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Sid Lowe explains how Sevilla have done "what most clubs around the world can't do"

For a club that sells its biggest talents every summer, five UEFA Cup/Europa League trophies in t...



Sid Lowe explains how Sevilla...
Soccer

Sid Lowe explains how Sevilla have done "what most clubs around the world can't do"

For a club that sells its biggest talents every summer, five UEFA Cup/Europa League trophies in the past 11 years would be a huge achievement.

The fifth could come tonight should they beat Liverpool in the final in Basel tonight.

But Sevilla's ability to maintain a consistency high standard of play is remarkable and the key man is sporting director Monchi whose methods have thrived in the transfer market.

Speaking to Team 33 in Dublin a couple of months as Sevilla made their route to another Europa League final, The Guardian's Sid Lowe explained how Monchi and the Andalucian club work behind the scenes. 

"I think what Sevilla have done is they've also done something which most clubs around the world can't do - and certainly in Spain can't do. They've normalised sales which enables players of course to go without it being a big crisis," he said.

"You see Ivan Rakitic come back to play against Sevilla with Barcelona and he's celebrated by the fans, rather than criticised because they see this as a normal part of the process and they don't see it as the beginning of an inevitable collapse when players go because they've invariably been able to do very well in replacing them."

Ramon Rodriguez Verdejo "Monchi" poses for a photo at the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan stadium, in Seville, Spain. Verdejo, who still goes by the nickname from his goalkeeping days, has become one of the most sought-after football directors in European soccer after revolutionizing Spanish club Sevilla with a scouting system that helped rescue the team from the brink of financial collapse and turned it into a perennial contender in the continents second-tiered competitions. (AP Photo/Miguel Angel Morenatti)

Lowe added that "weirdly, the one time the model started to look like it would fail" was when they actually started to spend more ambitiously, for example on striker Arouna Kone who is now at Everton. 

But Monchi is the key man holding it all together and directing the policy regardless of the managers that are in charge.

"They have a stability and clarity of ideas that is really rooted in the fact that they have a sporting director who is given authority by the club, who has an extremely talented team of people working with him, who has a very clear sense of where he wants to go and admittedly at times that's problematic because like any model it's not perfect," Lowe says.

"There are times when managers wanted slightly different players and he brings in players that they didn't want. Because of the very large turnover of players at Sevilla, you see them take time to become the team they are and this season is another very good example of that. It took probably three or four months before they were really playing well. The same was true last season as well."

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