BERGAMO, Italy – Villarreal became the last team to reach the UEFA Champions League knockout stages as Netherlands international Arnaut Danjuma’s double helped them to a 3-2 win at Atalanta in their rearranged final Group F match.
The game was scheduled to take place Wednesday but was postponed due to snow, and Villarreal wasted no time in putting themselves in the driving seat, with Danjuma racing clear to break the deadlock inside three minutes.
Atalanta had more of the ball in Bergamo and mustered plenty of attempts at goal, but their wastefulness proved costly as Etienne Capoue made it 2-0 three minutes before their break.
The home side knew only victory would do for them to grab the final last-16 qualification spot in the group behind Manchester United, and came out for the second half in all-out-attack mode.
Down the other end, however, Danjuma appeared to put the result beyond all doubt in the 51st minute with a fine goal on the turn, before substitute Ruslan Malinovskiy rifled home to give Atalanta hope 19 minutes from time.
Duvan Zapata scored again for Atalanta with a well-taken goal, but it was not enough as Villarreal secured second spot, four points ahead of the Italian side who go into the Europa League.
“We started very badly and in these games it becomes difficult when you go behind so early,” Atalanta coach Gian Piero Gasperini told Amazon according to Reuters.
“The players put in a lot of good performances, but we missed a little bit. When we managed to improve the game was gone.”
Danjuma’s first came about after Atalanta were caught too high up the pitch when conceding possession, with the Villarreal striker slotting through the legs of home goalkeeper Juan Musso.
It was the fastest goal Atalanta had ever conceded in the Champions League, but it did not disrupt their flow.
The chances came and went for the hosts while Capoue’s emphatic strike and a smart finish from Danjuma – his 10th goal of the season in all competitions – seemingly ended the match as a contest.
But this Atalanta side are not lacking in spirit, and soon battled back. Malinovskiy´s arrowing strike did not cause Villarreal too much concern, but Zapata’s lofted finish did and Luis Muriel hit the post moments later.
The visitors held on, however, and their first Champions League campaign in a decade will continue into the knockout stages.
Besiktas, meanwhile, parted ways with coach Sergen Yalcin after a dreadful run of form both domestically and in the Champions League in which they failed to register a point.
The Istanbul side won their 21st Turkish title last season and had high hopes for a campaign played out in front of fans for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
But they have lost five straight league matches and sit ninth in the table.
The club said, according to AFP, that they were parting ways with Yalcin “by mutual agreement” and thanked him for leading the black-and-whites to a Turkish Cup and Super Lig double last season.
The 49-year-old former Turkish international had been in his post since January 2020.
The club announced no immediate permanent successor.
Elsewhere, Xavi Hernandez said the Europa League is not where Barcelona belongs, but another chastening defeat by Bayern Munich showed again how far they are from the Champions League elite.
After six games played in Group E, Barca had scored two goals in a pair of 1-0 victories over Dynamo Kiev. Against Bayern and Benfica, the two accomplished sides in the group, they failed to score a single goal and conceded nine, from a stalemate at home to Benfica, and three 3-0 defeats.
When Xavi took over on the back of consecutive wins over Dynamo, there appeared to be a way back, a possible path to qualification. But that always assumed Xavi’s arrival would initiate a bounce in form that, in truth, is yet to materialise.
Barca suffered Xavi’s first defeat in La Liga Saturday at home to Real Betis, a fellow contender for the top four, and now their status as a Champions League club has also gone up in smoke.
“I wanted us to compete in this Champions League and try to win it but the reality is we are not at that level. It’s hard, but that’s how it is,” Xavi said according to AFP.
The immediate impact will be primarily financial, with Barcelona missing out on around 15 million euros they would have earned for reaching the Champions League last 16 and that the club had forecasted into their accounts.
To make the same money in the Europa League, they would have to win the tournament.
For any club, in the aftermath of the pandemic, unexpected losses like these are damaging but for Barcelona, still nursing more than a billion euros of debt and trying to launch a 1.5-billion-euro renovation of stadium and training facilities, it is a hammer blow.
There will be the impact on potential signings, those Barca are now even less able to afford than before and those who might see them now, even more so than before, as a club in freefall.
Any targets in the January transfer window might justifiably wonder if exile from the Champions League is a blip, or a sign of things to come. Will Ferran Torres leave Manchester City for this?
Even the struggling Lionel Messi at Paris Saint-Germain might look back at his former club with some sense of relief to be away from it all. It cannot be entirely coincidental the last time Barcelona played in the Europa League was 2003-04, the season before Messi made his Barca debut.
There will almost certainly be a hit to the morale and belief of the players, for whom Barcelona’s status and grandure has been one of the last remaining sources of reassurance.
Trailing Real Madrid by 16 points already in La Liga may have seen any hope of winning the title extinguished but most still believed Barcelona were too big not to beat the likes of Real Sociedad and Real Betis to the top four.
That confidence feels less secure with the team about to be thrown into the draw for the Europa League’s round of 32 on Monday.
There is an irony as well in Barcelona’s steadfast commitment to the European Super League, a project that would supercede the Champions League, the tournament that Barcelona are no longer good enough to play in.
For now, Xavi remains relatively untarnished by all this, even though he has missed out on what would have been a welcome boost to his authority and kudos if he had overseen Barcelona getting through.
He also avoids the very real possibility of another humiliation in the knock-out stages that might have been even more damaging.
But in a practical sense, Xavi’s job in the second half of this season has just got harder.
He has to weigh up how many of his chips to throw at winning the Europa League without harming his team’s chances of qualifying for next season’s Champions League through La Liga.
Most will expect Barcelona to progress in the Europa league even while rotating but there are countless examples of elite European clubs being burned by highly-motivated, often underrated Europa League opponents.
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