The Europa League match to be played on a Champions League Wednesday

The round of 16 of the Europa League opens with a Sporting CP-Atalanta match at the Jose Alvalade stadium. A match that, due to the nature of the competition, should have been played on a Thursday. The 4.6 kilometres between Sporting's stadium and Benfica's Estadio da Luz created the first problem. Since then, a sequence of events has caused Sporting-Atalanta to wander around the UEFA schedule.

With two matches, Sporting-Atalanta and Thursday's Benfica-Rangers, in the same city and within a few kilometres of each other, it is usual for UEFA to recommend changing the date of one of them. However, the decision to move the 'Lions' match has created more problems in the schedule, as it also directly affected Atalanta, their opponents in this tie.

In order to move the Sporting-Atalanta game from Thursday, the first date to be considered was Tuesday 5th March. A second problem arose: the Italian club had three matches in just one week. Atalanta played their Serie A matchday 26 game against Milan on Sunday 25th February, but in midweek they had to make up their matchday 21 fixture against Inter (Wednesday 28th), which was postponed due to the Supercoppa earlier in the year.

With only three days between those two games, their next match, the Serie A game against Bologna, was rescheduled for Sunday 3rd March to allow Gasperini's men a little more time to rest their legs. However, faced with the problem of having to reschedule the Europa League clash for security reasons, Sporting-Atalanta could not be played on Tuesday, with just 48 hours between Atalanta-Bologna and the European clash.

Therefore, UEFA agreed to schedule it on Wednesday. On a Champions League day with Manchester City, Copenhagen, Real Madrid and RB Leipzig battling for their schedules, Sporting and Atalanta will do so a little earlier, at 18.45 CET, in the first round of their Europa League tie.

 

March 6, 2024