Inter, Roma and Fiorentina, three Italians in the final: it hasn’t happened for 29 years
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The Europa League final, scheduled for Wednesday 31 May in Budapest, is Sevilla-Roma. The Conference League final, to be held in Prague on June 7, will be Fiorentina West-Ham. Two challenges that come together on the magical night in Istanbul which on 10 June will see Manchester City and Inter oppose each other for the top step of the Champions League, the main continental tournament. In short, three Italians in the European cup finals: it hasn’t happened for 29 years, since those “golden” nineties of Italian football, when our clubs dominated Europe far and wide.
In the 1993/94 season, to be precise, Capello’s Milan won the Champions League against Barcelona, Inter beat Salzburg in the final of the then UEFA Cup, while Parma lost the decisive match of the Cup Winners’ Cup against Arsenal , a trophy in the meantime extinct in which all the winners of the national cups participated. In short, in the 2022/23 season Italy has the theoretical possibility of realizing the “filotto”, winning all three continental competitions. There is only one precedent in history: that of the 1989/90 season which introduced the Italia ’90 World Cup, when Milan won the Champions Cup, Juventus the UEFA Cup and Sampdoria the Cup Winners’ Cup. Curiosity within curiosity: that year the Scudetto went to Napoli. And here the superstitious will strike wood…
In any case, we have to congratulate the Italian teams involved in the cups. Inter, as we well know, won the double Euroderby with Milan. Roma, on the strength of a 1-0 draw in the first leg, a 0-0 draw at Bayer Lerverkusen was enough. Fiorentina won 1-3 at Basel, overturning the 1-2 of the first leg. There was little for Juventus to release their ticket to Budapest (it ended 2-1 for the Andalusians at Sevilla). Of course, the failure to qualify for the final stages of the world championship for two consecutive World Cups does us no credit, but this year it becomes a little more difficult to theorize the structural decline of the former most beautiful championship in the world. Unless you want to attribute the 2023 exploit precisely to Italy’s non-participation in the Qatar 2022 World Cup.
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