. Every home side has the useful alibi of at least one away goal should scores be equal at the end of the 90 minutes.
And the prize, for the club that emerges the victor on May 18th in Basel, will, in half the cases carry a double value.
Liverpool, Athletic Bilbao, Sevilla and Braga currently occupy domestic league places that will not qualify them for next season’s Champions League. Winning the Europa League would.
That rule came into force in 2015, and its beneficiaries were Sevilla, whose bad luck was to land in a tough group, and as they finished below Juventus and Manchester City, they dropped back into what can only be regarded as their favourite Cup.
“This competition is very, very important to us,” said Unai Emery, the coach of the holders, seeking to guide his club to a third successive Europa League title, and a fourth triumph in the competition since 2005.
“It a chance for every team to achieve something big.”
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