Shamik Chakrabarty
On the face of it, this is a pretty shambolic Europa League final. The two teams turning up are the global laughing stocks of football at the moment. Manchester United — 39 points from 38 matches — are placed 16th in the Premier League and Tottenham Hotspur are a point behind at 17th.
Without Bruno Fernandes, United probably would have been relegated. Tottenham seemingly lost interest in the league and made the Europa League their Holy Grail once they slipped out of the top-six race. And yet, in United’s context, this is a game they can’t afford to lose.
Winning the Europa League will secure a £100m jackpot apart from a place in the Champions League next season. Neither of the teams deserves to be in the top-tier European competition next term, for they are a million miles off the European elite. But United are reportedly on course to lose £100m this financial year and losing the Europa League final and missing out on the bonus might mean further lay-offs at the club, under the pretext of balancing the books.
The club has already seen two phases of redundancies, the first involving around 250 staff and the second proposing up to 200 more job-cuts. Fernandes & Co. need to win the Europa League for the common people whose livelihoods have been taken away by Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos, the co-owner, who is in charge of the football side of the club.
At the pre-match press conferences, the two managers were a study in contrast. The ‘clown’ rant was the highlight of Ange Postecoglou’s presser. He chose to upbraid a reporter who had recently written “Postecoglou is therefore in a strange position, teetering between hero and clown” in an article.
The Tottenham manager responded: “Irrespective of tomorrow, I’m not a clown and never will be. You really disappointed me that you used such terminology to describe a person that for 26 years, without any favours from anyone, has worked his way to a position where he is leading out a club in a European final. For you to suggest that somehow us not being successful means that I’m a clown, I’m not sure how to answer that question.”
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Irrespective of the outcome of this final, the Australian is likely on his way out, with the North London club intending to bring back Mauricio Pochettino.
Ruben Amorim, the United manager, on the other hand, has the club hierarchy’s backing to continue with this job, notwithstanding the result of the Europa League final. Everyone agrees that the Portuguese needs a pre-season, and players to fit into his style.
Amorim’s press conferences are usually prosaic and at times there are too many words in his sentences. The pre-match presser, however, was full of light-hearted banter. Then again, the 40-year-old served the old wine in a new bottle.
“We need to be excited and confident but we already know the problems,” Amorim said. “There are a lot of things that we need to change in our club. The way we do everything during the week at Carrington, the recruitment, the academy — I think we need to improve. So it’s hard to point to one thing, and that will not be solved by winning a cup.”
A rule change by Uefa this term saw the Champions League dropouts miss out on the Europa League participations. With the old rule, Manchester City and Juventus probably would have been at San Mames, Bilbao, for the final instead of United and Tottenham. The fans of the two English clubs, however, won’t mind. All said and done, rules are rules.