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Villarreal CF in the Europa League: This club can become the European Cup winner

2021-05-28T02:00:57.871Z


Only around 50,000 people live in the place, but Villarreal could still achieve something extraordinary in the evening: The club challenged Manchester United in the Europa League final. How did he do it?


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Villarreal striker Carlos Bacca, his teammates in the background: "A club that lets you do it"

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Alex Caparros / Getty Images

When the Europa League final is played in the evening, then with FC Villarreal there is a club that looks as if it is out of place.

European Cup finals usually belong to the heavyweights of football, clubs from Manchester, Madrid, Munich.

With Villarreal, it is the first time in 15 years that a club from a city with less than 100,000 inhabitants has made it into a final.

50,843 there are exactly, according to the city hall of Vila-real. All residents would fit into Old Trafford, the stadium of the final opponent Manchester United (9 p.m.; TV and stream: RTL Nitro and DAZN, live ticker SPIEGEL.de). The favorite role is also clearly assigned to the English. But nothing forbids the team of coach Unai Emery, the ex-Dortmund Paco Alcácer or the national players Gerard Moreno and Pau Torres to dream. "It's the game of our lives," said midfielder Manu Trigueros at the final venue in Gdansk last night.

Vila-real is located around 60 kilometers north of Valencia.

A sleepy place with good paellas and a charming stadium at the northern end of the flat city center.

Up until 1997 there was absolutely nothing to indicate a European Cup finals.

The highest of emotions were a few years in the second division when Fernando Roig took over the majority of the shares.

The takeover was agreed in a bar - the club had no office

The Roigs are heavyweights in the region. Fernando inherited the ceramic company Pamesa from his father and, together with his brothers, the supermarket chain Mercadona, which is now the market leader in Spain. In sport, he was initially involved in basketball in his native city of Valencia. While brother Francisco was soon one of the many failed owners of the dazzling millionaire grave of Valencia CF, Fernando quasi denied the takeover of Villarreal from the postage. The purchase price was around 70 million pesetas - the equivalent of 420,000 euros - and the deal was agreed in a local bar. The club didn't even have an office.

Stadium expansion, training grounds, youth center: Roig invested.

In structures, sometimes also in stars.

In 2006, a team with the Argentine playmaker Juan Román Riquelme and Uruguay's star striker Diego Forlán reached the Champions League semi-finals.

But when they surprisingly went down in 2012, Roig paid off all debts by selling 2.4 percent of Mercadona shares and declared his patronage ended.

According to the company's own statements, it totaled 180 million euros.

Today he is still president and owner, but the club is self-sustaining thanks to excellent youth training and a clear sporty model.

»An association that lets you do it«

Villarreal relies on sophisticated combination football. For their needs, transfers are made and young players are promoted, the respective coaches then only nuance. Thirteen professionals in the current squad come from their own youth, above all Pau Torres, who was born in Vila-real, burst into tears of joy after reaching the finals in the Europa League and speaks fondly of "defending my village". But the newcomers also appreciate this calm location. "A club that lets you do things, with great stability, ideal for enjoying and feeling football": that's how midfielder Dani Parejo defines him, who moved to his neighbor last summer after nine years of madness in Valencia.

Villarreal currently has a good 17,000 members, more than a third of the population.

The season ticket is practically a civic virtue like an ID card from a library or swimming pool.

The atmosphere is correspondingly familiar.

When the stadium reopens, there will be no need for the police because there is never any stress in Vila-real anyway.

In principle, there is only one thing missing for perfect small town happiness: a title.

In 2008 it was enough for a second place in the championship;

Somehow it never worked in the Spanish Royal Cup;

and internationally there have been four semifinals up to this season.

But not anymore.

Fernando Roig and his managing son of the same name therefore saw the moment for a controversial maneuver. Despite successful work, they replaced coach Javi Calleja with Emery. The former coach of Valencia, Sevilla, Paris St. Germain and Arsenal should bring the expertise that his teams had always demonstrated in the Europa League. He won it three times with Sevilla and reached the final with Arsenal. As with the script, he succeeded with Villarreal.

"Break barriers" was his credo throughout the season, and he repeated it again yesterday. Having overcome the psychological hurdle of the semifinals was felt in the club as a kind of historical liberation. Villarreal completed his workload without much glamor, but with great seriousness, favored by a rather easy draw (Salzburg, Kiev, Zagreb and Arsenal in the knockout round), but also with the necessary nerve strength. When an unjustified penalty for Arsenal in the semi-final first leg turned a 2-0 lead into a 2-1, they defended the 0-0 in the second leg sacrificially.

Manchester United will be of a different caliber, as Emery knows: "But we still want to break a barrier." If he won his fourth title today, he would become the sole record holder in the former UEFA Cup ahead of Giovanni Trapattoni. In addition, Villarreal would then be in the Champions League next season. In the event of a defeat, only the Conference League would remain after seventh place in La Liga.

This is the name of the newest competition in Europe. KV Mechelen just missed qualifying for them on the last matchday in Belgium. The club is the only one in the history of European football that comes from a city with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants and still won a European Cup, which was in 1988, in the long-abolished European Cup Winners' Cup. 86,300 people live in Mechelen. Compared to Villarreal, the KV is almost a big city club.

Source: spiegel

All sports articles on 2021-05-28

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