3️⃣ questions ahead of the Europa League final ❓ | OneFootball

All eyes are on Budapest on Wednesday as Sevilla and Roma face off with Europa League glory at stake.

We ponder the three burning questions ahead of kick-off.

Is a Sevilla win inevitable?

There are few more iconic duos in world football than Sevilla and the Europa League.

Coaches come and go (that has been a theme this season especially; José Luis Mendilibar is Sevilla’s third of the campaign) as do players but their love affair with this competition remains the same.

They are the competition’s most successful side and are chasing an unprecedented seventh title. In a season where they have chopped and changed and struggled against relegation for a spell, they’ve still ended up in the final.

That alone almost carries a sense of impending doom for Roma. Even when the Andalusians aren’t at their best they find a way in the Europa League, as Manchester United and Juventus have found out this season

Sevilla have a perfect record when contesting the final, even if their coach is in the first of his career, and Mendilibar does have some selection dilemmas to resolve if he is to make it a magnificent seven.

With Lucas Ocampos and Youssef En-Nesyri’s places secure, he has a decision to make on Oliver Torres or Suso in the XI, while he also has a call to make on the left, with Marcos Acuña suspended.

But there is a sense with this club, in this competition, that it doesn’t matter who is there. The end result will be the same.

Will Roma’s all-in approach backfire?

José Mourinho has changed tack in the Giallorossi’s quest to return to Champions League football.

In recent months, priority appears to have shifted from securing access via a top four Serie A finish (with Juventus’ points deduction uncertainty not helping in that regard) to putting all of their eggs in the Europa League basket.

The strategy worked last season as Roma secured Europa League football with a Conference League win, although they would have entered regardless of the win over Feyenoord after locking down a sixth place finish.

But there is a real concern among observers in Italy that the pressure of pinning all of their Champions League hopes into a one-off game against dangerous opposition could get to Roma.

Their coach, though, is understandably shifting the pressure entirely away from his side by insisting they shouldn’t even be this close to Europe’s top club competition with their investment.

“With a transfer budget of €7m, you need a miracle to qualify for the Champions League,” he said last week.

He may be a miracle worker but even he may struggle to mastermind another success due to injury concerns hanging over Paulo Dybala, Chris Smalling and Leonardo Spinazzola too.

If he can, more history awaits and Mourinho will become the first coach ever to win this competition with three different teams.

Will the exes come back to haunt Roma?

There are two key figures in the Sevilla camp who the Lupi are quite familiar with.

The first is a man who is not remembered fondly in Rome to say the least – sporting director Monchi.

After his sterling work at Sevilla resulted in 11 trophies, he left for Roma in 2017 but his short tenure there was fraught with expensive errors in the market, in-fighting behind the scenes and he remains an unpopular figure in the Eternal City.

For what it is worth, he has held his hands up when it comes to that ill-fated spell and acknowledges that underestimating the size of the club and project was what ultimately proved fatal.

“The big mistake was that I had to better understand what Roma was. What it represents for the city, the fans and the press,” he recently admitted when assessing what went wrong. “By the time I realised, it was too late so 95% of the responsibility is mine.”

While he cannot hurt Roma in a direct sense on the field of play on Wednesday, another well-known name could.

Monchi brought Erik Lamela to southern Spain two years ago – a decade on from his successful two-season stay at the Stadio Olimpico where his dazzling feet and eye for goal made him a popular figure before he departed for Tottenham as part of their package to replace Gareth Bale.

It was his goal against Juventus in the semi-final which punched Sevilla’s ticket to Hungary. Will he repeat the feat against his former employers?