Manchester United representing more than their city now as Europa League Final takes on different importance

Jose Mourinho has staked Manchester United’s entire season on tonight’s Europa League final but in the hours before kick-off here in Stockholm it was clear the match had assumed a different importance.

Although Uefa have said they do not believe there is any specific terrorist threat to the game, the attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on Monday, which left 22 dead, has heightened safety concerns.

Last night, the mood in the city was muted. As the Ajax manager Peter Bosz said, the final has lost its “glow”. Any talk of Ajax chasing their first European trophy since 1995, or United qualifying for the Champions League to salvage Mourinho’s first season at the club, felt at best irrelevant and perhaps even distasteful.

There were small pockets of fans drinking around Gamla Stan yesterday, along with the former Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit, but nothing like the raucous and colourful takeover of a city that has become common before major finals.

Whether that was entirely the direct result of Monday’s bomb attack in Manchester, though, is unclear. A barman explained that payday in Sweden is usually the 25th of the month and the couple of days before that are always quiet. And, as one fan pointed out, Stockholm is expensive, with beer at around £9 a pint in city-centre pubs, and hotels and taxis prohibitive.

Many more fans, from Manchester and Amsterdam, are expected to arrive in the hours before the game. They will be greeted by police armed with automatic weapons, with more than 1,000 deployed on the streets.

The advice to supporters is to arrive early to allow time for bag checks, though European football’s governing body insist that stringent security measures are already in place.

It has become clear over the past few years that football has become a target for terror. The Togo team bus was shot at shortly before the African Cup of Nations in 2010, leading to two fatalities, suicide bombers unsuccessfully targeted a friendly between France and Germany in Paris in November 2015 and this year Borussia Dortmund’s bus was attacked, an explosion injuring the defender Marc Bartra.

Stockholm itself was the subject of a terror attack last month, as an IS sympathiser drove a hijacked truck across a crowded shopping street and into a department store, killing five.

There will be a minute’s silence before the game and players will wear black armbands, while the opening ceremony has been pared back.

The stakes felt high for Mourinho tonight, after he effectively gave up on the Premier League to pursue this trophy and a different route into next season’s Champions League, but that was before the tragic events in Manchester redefined the context.

It would be understandable if players and staff from both sides were affected but most obviously those with longstanding roots in the area.

Marcus Rashford was born in Wythenshawe, an area of south Manchester, and played as a youngster in nearby Didsbury at Fletcher Moss Rangers, the club where Jesse Lingard also began.

Many other players have been at the club a sufficient length of time to develop an affinity with the region — Michael Carrick, Wayne Rooney, Chris Smalling and Phil Jones to mention only four — but even more recent arrivals, such as Mourinho himself, could easily be shaken by an attack that struck the heart of the city, where the Portuguese lives.

Sport’s rhetoric can feel painfully awkward at times like this but that does not detract from the power it has as a force for good. Football, for all its flaws, brings otherwise disparate groups of people together.

Some go to a music concert, others go to a football stadium. Everybody, no matter who they follow, expects to come home. Suddenly, United represent their city and a country recovering from the worst terrorist atrocity committed on the British mainland since the London bombings of 7/7.

The club have a history of responding to tragedy. The Munich air crash of 1958 occurred in completely different circumstances, of course, but United refused to be cowed in the face of unfathomable loss.

That is the challenge that awaits them against Ajax in the Friends Arena this evening.

Everyone inside the ground and the millions watching at home will seek to send a message that the dead will be remembered but life will go on. Nothing is more important than that.