The Europa League final on Wednesday isn’t just a cup final with a major trophy at stake. It’s also a soccer match between two clubs in the midst of existential crises.
Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur have been almost impossibly bad this season. They’ve languished near the bottom of the English Premier League table, currently in 16th and 17th place, respectively, with one league match to go. Each club is guaranteed to finish with a record-low point total in its Premier League history and its most losses in a single season since the competition began in 1992. In the middle of a lost season, neither team has much of an identity. Both clubs have been searching for one for well over five years now, and each league game that comes and goes seems to move them further from finding that purpose.
But while the questions of purpose, legacy, and identity exist for these clubs right now, a faint glimmer of hope has underscored Manchester United’s and Tottenham’s runs through the Europa League. Both now have a shot at ultimate redemption at the end of an otherwise aimless season. A chance at glory. A get-out-of-jail-free card.
And these teams aren’t just playing for pride or silverware. The winner also qualifies for the Champions League. And with this most unlikely of qualifications comes the ability to recruit better players and alter the financial outlook of the club. The match could also determine the fate of Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham’s worst-ever Premier League manager but also the man who could win Spurs their first trophy since 2008 and their first European silverware in 41 years. For United, it’s a chance to salvage manager Ruben Amorim’s woeful first six months in charge and kick-start the club’s dream of returning to the European elite post–Alex Ferguson.
The dichotomy of the almost comical failures in the Premier League every weekend, while the clubs also do just enough to scrape by in the Thursday Europa League matches, has been a constant whiplash for fans. These are two clubs that might not reach the 40-point threshold that has long been considered the barometer for Premier League safety. In a different year, with a more competitive bottom three, United and Spurs might have been looking over their shoulders at potential relegation—a staggering reality for two members of the Premier League’s so-called “Big Six.” This shouldn’t really be possible given the financial resources at both clubs’ disposal.
There’s a scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker snaps a pool cue in half and informs the mobsters that only one survivor will be joining his team. It’s a bad situation, and it’s about to get a lot worse for whoever fails to get into the 2025-26 Champions League. The winner gets to embrace selective amnesia about how the season went. The loser will depart the San Mamés Stadium in Bilbao, Spain, wearing the stink of their club’s worst season in decades.
The Europa League is no stranger to teams winning the trophy despite a poor league campaign, but the difference has never been this stark. Eintracht Frankfurt won the Europa League in 2022 while finishing 11th in the Bundesliga. Sevilla won it in 2023 despite a 12th-place finish in La Liga. Regardless of what happens on Wednesday, the winner will have the lowest league finish for a Europa League champion ever. The Europa League title is an opportunity for glory and presents some very real advantages for the next season, but it’s not necessarily indicative of anything beyond the cup run itself. In the cases of Frankfurt and Sevilla, they finished seventh and 14th in their respective leagues the year after their triumphs. Amorim more or less alluded to this in a recent press conference when he said, “For me, it doesn’t matter if we win the Europa League, because the problems are much bigger than that.”
For Manchester United, you have to go back to just this time last year, when a 2-1 win in the FA Cup final against rival Manchester City earned United a prized trophy despite a disastrous league campaign. Then-manager Erik ten Hag kept his job in that moment of jubilation, but he didn’t make it three months into the new season before getting sacked. That victory can’t be taken away, but it also probably set in motion this lost 2024-25 league campaign. Spurs are in a nearly identical spot with Postecoglou this year. There was a report in April claiming he is set to depart the club regardless of how the Europa League campaign ends. But if Postecoglou does deliver a victory in Bilbao, would Tottenham really have the gall to sack the manager who won the club its first trophy in 17 years? While Spurs are lumped in with Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, and United in the Big Six because of their financial resources, you wouldn’t know it looking at the club’s recent trophy case. It’s time to get the monkey off Tottenham’s back.
Fairly or unfairly, the Postecoglou era will be defined by one match. If he wins it, he’s a club legend—even if he departs the club after the season. If he loses, Postecoglou’s time at Spurs will go down as one of the worst eras in recent Tottenham history. The margins are that thin.
Postecoglou’s Spurs started as emphatically as possible when he took over in 2023. He arrived with an unwavering belief in attacking at every given opportunity. When Spurs won eight and drew two of his first 10 Premier League matches, Postecoglou had successfully injected life into a club that had spent years trying to recapture the highs that defined the Mauricio Pochettino era from 2014 to 2019.
The honeymoon period ended, though, when Spurs suffered a 4-1 defeat to Chelsea on Monday Night Football in November 2023. Postecoglou has spent the better part of the past 18 months trying to find consistency at the club again. It hasn’t come. Consecutive years of injury crises have left some wondering whether his demanding play style is sustainable over the course of a season. His tactical rigidity has also been questioned. In the expected-goals-allowed table, Spurs finished 14th in his first year at the club. This season, they are 17th. Whether it’s personnel or tactics, Spurs have been well below average defensively and, if anything, are moving in the wrong direction.
Spurs’ week-to-week performances haven’t come close to matching the quality shown in the golden Pochettino years. And yet, Postecoglou has an opportunity on Wednesday to accomplish something that Pochettino, José Mourinho, and Antonio Conte before him could not. To finally put an end to the trophyless run at Tottenham. To end, or at least temporarily put on hold, the “That’s so Spursy” and “Lads, it’s Tottenham” jokes that have followed the club around for years.
Postecoglou also has a chance to make good on a decree he issued before the start of the season and then doubled down on about a month into the campaign. Postecoglou’s past managerial tenures have always resulted in some type of silverware in his second season at the club. As a result, he reminded the press in August, “Usually, in my second season, I win things.” Following a 1-0 loss to Arsenal in the North London derby in September, a reporter asked Postecoglou if he felt Spurs were on track to continue his year-two tradition.
“I’ll correct myself. I don’t usually win things—I always win things in my second year,” Postecoglou said. “Nothing’s changed. I’ve said it now. I don’t say things unless I believe them."
The unstoppable force—Ange’s success in year two—was officially placed on a collision course with an immovable object: Spurs’ trophy drought. Two outcomes that could not both be true at the same time. Postecoglou had basically pushed all of his chips into the center of the table, and by February, the Europa League became the top priority to win that bet. Ange was all in, and the recent changes in the competition’s format also helped him get closer to achieving that goal.
In the past, eight Champions League teams that failed to make the final 16 of the competition would drop down into the Europa League bracket. Across the last two seasons prior to the format change, that meant that major players like Juventus, Barcelona, and AC Milan all dropped down to add more depth to the second-tier competition. But since the Champions League expanded from 32 teams to 36 in 2024-25 and abandoned the traditional group stage format, the 36 teams that begin the Europa League are the only teams eligible to win the competition. This year, the drop-down teams would have included Manchester City and Juventus. Without them, Spurs and United were priced by oddsmakers as two of the three favorites when the knockout rounds began. We shouldn’t be shocked to see these two here, yet it feels almost miraculous. It’s a weaker field as a result of the changes, but the Champions League reward helps the competition retain its prestige.
A club with the stature of Manchester United expects to be playing in the Champions League. United isn’t starved for trophies in the same way as their opponent, but they’ve been one of the most poorly run clubs at the top of the football pyramid for nearly a decade. In addition to their FA Cup victory last year, the club won the Carabao Cup in 2023 and the Europa League in 2017. But since hiring Amorim to replace ten Hag in November, United have seven league wins in 28 matches. Four of those seven wins are against the three relegated teams. Amorim doesn’t have the personnel to properly execute his ideal system—the lack of attacking wing backs has been problematic all year—but will United commit a ton of financial resources so this manager can rebuild the squad in his image following a rocky first 29 league games?
Amorim’s positioning at United for the short and medium term hinges strongly on Wednesday night. If United loses, they’ll miss out on a potential 85 million pounds (roughly $113 million) in European revenue next year. The club has been tightening its belt considerably this season to try to rein in spending. They also haven’t missed out on European football completely in any season since 2014-15. It’s a domino effect. If United aren’t in Europe, they don’t have the revenues to justify spending heavily this summer. And any hope of the club’s aura attracting players dissipates if they’re absent from the continent’s top competition.
While last season’s issues primarily revolved around a porous defense under ten Hag, the lack of goals for United this year is alarming. They’ve spent a lot of money on attacking players like Rasmus Hojlund, Joshua Zirkzee, and Antony in the past three seasons, yet they are 16th in the Premier League in goals scored. Much of their creative output is solely reliant on Bruno Fernandes, and the lack of production around him has led to just 42 league goals in 37 matches. (The top six teams in the league, by contrast, have scored at least 58 goals.)
It’s hard to make the case for either team actually winning this match, given how much losing both have done this year. It may come down to who loses it less. Spurs didn’t exactly run through a gauntlet to reach the final, beating fifth-place Dutch team AZ Alkmaar, Eintracht Frankfurt, and Cinderella Norwegian side Bodo/Glimt in their three knockout ties. United haven’t lost a match in the entire competition, but they’re only here following a spectacular two-goal, extra-time comeback in the final minutes of their quarterfinal against Lyon, a sixth-placed French team.
Spurs’ two most important creative midfielders—Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison—will not play in the final due to injuries. The 19-year-old standout midfielder, Lucas Bergvall, is also unlikely to feature. When you compare this to United’s improving health situation with the recent return of Amad Diallo, you could tip the scales in favor of United.
However, Spurs’ lackluster metrics have been somewhat tied to injuries to their top center back pairing. When Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven are both fit, as they are now, Spurs are considerably better at progressing the ball forward and covering space behind their high line. There are also the head-to-head results between these two teams. United have really struggled to handle Spurs’ press all year long. Spurs beat them 3-0 in a dominant win at Old Trafford before ten Hag’s firing. Since Amorim took over, Spurs beat them 4-3 in December in the Carabao Cup quarterfinals (the highlights of that match are worth watching for the comedic goalkeeping displays), and then Spurs won 1-0 in February when both clubs were in the midst of brutal injury crises. The oddsmakers make United a small favorite in Bilbao because they’re healthier, but I’d be wary of anyone who has confident opinions on who will avoid defeat on Wednesday.
As fans, we’re all chasing the euphoria of reaching the summit and winning a final like this. The game is ultimately about glory. But this particular summit is more like reaching the base camp than actually climbing Mount Everest. It’s a fleeting victory that could cloud the view of where both clubs currently are in the search for bigger trophies and more consistent results.