Rangers complete memorable journey from liquidation to Europa League final

Up to 100,000 Glasgow Rangers supporters are expected to have arrived in Seville by the end of Wednesday afternoon, the vast majority of them simply to be somewhere in the broad vicinity of the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium. Its capacity is a little over 42,000 and the allocation of tickets for fans of the Europa League finalists was capped, officially, at under 10,000 for each.

Happily, Seville is a city of abundant football arenas. Close to 60,000 supporters of Eintracht Frankfurt and Rangers will watch a big-screen broadcast at La Cartuja stadium some three kilometres from the live action. That still leaves plenty seeking bars and restaurants with a television.

Safe to report that the capital of Andalusia will experience the sort of night it has known only once this century, when La Cartuja hosted the 2003 Uefa Cup final between Porto and Celtic, the Scottish club losing 3-2. Naturally, that was an outcome noisily celebrated by followers of Rangers.

But the boasts and taunts across Glasgow’s fevered rivalry have for most of the last 20 years been contained within the confines of Scotland’s domestic game, across cups and a league ranked by Uefa as only the ninth strongest in Europe. Rangers did reach a Uefa Cup final in 2008, losing to Zenit Saint Petersburg, but the journey to this evening started from a very low place indeed.

A decade ago, the club were preparing for a season in the Scottish third division, effectively the fourth tier. They had gone into liquidation, the consequence of chronic financial mismanagement. Their closest chasers for the main prize – promotion – in the 2012/13 campaign were not Celtic but Peterhead, whose Balmoor Stadium in Aberdeenshire has never known a crowd as big as the 4,850 who