Roma beats Feyenoord 1-0 to win Europa Conference League title

TIRANA, Albania: José Mourinho had described Roma as “a giant club” lacking a trophy room to match the team’s social dimension and passionate fan base. Well, the Giallorossi claimed their first European title in more than six decades Wednesday to crown Mourinho’s first season coaching in the Italian capital. Nicolò Zaniolo scored in the first half, goalkeeper Rui Patrício made some big saves in the second and Roma beat Feyenoord 1-0 to win the inaugural edition of the third-tier Europa Conference League.

“Today wasn’t work, this was history,” Mourinho said. “Either you write it or you don’t and we wrote it. I’ve been at Roma for 11 months and I realized the moment I arrived what it meant — that they were waiting for this.” It’s Roma’s first European trophy since winning the 1961 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup — a tournament considered to be the precursor to the UEFA Cup and Europa League.

It’s also the first title of any kind for Roma since winning the 2008 Italian Cup. “Now we’ve got to celebrate — a lot,” said Roma captain Lorenzo Pellegrini. “But then we’ve got to keep going.

A real team wins then comes back even stronger than before.” Besides the few thousand Roma spectators inside the small National Arena in Tirana, some 50,000 fans watched the game on giant screens at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. At the final whistle, the fans at the Olimpico celebrated on the pitch waving banners and chanting the team’s songs There were violent clashes in Tirana between fans of both clubs ahead of the final, and dozens were deported back to Italy. Two separate groups of Dutch and Italian fans clashed with police on Tuesday in the city, injuring 19 officers and five Albanian civilians.