This season, the Europa League and the Champions League have been full of dark horses, and the cold has continued. Frankfurt, who is ninth in the Bundesliga, became the dark horse of the Europa League, and the upset elimination of Barcelona advanced to the semi-finals, and Villarreal, who was 7th in La Liga, became the dark horse of the Champions League, and the upset knockout of Bayern Munich reached the semi-finals. As in the previous quarter-finals, Villarreal and Eintracht Frankfurt continued to be under-expected in the following matches.
Villarreal's dark horse attributes are more powerful than Frankfurt's. As a La Liga powerhouse, Villarreal did not dare to win the European championship before Emery took charge, and has been playing supporting roles in the Champions League and Europa League, and after Emery's arrival, he poured the attributes of the king of cups into Villarreal. In the 2020/21 season, Emery led Villarreal to directly beat arsenal and Manchester United, the two giants of the Premier League, and won the Europa League, which was Villarreal's first Europa League championship.
Entering the 2021/22 season, Villarreal once again showed the strength of the title, but they were tired of multi-line combat, in order to impact the Champions League, the team's record was once double, the early stage of the league was very bad, once fell out of the top ten of the table. Fortunately, Villarreal found relatively stable form later in the league, bringing the resilience of the Champions League to the league. Recently, Villarreal achieved a big rebound, starting from the 1-0 defeat of Bayern in the first leg of the Champions League quarterfinals on April 7, until the latest La Liga 2-0 defeat to Valencia, in the Champions League and La Liga double line to win 5 consecutive games, 3 wins and 2 draws, counterattack into the Champions League semi-finals, while rising to 7th place in La Liga, 33 La Liga games accumulated 52 points.
Trailing the top four by at least eight points, Villarreal has largely confirmed that he will not be able to qualify for the Champions League for the new season through his league results. As a result, the following Champions League matches became the only way for Villarreal to maintain the club's peak. At 3:00 a.m. Beijing time on April 28, the Champions League semi-final officially began, and Villarreal played Liverpool away in the first leg. On this away trip, Villarreal made every effort to create a good atmosphere for the game, and the official announcement confirmed that 12 planes were chartered, and 3,000 fans would take chartered flights to Liverpool, who were eager to continue to witness the miracle of the club.
According to the analysis of relevant big data websites, Villarreal has won the Europa League and the Champions League for two consecutive seasons, and first of all, there is only a 20% probability of eliminating Liverpool to enter the final of this season's Champions League, and the probability of finally winning the Champions League is only 6%. Objectively speaking, Villarreal really can't win any team from liverpool, Real Madrid and Manchester City, but they are defensively based and their overall tenacity is full of performance, especially in the case of consecutive elimination of veteran giants Juventus and title-winning favourite Bayern, they are subjectively confident enough to continue to create miracles. As a result, Liverpool still can't relax, and it's hard to show one-sidedness in the semi-finals.