Pride of their partners, Barça, Athletic, Real Madrid and Osasuna refer to football of yesteryear in the fight for the title
The Cup has rewarded the most classic football, represented by the only four clubs that were not forced to become a public limited company by the Sports Law of 1990 and are the pride of their members. At a time when great tycoons unrelated to football, owners of emporiums who venture into this business with greater or lesser success and even clubs-State are trying to star in Europe, the semifinals of the Copa del Rey refer to yesteryear, with the three most important teams winners of the competition and one who has never been a champion but is a great revelation of the season.
Barcelona (31 Cup titles), Athletic (23) and Real Madrid (19) are, in addition to being owned by their social mass, like Osasuna (runner-up in 2005), the only three teams that have always played in the First Division. The Navarrese team has also played in Second and Third, but with one of the lowest budgets in the highest category (barely 69 million euros) and one of the main youth academies in Spain, fighting in the elite for the fourth consecutive year.
In his return to the semifinals 18 years later, Osasuna gave the blow in the KO tournament by eliminating the current champion (Betis) and also firing one of the most cup-bearing teams of the last century (Sevilla). In the XXI, it is the King of Cups who rules (seven Barça titles since 2000). Barça, after being on the verge of bankruptcy, is now, with more than 143,000 members, the seventh richest club in the world and, relaunched by levers, with a record budget of 1,255 million, repeats the semifinals two years later.
Real Madrid’s for this season is 770 million, but its close to 100,000 members boast of owning the second most economically powerful club on the planet, second only to Manchester City. Among the 100 most valuable are also Athletic (position 51 according to Transfermartk) and Osasuna (position 78).
quarries
However, the sporting merit of the club from Biscay and Navarre is light years ahead of the two colossi of Spanish football, with the Bilbao’s philosophy of incorporating only footballers born or trained in the Basque Country or Navarra and the rojillo also represented almost exclusively by national players. With Lezama and Tajonar as flags of such prolific youth academies, their respective coaches, Ernesto Valverde and Jagoba Arrasate, are also ‘of the house’.
The man from Extremadura, as well as a former rojiblanco player, trained as a coach in the lower categories of Athletic. The Biscayan, hardened in the mud as a footballer outside of professional football, before arriving at Osasuna and ascending from Second to First in 2019, was coach of Real Sociedad and Numancia, which Arrasate also led to the semifinals and round of 16 Cup, respectively.
Xavi Hernández is also the greatest exponent of La Masia and now enjoys stars like Pedri, Gavi, Ansu Fati or Balde. Carlo Ancelotti is the foreign semifinalist coach and also the only one who does not exploit, for well-known reasons, the talent of Madrid’s upbringing. Another footballer from the Barça academy, Ez Abde, on loan from the Barça club to Osasuna, became the great hero of the rojillo team in the quarterfinal tie, decided in extra time by the young Spanish-Moroccan winger.
Precisely, since the new Cup format with a single match up to the semifinals was established four years ago, the competition has allowed teams to reach this tie in recent editions, previously also with hardly any options, in the case of Mirandés, Levante, Rayo Vallecano or Grenade. Now the doors have been opened to Osasuna, to face its sixth cup semifinal in its 123-year history.
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