Continental silverware is up for grabs as Tottenham face Manchester United in the Europa League final in Bilbao.
Both sides have had Premier League campaigns to forget, sitting 17th and 16th respectively coming into this game, but the winner will bag themselves a spot in next season’s Champions League.
Ahead of the first big European final of 2025, we take you through the best stats and facts…
Tottenham v Manchester United (Wednesday, 8pm BST)
Finals featuring two clubs from the same country have been a relatively common occurrence in the history of the Europa League, and this will be the ninth.
Tottenham took part in the very first – the inaugural UEFA Cup final, in fact, in 1972 – and lifted the trophy, beating Wolves 3-2 on aggregate in the old two-legged format.
There has been one other all-English final in this competition: in 2019, when Chelsea thrashed Arsenal 4-1 in a London derby (in Baku, Azerbaijan).
For Spurs, it’s a third all-English final in major UEFA competitions. They lost 2-0 to Liverpool in the final of the 2018/19 Champions League – a competition in which Manchester United know what it’s like to win an all-English final, having triumphed over Chelsea via a dramatic penalty shootout in Moscow 17 years ago.
But United have experienced mixed fortunes in their two Europa League final appearances to date, defeating Ajax 2-0 in 2017 under Jose Mourinho – but ending up on the wrong end of an 11-10 shootout epic against Villarreal four years later under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Spurs are appearing in the final for the first time since the competition’s 2009 rebrand, having reached three UEFA Cup finals – including two of the first three.
In addition to their 1972 victory over Wolves, the North Londoners beat Anderlecht on penalties after a 2-2 aggregate draw to get their hands on the trophy again in 1984 (they lost to Feyenoord in 1974).
Success for Spurs this time around would see the become only the sixth club to claim three or more Europa League / UEFA Cup crowns – joining Atletico Madrid, Juventus, Liverpool, Inter (all 3) and Sevilla (7).
United, meanwhile, will be looking to secure silverware in three successive seasons for the first time since the end of the Sir Alex Ferguson era, following League Cup and FA Cup triumphs in 2022/23 and 2023/24 respectively.
To do that, though, they will have to beat Spurs for the first time since October 2022. The Red Devils have lost all three meetings this term: 3-0 (under Erik ten Hag) and 1-0 in the Premier League and 4-3 in the Carabao Cup quarter-finals (both under Ruben Amorim).
Amorim has already won a fair amount of silverware in his short managerial career to date – two Portuguese titles and two Portuguese League Cups – but remember what his counterpart Ange Postecoglou said back in September?
“I always win things in my second year,” the Spurs boss noted. Well, he has done so at each of his previous two clubs, Celtic and Japan’s Yokohama F. Marinos.
