Following 2018 and 2019, Coach Gopp took charge of Liverpool for the third time, leading the team to the UEFA Final. In doing so, he has now taken his personal tally of UEFA finals to four in his coaching career, adding to the runners-up he helped Dormont to in 2013, and joining Nabi, Ferguson and Antsalotti as one of the coaches with the most number of UEFA finals in European football. However, should Real Madrid progress to the final in the early hours of Thursday morning (5), Antsalotti will be crowned as the all-time leading finalist with five.
After the match, Gopp revealed that he gave his players a "chicken soup for the soul" type of motivation during the halftime break, which helped them achieve a reversal of the victory in the second half: "I asked my assistant to remind the players of a highlight of the first half, but unfortunately, I couldn't find it, so I told the players we need to move more space and become more flexible. So I told the players that we needed to be more mobile, to be more agile, to get away from our opponents' man-to-man tactics, and to not let our opponents control the game. I feel like we've played 500 games this season and it's just too much to play every single one of them." Gopp also praised Villarreal's excellent performance, but is confident that Liverpool still deserve to reach the final.
This is the tenth time Liverpool has reached the UEFA final, following Real Madrid, AC Milan and Bayern Munich to become the fourth team to reach double digits in the number of times they have reached the final. Liverpool's previous nine times in the UEFA final, six times to win the cup, the high rate of winning the title, remarkable.
In addition, Shadiovanni scored a goal in the match to take his UEFA knockout stage total to 15, surpassing Chelsea star Douaouba as the highest scoring African player in UEFA knockout stage history.
