Manchester United must not think of Celta Vigo as a walkover - it could be a rude awakening

On paper, the gap is unbridgeable. When Manchester United play Celta Vigo in the Europa League semi-final this Thursday the odds are entirely stacked on their side. Such is the scale of opposition, frankly there have been tougher walkovers.

Consider this: Celta Vigo have never been this far in European football in their history; Manchester United have won the Champions League twice, the European Cup once, been to the final on two other occasions and won the European Cup Winners' Cup. Last season Celta's average home attendance was 19,156; United’s was 75,329.

The Spanish club’s revenue is dwarfed by that of their opponents: their sponsorship deal with Adidas is worth just over £500,000 a season; in the same period United’s arrangement with the kit manufacturer brings in 150 times as much, £75 million. United paid £80 million for Paul Pogba; Celta’s priciest import is the forward Iago Aspas, their returning former player who they bought from Sevilla for under £4m after his less than fulfilling year-long sabbatical in Liverpool.

Yet any United fans thinking the task in Galicia on Thursday will be straightforward need to be injected immediately with a dose of caution: this could be the very point that Jose Mourinho’s season comes unstuck.

All the more so because of the growing significance of the game. After setting an unwanted record on Sunday by drawing their 10th home Premier League match of the season, United need to progress in the Europa League. A competition that has long been regarded around Old Trafford as something below their dignity is suddenly United’s lifeline.

Struggling to secure sufficient points to qualify for the Champions League via the conventional route, with away trips to Arsenal and Tottenham imminent, their best bet is to win Europe’s second tier competition. But Celta Vigo will ensure such a prospect is anything but straightforward.

For the Spaniards, Europe has been everything this season. In a league far more distorted by television income than in England, the chances of a small, provincial operation like Celta ever getting close to the top of La Liga is absurd. In Spain, the chances of doing a Leicester are precisely zero.

So what Eduardo Berizzo, the purposeful Argentine coach in charge of the club, has done is target the possible rather than the impossible. Resources have been husbanded into their Copa del Rey and Europa League campaigns. Players have been rested for league fixtures, everything directed to plausible returns. Make no mistake about it, Celta are not in this competition to make up numbers, to be cannon fodder for their super-rich guests, to pick up a few celebrity shirts swapped in the tunnel. They are in it to win.

Intense, hard, unyielding, Berizzo shares many of the qualities of his fellow Argentine coaches Mauricio Pochettino and Diego Simeone. Like them he is a disciple of Marcelo Bielsa, serving as the guru’s assistant with the Chile national side before coming to Europe. As do his elevated compatriots, Berizzo follows the Bielsa methodology to the letter. This is a believer in the doctrine of pressing.

To watch Celta in action is to see a bunch of players not so much hurrying to close down their opponents as sprinting. Like a bunch of Usain Bolts, as soon as the whistle goes they tear into their opponents. Space disappears, angles are squeezed, ankles are tapped. It can be the most uncomfortable experience, as both Real Madrid and Barcelona have found at various points during Berizzo’s time in office.

Mourinho will be only too aware that his players will need to be absolutely on their game. Any dawdling, any dip in concentration, and the ball will be whipped from their toes before they have even realised they are in possession.

As with all games built on the press, it can go wrong. Even though they have claimed some elevated scalps (though beating Tony Adams’s Granada the other week probably does not count among their greatest hits) they have also found themselves on the receiving end of some serious spankings. Although they lost at Balaidos last October, Barcelona, for instance, have won 5-0, 6-1 and 4-1 in the three other recent matches between the sides.

Mourinho will have learned this fundamental point from studying Barca: Celta can be caught horribly open on the break. So we might expect to see him utilise a front three of Marcus Rashford, Anthony Martial and Henrikh Mkhitaryan on Thursday night, there to exploit any potential counter-attack. Behind them, he is likely to field Pogba and Ander Herrera to try to match the industry of the Celta midfield, plus Marouane Fellaini to counter any quick high through balls to the home forwards.

Which brings us back to Aspas. The Spaniard had a wretched time on Merseyside. After he was bought from Celta for £9m in 2013, he scored precisely no goals, coming to be regarded as a symptom of Brendan Rodgers’s woefully inadequate transfer policy when the Irishman sought to replace Luis Suarez.

It was not just in his disinclination to snack on opponents’ limbs that marked Aspas as different to the Uruguayan. He is nothing like as aggressive. But that doesn’t mean he can’t score goals. Since he returned to Galicia in 2015 he has scored 31 in 64 appearances. When there is a chance, he is likely to take it.

In short, anyone imagining it will be a walkover on Thursday night could be rudely awakened. Given United’s hapless inability to kill off opponents, this is likely to be a tie still alive next Thursday. Indeed, as a salve for end of season tension, this is not a semi-final that is going to be of much assistance.