Today, Wednesday, Moroccan striker Ayoub El Kaabi will have a very important date if he is able to lead his Greek team, Olympiacos, to win the European Football Conference League title, when he faces Italian Fiorentina in the final of the competition.
Olympiacos hopes to become the first Greek club to win a European title in the third most important continental competition, the Conference League.
Before the current season, Olympiacos, which was founded 99 years ago, failed to advance beyond the European group stage 14 times in 16 attempts.
The only Greek team to reach the final of a continental competition was Panathinaikos when it lost to the Dutch Ajax in the 1971 Champion Clubs Cup final.
Will Al Kaabi be on time?
After scoring 5 goals in one week during the semi-final against Aston Villa (4-2, 2-0), which will represent England in the Champions League next season, attention is focused on Moroccan international striker Ayoub El Kaabi, the main threat in the ranks of Olympiacos.
The 30-year-old, who is making his first continental appearance, scored 10 goals in 8 matches in the continental competition, where he tops the scorers’ rankings.
He also scored his 15th goal in 18 matches in Europe this season, including the preliminary rounds and the group stage in the Europa League, where Olympiacos finished third in its group, becoming the player who scored the most in a continental competition this season.
No African player has ever scored this number of goals in one season in any of the continental competitions.
Al-Kaabi also became the first player to score a hat-trick in the semi-finals of this competition, which Olympiacos won 6-2 on aggregate.
Olympiacos is guaranteed to play the final match in his country on May 29 against Italian Fiorentina, the runner-up of the last edition, which tied with its host Club Brugge 1-1 on Wednesday after winning 3-2 in the first leg in Florence.
🤍❤️ All 🔟 of Ayoub El Kaabi’s goals in the competition this season 😮💨#UECLfinal || @olympiacosfc pic.twitter.com/KP8IdycoSm
— UEFA Europa Conference League (@europacnfleague) May 27, 2024
A volatile march
Before arriving at Olympiacos in the summer of 2023, Al-Kaabi played two seasons with Turkish Hatayspor, which was actually his first stop in Europe.
During this period, he succeeded in scoring 26 goals in 55 matches, but his second season with the team came to an early end after he withdrew from the league; Due to the major earthquake that struck Turkey and led to the destruction of the club’s headquarters, and to save his season, Al-Kaabi joined the Qatari club Al-Sadd, where he scored 6 goals in 13 matches.
Last summer, Al-Kaabi reached an agreement with Olympiacos to join them on a free transfer, and here the story of brilliance began, as he is currently the top scorer in the Greek League, and this is not a strange thing, as the player was the top scorer in the Moroccan League in the 2020-2021 season with 18 goals.
Al-Kaabi sent multi-directional messages that raised his profile at the club level and the Moroccan national team, which missed its historic participation in the 2022 World Cup, before being summoned by coach Walid Regragui to participate in the recent African Cup of Nations.
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