The Europa League, an Appreciation

The Europa League's appeal shouldn't require explanation. The level of play is high. The format is elegant and easy to understand. It produces novel matchups between clubs that don't often get to play each other. When it's over, a champion gets to tear up, hoist a trophy, and grab some prize money. It's not ingeniously constructed, but also this is a soccer tournament and not an education reform proposal. Chuck some good teams into round robin pools, then order them in a bracket, and that should please any right-minded sports fan.

So why is the Europa League widely denigrated and ignored? The obvious answer is the existence of the Champions League, which is more lucrative and prestigious. It lavishes the clubs that participate in it with cash, and the team that wins it can lay claim to being the best on the continent. The Europa League has a certain NIT vibe to it, a poisonous combination of ponderousness and dubious significance. Winning it isn't definitive; it's a title that doesn't function as an argument. Clubs chase it for the sake of chasing it, because it's there and because winning feels good. Which is not a bad reason to do anything, actually.

That is, if they bother to chase it at all. The simple thrill of competing against other talented squads isn't enough for some managers, and so they attack the tournament with anti-aplomb, trotting out sub-laden lineups and focusing most of their energy and resources toward domestic matches. A majority of English clubs actively disregard the Europa League. Chelsea went so far as to win it in 2013 while seeming not to care the whole time, and the second tier of the EPL—your Tottenhams, your Liverpools—tend to crash out early due to a lack of emotional investment. Perhaps this is because there's so much money in English soccer that its clubs are better served chasing the payout that comes from finishing fourth instead of sixth in the league table than pursuing whatever comparatively meager windfall they'd receive from making it to the Europa League semifinal. Maybe it's cultural snobbery, a perception that European competition at anything other than the highest level isn't worth honoring with more than a token effort. Whatever the reason, English clubs sort of ruin the Europa League.

But, as a general rule, the rest of the continent demonstrably gives a shit, and that makes for some entertaining soccer. The NIT analogy doesn't quite work, in this regard, because college basketball only has something like 12 compelling teams in a given year. Teams like Real Madrid and Manchester City, and their excellence-obsessed cavalcade of fans, imply that if you're not watching them execute the sport at its very pinnacle you might as well go to the park and take in some weekend warriors hoofing the ball around. This is snobbish and silly, but also wrong. There's a whole big world of interesting teams and players out there.

The Europa League is an opportunity for the teeming middle class of European soccer to test themselves against one another. Just as not every enjoyable movie needs to be a sprawling epic about Identity and Truth and Violence, not every aesthetically pleasing soccer match needs to feature two squads with 17 internationals each and an obscene payroll. Barca-Bayern is fun, but so is Sporting-Wolfsburg, or Villarreal-Fiorentina. This is an obvious and underexpressed thing: there are just a staggering amount of gifted soccer players plying their trade in Europe, and most of them play for clubs that aren't continental titans. The Europa League lets us watch them.

Besides, it's nice to see the Fiorentinas and Sportings of the world chase glory, however minor. A competition is what you make of it, and by the time the Europa League arrives at its quarterfinals, everyone involved wants to win it. So what we get is a bunch of much-better-than-decent teams playing soccer as hard as they can. As a fan, there is not much more to want from a game. And the clubs themselves catch the fever because the reality is that, while they'd like to play in the Champions League every year and fight domestically toward that end, they're almost definitely not going to unseat Madrid and Chelsea once they get there. Champions League qualification is a financial victory, not a sporting one. A Europa League title, for a club that finishes most of its seasons both in the upper third of the table and beyond spitting distance of the country's elite squads, is invitingly attainable.

Sevilla and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk will tussle for the trophy on Wednesday, and it will be a fine spectacle. Sevilla were a single goal away from finishing fourth in La Liga this season, and they feature Carlos Bacca, a powerful, inventive forward with a penchant for scoring landslide-sudden goals. Dnipro are a club that haven't played in their local stadium all season, schlepping some 240 miles to Kiev for each home match due to the Russian conflict in eastern Ukraine. Some of their players have helped cash-strapped fans travel to Warsaw, Poland for the final, and fittingly, the team contains Yehven Konoplyanka, a fast, technical winger who has established himself over the past few years as the best Ukrainian player in the world. If Shakhtar Donetsk are the nation's most talented squad; Dnipro are its proudest, or at least they will be for one game.

If the Europa League is little more than an excuse to bring two squads like this together, then that's achievement enough. A rich, competitive, well-played match doesn't require some grand context in order to be meaningful. Wednesday's final should be all three of those things, and at the end, one team will dogpile and celebrate and sing. That's the mark of a successful competition. That's all any worthwhile competition is, really.