One of European football’s most prestigious tournament deciders could be played in front of swathes of empty seats — and one player has opted to sit out due to his nationality.
Premier League giants Arsenal and Chelsea will go head to head for the UEFA Europa League title on Thursday morning (5:00am AEST).
Two London clubs they may be, but both the Blues and the Gunners have made their way to Baku, Azerbaijan for the final, on the very edge of Europe’s political boundaries.
And while the Europa League (formerly known as the UEFA Cup) may not quite have the prestige of the far more lucrative Champions League, it’s a trophy with history that both clubs will be keen on.
And yet supporters of the two clubs with enormous worldwide fan bases have largely shunned attending the showpiece match in Baku’s Olympic Stadium. The extreme difficulty and exorbitant cost of getting to Baku has turned many fans off.
Meanwhile, Henrikh Mkhitaryan — Arsenal’s creative Armenian midfielder who would at the very least make the bench if not the starting line-up — has chosen to sit out this match in Azerbaijan over fears for his safety.
So how did it come to this?
While the logistics of the final are in question, the politics of the venue have bled into the sporting integrity of the match, with Armenian player Mkhitaryan staying in London while the rest of his Arsenal teammates headed for Baku.
Mkhitaryan — who scored as a Manchester United player in the 2-0 win over Ajax in the 2017 final — spoke with his family and decided not to go to Baku, amid tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed ethnically Armenian but geographically Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
This despite assurances from Azerbaijan that appropriate security measures would be put in place for him, though they were tempered by the country’s ambassador to the UK when he spoke to Sky News.
“My message to Mkhitaryan would be: you’re a footballer, you want to play football? Go to Baku, you are safe there,” he said.
“If you want to play the issue then that’s a different story.”
Arsenal’s managing director Vinai Venkatesham said the decision was one the player and club made together.
“We don’t feel he can travel to a major European final and that’s extraordinarily sad,” Venkatesham said.
“He has had that opportunity taken away from him, one that is a rare opportunity for any player.”
Arsenal has also held talks with the UK’s foreign office after a number of British-Armenian fans were reportedly unable to gain visas to attend the match.
UEFA said it respected Mkhitaryan’s “personal decision”, but Arsenal captain Laurent Koscielny was anything but pleased.
“I am not very happy. First because we need to leave one player here, because he can’t play in the final,” the Frenchman told the BBC.
“I think UEFA needs to know about the different problems they can have with the politics in the country.
“When one country has a problem with another they should not give the final to that country.
“For us it is difficult because we want to have Micki with us. He is an important player for us.”
How then, with political tensions between two of its member nations so high, does UEFA award a prestigious final to Azerbaijan’s capital?
Every year, UEFA rotates the hosting of the final among countries under its jurisdiction in the hope of promoting football in different regions.
Waiting until the finalists are known before choosing the venue may appear practical in theory, but this would ultimately lead to an almost exclusive use of western European venues, given the high success rate of clubs from that region.
In 2017, UEFA awarded the Europa League final rights to Baku, with UEFA citing the Olympic Stadium’s hosting of the 2015 European Games, as well as being chosen to stage three group games and a quarter-final at the upcoming Euro 2020 tournament.
But the hosting decision was always going to come in for heavy criticism, given Azerbaijan’s very patchy human rights record.
Human Rights Watch says 43 human rights defenders, journalists and political and religious activists remain wrongfully imprisoned in Azerbaijan, while dozens more have been detained or are under investigation, or face harassment and travel bans, or have fled the country altogether.
The international NGO says other persistent problems include “systemic torture, undue interference in the work of lawyers, and restrictions on media freedoms”.
Amnesty International’s UK director Kate Allen said in a statement that it was important Azerbaijan was not allowed to use the event to “sportswash” its image and distract from “journalists, bloggers and human rights defenders being ruthlessly targeted” in the country.
Of course, it can be difficult for the plight of a remote Eurasian nation on the Caspian Sea to gain international media attention. So trust two London football clubs to do the job instead.
When Arsenal and Chelsea qualified for the Europa League final in the second week of May, it presented fans of two clubs just a few boroughs apart the acute difficulty of travelling to a neutral venue thousands of kilometres away.
The sheer distance from London to Baku is compounded by the fact there are very few direct flights to Azerbaijan’s capital from major centres.
The costs of getting to the final, as well as the inconvenience, have seen both clubs return about half of their combined 12,000 allocated tickets — though the Azerbaijan FA claimed Arsenal almost sold out its allocation thanks to fans from outside the UK.
But why were the two clubs, who boast season ticket holders in the thousands and are followed by millions of fans worldwide, only given an allocation of 6,000 tickets each?
Baku’s Olympic Stadium holds a capacity of 68,000 seats, and both clubs immediately complained of the allocations as soon as they were announced.
But in a further embarrassment for UEFA, sponsors who were given tickets have also handed them back, saying they could not give them away due to the travel and accommodation expenses involved.
Joining the wave of dissent to the showpiece match in Baku are disabled supporters, whose complaints range from extremely high costs of travel, to stadium accessibility issues including clear sight of the pitch for wheelchair users as well as a lack of pavements en route to the ground.
Ultimately the match will go ahead: it is more than just a trophy on offer for Arsenal as it provides a back-door entry to next season’s lucrative Champions League if the Gunners are victorious (Chelsea has already qualified, having finished third in the Premier League).
But despite the match’s importance, both clubs’ fans have shunned the match thanks to profound impracticality, while regional politics seemingly ignored by UEFA have seen a player left home and human rights campaigners angered.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-29/why-europa-league-final-arsenal-chelsea-has-become-a-debacle/11150648