Europa League: Seville and Fiorentina should shine tonight but the Europa League needs a full overhaul

A DIFFERENT LEAGUE: Joaquin, a former favourite at Real Betis, will be keen to do well against their local rivals Seville tonight

Ivan Rakitic raises the Europa league trophy as Sevilla are crowned champions (Getty Images)

The Europa League does as much for promoting healthy competition in European football as financial fair play. It protects the established clubs from any team trying to knock them off their perch.

Clubs trying to improve season on season hit a wall when they finish fifth in England, Spain and Germany and fourth in Italy because, just as they are ready to launch an assault on a Champions League spot, they have to play the competition that is guaranteed to ruin their season.

If the big clubs had sat around a table in 2009 and tried to come up with a competition that would stunt the growth of every upstart trying to crash their party, they would not have come up with anything better than this marathon of matches. Seville, last year’s winners, had to play 15 games starting on 1 August. It worships at the altar of quantity over quality and it badly needs an overhaul.

Everyone misses the old European Cup and its pure draw format that could just as easily throw Real Madrid and Bayern Munich together in the early rounds as it could allow for Malmo to reach the final. So why not turn the Europa League into what the European Cup once was – an open draw with two-legged knockout games that will not have teams doing the maths at the end of the season to see how they might avoid qualifying for it? We can even go back to calling it the Uefa Cup.

For now we are stuck with a format as arduous as the London Marathon. At least in early May we have been around the Isle of Dogs that is the group stage and we are almost ready to hit The Mall.

It is to Seville’s enormous credit that after last year’s slog, they are 180 minutes from reaching this year’s final as well.

The semi-final against Fiorentina which starts on Thursday may be the tale of thirtysomething wingers Joaquin and Jose Antonio Reyes. They were the great hopes of Spanish football at the start of the 2000s, flying down the flanks for Seville and Real Betis.

Reyes moved to Arsenal in 2003 and turned his family home at Cockfosters into a “little Seville”, where his mother made sure he never went without Spanish food. He was back in Spain before Arsène Wenger could say “homesick”.

It was £20m spent on someone who any Seville fan knew would never settle outside of Spain.

Joaquin saved his foreign adventure for his senior years, moving to Fiorentina in 2013 after playing for Valencia and Malaga following six years at Betis. He was outstanding in the quarter-finals and he can reach his first European final by knocking out Betis’s old enemy, Seville.

Joaquin is the player who, when presented to thousands of fans of Malaga when he signed for them in 2012, told them the following joke:

“It’s the final of the Champions League and a man arrives late looking for somewhere to sit. A woman tells him he can sit in the empty seat next to her. He accepts but can’t help wondering why the seat is empty.

“‘It was my husband’s,’ says the woman. ‘He died.’

“‘I’m very sorry,’ says the man. ‘But was there no one from your family who wanted to take the seat?’

“‘No, they are all at the funeral,’ she says.”

Reyes and Joaquin have always played with a smile on their face and will do so on Thursday. Rafa Benitez’s Napoli or Dnipro will face the winners in the final in Warsaw on 27 May.

If European football’s governing body wants to make people happy, it should bring back the Uefa Cup as soon as it can.