The Europa League Final: What Went Wrong

By Rhys James, published on 29/05/21

Days on from the disappointment of the Europa League final, there has been time for some much needed reflection on what exactly happened that night and more so why it happened. There are a few main reasons I’ve come up with.

Firstly, it's something we already knew about, but it was clear to me that the team on the pitch lacked creativity. Our best creators were on the pitch but a mix of their struggles and Villereal’s solid defensive structure made it difficult for our team to create chances and even the goal United did score came from a bit of luck after a blocked Marcus Rashford attempt from long distance.

Expected goals isn’t a perfect statistic but it tells us the value of the chances a team did create and gives us an average-based score between the two teams. After 120 minutes the xG score was 1.11 - 0.89 in United’s favour, which means 1-1 was always going to be the most likely result. Ultimately we did not create enough chances to score more than one goal.

Although the potential signing of Jadon Sancho might make things a lot easier on that side of things next season, we still had enough in that starting 11 to create more than we did.

Something that I felt may have contributed to that is the absence of club captain Harry Maguire. He has been such a consistent presence at the back for us but I didn’t feel like it was his defending that we missed on that day, it was his calming presence, leadership and his ability to bring the ball out from the back to help get the ball into the creative players in dangerous positions.

Some may not have seen it but after the game a clip surfaced of Eric Bailly and Victor Lindelof playing passes to each other at the back for a painful 20 second period during the game. With Maguire we wouldn’t have had this problem of the center backs being reluctant to take responsibility and pass or drive forward. He is the one who always is willing to do that consistently and no matter what, and especially in a cup final where nerves will have been increased, we missed Maguire’s influence.

A talking point before the game was which goalkeeper Solskjaer would select out of David De Gea and Dean Henderson. Personally I agreed with Solskjaer that De Gea was the right man because winning a big trophy in his final game would be the perfect send off. During the 120 minutes he didn’t do anything wrong, he only had to face one shot on target, which may have gone in but there wasn’t much he could have done about it.

Although, even for prime De Gea, penalties were always his big weakness. And for a De Gea who was low on confidence after a disappointing last few seasons, it was clear he wasn’t up for the task. An astonishing statistic that Solskjaer was bound to be aware of is that the Spaniard has faced a total of 40 penalties for club and country since he last saved one in 2016, with every single one finding the back of the net. Considering around 23% of penalties are saved or missed, that is a serious underperformance. Henderson however, who was on the bench, has managed to save eight out of 17 spot kicks in his short career - a well above average 47% success rate.

Although I still maintain that it was the correct decision at the time to start De Gea, I believe keeping him on for the shootout was the mistake Solskjaer made. Hindsight is a wonderful thing though and I appreciate that at the time it was a more difficult decision to make than it now seems.

Overall you might say it was a night to forget, but the players need to remember this and use it as motivation to do better in the future. This team is by no means the finished product and still has a long way to go so we can deal with the problems we faced in the final and we don’t face them again in the future.

We need more squad depth at center back so we don’t suffer so much from Maguire being injured, we need to replace De Gea with a better goalkeeper (Whether that means Henderson or someone else) and we need to sign another creative player for the starting 11 such as Sancho. Of course more than just these three things need to be fixed but these are the clear weaknesses that cost us on the day.

The players (And manager) have had enough heartbreak in recent seasons with this and the semi-final defeats and they must make sure it doesn't happen again, but I have full faith in Solskjaer to lead the team to success next season with further strengthening to the squad, now is the time he needs to be supported more than ever.