Manchester United Kiss Goodbye To Champions League

Premier League week 37

Manchester United will play in the Europa League next season. The Red Devils failed to qualify to the Champions League after they drew at Huddersfield 1-1, dashing any slim chances to make it to the top 4.

In Manchester, the performing team has been City the past couple years and United concluded a rather chaotic and disappointing season. They sacked manager Mourinho to replace them with former super-sub and club legend Solskjaer.

The Norwegian coach did have a splendid start but the coaching honeymoon only lasted a few weeks. The Red Devils missed on many opportunities to reach top 4 and were trashed by FC Barcelona in this year’s Champions League quarterfinal stage. 

Coach Solskjaer is optimistic for the future though:

“We gave ourselves hope and belief that we could make it and we have had other results [go for us] but we’ve not been able to capitalize. It’s a big blow. Of course everyone is disappointed in the dressing room and you could say we lost the opportunity today for Champions League football, but that’s not the case, it’s been all through the season that it’s not been good enough. We haven’t been able to turn games to our advantage when we should have done, like today.

We’ve talked about next season as in we need to start to rebuild and of course next season will be one without Champions League football – that’s a challenge in itself, playing on Thursdays. We’ll see how we cope with that. It’s a big summer.

We gave ourselves a chance to be in the Champions League, something that we didn’t think was possible. We got so many opportunities to grab the third or fourth place, we weren’t able to, so it’s probably the right place to be for us, the Europa League next year.

You can sometimes use the Europa League as something positive, as Chelsea and Arsenal have done this year, as we did a couple of years ago when we won the Europa League. I am an optimist by nature and I will make the most of it. The kids will get chances to play games, that’s for sure. We’ll have to make something positive out of it, no matter what.”