Europa League Final: prediction for the match Sevilla – Roma

Today’s Europa League decisive match in Budapest is an event with a special, metaphysical, one might say, component. In it, the team, which surprisingly often reaches the finals of the second most important continental tournament and never loses them, will meet with a coach who, if he gets to the meetings crowning the European Cup, will definitely win them. One of these phenomenal series – either the series of Sevilla, or the series of the now heading Roma, Jose Mourinho – is destined to be interrupted.

There is no escape from referring to these figures before the Budapest match, because it is impossible to interpret them otherwise than completely magical ones. On the one hand, the magic of the Spanish participant. It seems that the Europa League is a tournament even more competitive than the Champions League, which surpasses it in status. It seems that there can not be a dominant club in it. But it turns out that this tournament was like created for Sevilla. Well, or Sevilla was created for him. For her, this is the seventh exit to its final over the past decade and a half, and all the previous ones – in 2006, 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2020 – ended with the triumphs of the Spanish club. Something completely incomprehensible.

On the other hand, there is the magic of the Roma mentor, to whom the nickname The Special One (Special) has long stuck. Maybe José Mourinho no longer claims to be the best football coach, but his productivity and efficiency in European competition looks no less anomalous than the productivity and efficiency of Sevilla in the Europa League. Mourinho’s biography includes five performances in European Cup finals, including last year in the final of the freshly invented Conference League, with different teams: Porto, Inter, Manchester United, Roma. The indicator is not exactly cosmic, but the main thing here is that each of these finals, including those in which his team was listed no higher than the opponent, brought him a prize.

Now some of these series will be interrupted. And it is absolutely impossible to guess which one, because with rational factors – earthly and understandable – the same puzzle as with metaphysical factors.

If the national championship is at the forefront, then Roma’s season should be considered not very successful. A round before the end of the Italian championship, she is in sixth position (and she would have been even lower if ten points had not been withdrawn from Juventus for financial violations). But Sevilla’s championship was even worse, they are generally only 11th. The definition of “indisputable catastrophe” in this case does not sound like a stretch.

But these facts are rather a cunning trap. In fact, if we take the weeks leading up to the final, then the undeniable disaster is the results of Roma. In the championship, she has a losing streak of seven matches! And the fresh disruptor of Sevilla – three matches without victories with two draws and a loss to Real Madrid – against this background, it seems like nonsense: before him, she played wonderfully. The Sevilla season should generally be divided into two unequal parts. The first and long – under Julen Lopetegui and Jorge Sampaoli, who replaced him in the middle of autumn as a coach, was a continuous steep dive that threatened to lower the team into the “relegation zone”. The second, much shorter, opened with the unexpected appointment in March to the coaching position of José Luis Mendilibar, noticed for his creative approach to working with the modest Eibar, and resulted in the rise of Sevilla, the acquisition of freshness by all of its players, especially attack-oriented, including football “dinosaurs” – 35-year-old Ivan Rakitic and 37-year-old Jesus Navas, and super form, which allowed him to rise in the championship of Spain, and in the play-offs of the Europa League to cope with Manchester United and Juventus.

Those who are worried about Sevilla will probably always remember the semi-final battle with Turin as a beacon showing the path to success. The fact is that in terms of game style, Roma is similar to Juventus. She has a problem with driving forwards (Roman fans are forced to pray that Paulo Dybala recovers by the final, without which the front is very dull), but everything is in order with defensive density, which the club enjoys using. But Juventus also bet on her when, in the middle of the second half of the return semi-final match, he opened the scoring and took the lead in the sum of two confrontations, deciding that Sevilla would never open his strongest rear. She, adding to the movement, managed to open them twice.

Alexey Dospekhov