Video fanatic Unai Emery took his team to victory in the Europa League last year and wants to do the same against Dnipro in this year’s final • Dnipro hope gritty approach will blunt Sevilla in Europa League final

At the end of Sevilla’s Europa League semi-final win over Fiorentina their manager, Unai Emery, sought out the winger Joaquín, embraced him, put an arm around his shoulder and walked him through a detailed tactical analysis, explaining precisely how the plan had come together. None of which would be particularly unusual, except that Joaquín does not play for Sevilla; he plays for Fiorentina. “I told him: ‘We spent three days working on how to stop you, first with videos and then on the training pitch,’” Emery says. “And he was like: ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’”

Joaquín knows all right. Not only had he been nullified, Sevilla winning 5-0 on aggregate to reach the final against Dnipro, but, having played under Emery at Valencia, he could imagine the preparation; he had suffered it now and he had suffered it then. A few days earlier he had been asked about his former manager. “Emery put on so many videos I ran out of popcorn,” Joaquín replied. “He’s obsessed by football, it’s practically an illness. He’s one of the best managers I’ve had. I worked with him for three years ... I couldn’t handle a fourth.”

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Spend time with Emery and you get a glimpse of that. He is engaging company, the energy and enthusiasm overflowing. An hour flies by the way that his Sevilla team do; fast, intense. The son and grandson of footballers, Emery talks about the kid he was, unable to take his eyes off Real Sociedad’s Roberto López Ufarte, and the coach he became, aged 34. The coach he always was, in fact, even if he never imagined himself at Uefa’s technical meetings where, he says with a grin, “Alex Ferguson was in charge”.

He talks about ideas and method, the depth of detail fascinating. He talks about faith and nerves, never giving in. He talks about commitment and time, the way the job engulfs him. He talks about his own hyperactivity and about being a bad loser, apologetically noting that he was happy to have a post-match glass of wine with David Moyes when he had drawn with Moyes’ Manchester United but not when he had lost to the same manager’s Real Sociedad.

“I live football as passion and emotion,” Emery says. Almost an “illness” in Joaquín’s words: something to be enjoyed but something to be taken seriously too. “My dad always said you have to value and respect the responsibility you’ve been given,” Emery recalls of his father Juan, who died a fortnight ago. “When I coach, I take that responsibility seriously because I know people have trusted in me and there are thousands of supporters whose emotions are bound up in what we do.”

It is afternoon in Seville and it is hot. The players have now left the club’s training ground, which is a 15-minute drive from their Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium. The first thing they did when they arrived, just like every morning, was to have a blood test; the last thing they did before leaving was to eat together. Emery is still here, wading through the videos of Dnipro. He does the editing himself, cutting and pasting and analysing.

“For every game I might have spent 12 hours just on the video,” he says. “Videos are very important. We work hard so that they have the best information and it has to be a good video: in an hour the players have to understand everything you’ve seen in 12.”

That is the collective screening; there is also a private showing. When he was at Valencia, Emery gave each player his own pen drive with images and information on the men they would be facing. He suspected that one player was not bothering to do his “homework” – he will not say who it was but it was not Joaquín – so one week he gave him a blank pen drive. “‘Did you see it?’ ‘Yes, don’t worry boss’. And it was empty.” These days at Sevilla the individualised analyses, videos that are three or four minutes long, are done with the players in the final hour before the game.

Unai Emery prepares his team to face Dnipro. Photograph: Radek Pietruszka/EPA

“I always say: when I was 16, 18, I would go to school and I would have an hour of Latin, maths, history, philosophy, English, an hour of I don’t-know-what ... six hours. Here you come in and you have an hour of football ... an hour! Football! An hour of football, and you like football. So a video [is not too much to ask].” Emery smiles. While he admits that players can feel “watched”, that the methods are “invasive”, he has won them over.

“Implication is a cumulative process that generates union in the team and mutual respect. Either we all work or let’s just burst the ball,” he says. “In the end they ask for the videos, for work, and that’s the best thing that can happen. To start with, maybe four ask; when you educate them, maybe 14 do; and when you educate-educate, when they see that they’re developing, that it works and you win, then 24 do.”

Players improve. The list of players Emery has worked with and helped develop is impressive: Ivan Rakitic, David Albelda, Jesús Navas and Álvaro Negredo among them. The two that stand out most, however, are David Silva and Juan Mata. “Silva might be the best; he made us play. And Mata is the sharpest, brightest player out there,” he says, hands moving to the rhythm of Mata’s passing, soon joined by ping-pong sound-effects. “Mata’s clever, very clever, the cleverest of the lot.”

The satisfaction in seeing them succeed, the pride in his teaching role, is clear. But all of them have gone. Last summer, Rakitic, Alberto Moreno and Federico Fazio left; the summer before Negredo, Navas, Gary Medel and Geoffrey Kondogbia. This summer, others will probably depart too. It is a familiar routine, the fate of Spain’s “other” clubs, and one Emery also experienced at Valencia, who finished third under him every year.

In total 18 players left in the summer. Eleven arrived, including Gerard Deulofeu, who came on loan from Barcelona, via Everton, and Iago Aspas, who joined from Liverpool. Neither has had a significant impact and, while Emery says Sevilla plan to exercise their option to buy Aspas, insisting “next year could be his year”, it seems unlikely that Deulofeu will continue.

“He has incredible qualities but lacks others. Put him out there, one on one and ... pfff,” Emery says, blowing out his cheeks in admiration. “But make him play football with team-mates, on a big pitch, and it’s hard. He doesn’t have the maturity or capacity for sacrifice yet. I told him: ‘There are players here who aspire to a contract like yours, men with less talent but more hunger. Iborra, Carriço, Vitolo. They know what it costs. You haven’t experienced that. When you do, you’ll grow. I hope you get that. If not here, somewhere else.’”

The marginalisation of Aspas and, especially, Deulofeu could have been divisive. But results have been good and others have stepped up instead. Éver Banega, a player Emery rescued from Valencia, has been superb; Aleix Vidal and Vitolo have made the Spain team; Grzegorz Krychowiak has been arguably the country’s outstanding defensive midfielder; José Antonio Reyes is as fun to watch as ever; Carlos Bacca scored 22 league goals.

Emery took over in January 2013 and Sevilla had finished ninth at the end of the previous season. Despite early doubts, the supporters have connected superbly with him. This is his second full season and they have finished fifth both times. Only Real Madrid and Barcelona scored more goals than they did domestically and, when they were defeated 3-2 by Real thanks to a Cristiano Ronaldo hat-trick, it was the first time they had been beaten at home in 34 matches. They finished the campaign with more points than any other season in their history.

Best of all, tomorrow night, they will play their second consecutive Europa League final, having won 4-2 on penalties against Benfica last year. Win again and they will have won the trophy four times – a record. These are among the best days of their lives. There may be no stadium in Spain where the communion between the pitch and the stands is as strong as at the Sánchez Pizjuán, as if driven by the same forceand tomorrow night’s final, their connection to the Europa League, is central to that.

“When I arrived at Sevilla, the first thing they said to me was: ‘Unai, playing in the Champions League, like Valencia did with you, is lovely but you haven’t experienced what it is to win things,’” says Emery. “Now I have; I have felt it. And it is the greatest feeling there is, something really shared. We can’t be a super-top team because of budget. But if you can grow, it’s very gratifying. And joy comes from the ilusión, the hope, the dream, of winning a title.”

This point is a particularly pertinent one for a trophy that has not always been embraced, particularly in England where some clubs appear happier with an extra point or place in the league than the glory of competing. Emery struggles to find an explanation but agrees that to not embrace the competition is to miss the essence of the game: to compete. “Fans want their emotions to come to the surface,” he says. “How? By their team transmitting intensity, attacking, scoring goals, competing, winning. That awakens them. You have to win. You have to generate ilusión.”

“Football is emotion. There’s an economic [imperative] but what fans really want is to enjoy their team. If you have money but don’t generate feeling, it’s worthless. You play the Champions League but get knocked out in the group, losing all your games, and [the fan says:] ‘Sure, you’ve made €20m, but that means nothing to me.’”

“I had Everton down as a contender, representatives of English football, but they were knocked out,” Emery continues. “City and United came into the Europa League after being knocked out of the Champions League [a couple of seasons ago] and you think ‘they’ll compete’. But they didn’t. The English league is so strong economically, but they don’t compete.”

The excuse is that they have to prioritise the league or that this tournament is seen as just too secondary. “I don’t know: Sevilla have competed in the league and the Europa League,” Emery notes. “It’s true that having had the joy of winning this trophy, being in another final, the fans want to be in the Champions League. We want more, we want to keep growing, and they want to see Arsenal, Manchester United, Bayern Munich here. They want us to play the biggest teams. But our mentality is: ‘we want this’, and not because of qualification but because of the ilusión. Often, people want to enjoy what comes next. No, no, enjoy the now.”

Sevilla will enjoy the now, that’s for sure. “In the summer we wanted Gaston Ramírez, but he went to Hull City,” Emery reveals. “We can’t compete economically with Hull City. We pay less, but we compete more. It’s hard to explain that. Ramírez didn’t even reply, he ignored my calls. We had won the Europa League but he didn’t pick up the phone. I don’t know if he is playing, but now we’re in another final. Our fans love this competition.”

He pauses. “Football is about moments,” he says. This is among the best moments Sevilla fans have experienced. One they, like him, will enjoy on Wednesday night and watch again and again on video.