We’re fulfilling another COVID-19 donation request today. Ryan asked for a piece about Radamel Falcao. The Colombian striker just broke a bone in his face after what sounds like a vicious collision in training. Get well soon, El Tigre.

The Europa League is a strange place.

Nobody wants to be there. In fact, everyone's trying to get out. It's one of the few tournaments in sports where the ultimate award is "congrats, you don't have to come back next year". The winner of the Europa League noe qualifies for the Champions League the following season.

Most of the teams that qualify for the Europa League each year have, by definition, just missed out on qualification for the Champions League. Or perhaps they were just in the Champions League a couple weeks ago but got suddenly thrown down to Europa, as if through a trap-door midseason, because they weren't good enough to advance beyond the group stages. Most of the players who play for teams in the Europa League want to be playing in the Champions League, too. Even if you'd never watched a soccer game before, and you were presented with both options, you'd wanna be in the Champions League. What the hell's a "Europa League" anyway?

"All football competitions have names," Brian Phillips wrote in The Blizzard a few years ago. "Frequently those names are used to convey information. Quite often the information so conveyed sheds light on the competition's distinguishing characteristics. Its reason for being, so to speak ... The Champions League is a league of champions, and occasionally Liverpool. Glance at the names of these events and you can generally puzzle out what their organizers had in mind for them. Now glance at the name 'Europa League’. What information does it convey? It's a league for ... the abstract concept of Europe? For women who ride off on divine white boars? UEFA can't call the competition what it is since the Second-Tier Distribution of Teams as Apportioned by Mathematical Coefficients Cup lacks a certain Heineken factor."

Now, this is not to say the Europa League isn't a great tournament; it really is, or at least it's become one. The number of quality soccer players across the globe has never been higher, and so goes the quality of the STDTAMC Cup, too. But the true appeal of the Europa League is that it isn't as good as the Champions League. It's janky. The passes aren't quite as crisp, the tactics aren't as dialed in, the pressure isn't as high. There's an underlying tacit acceptance to the Europa League that "man, soccer is fucking hard but I guess we're gonna try our best" while the Champions League is filled with a bunch of teams refusing to admit that they haven't perfected an impossible game.

All hail the Europa League and its king: Radamel Falcao.

Remember, you’re not supposed to be there for long. You’re supposed to keep winning. If you win the Europa League, you get to escape. And if you’re capable enough to come close to winning, you should be good enough to be within striking distance of Champions League qualification via finishing high enough in your domestic league. Just look at the Europa League’s (and previously, the UEFA Cup’s) most successful teams; it’s a list of the second- or third- or fourth-best teams in every country. Sevilla lead the way with sixth, and then Inter Milan, Liverpool, Juventus, and Atletico Madrid are tied for second with three. There’s no Real Madrid, no Barcelona, no Manchester United, and no AC Milan. In Germany, Borussia Monchengladbach -- not Bayern Munich -- lead the way with two Europa League titles. And in France, well, somehow no French team has won the Europa League, but Belgium, the Ukraine, and Turkey each have one. Sweden, Russia, and Portugal have two a piece, and the Netherlands has four. Half of which were, of course, won by Feyenoord, not Ajax or PSV Eindhoven.

But what if you’re a player? The list of the most prolific goal-scorers in the Champions League doubles pretty well as a list of the best attackers of the modern era. The top five:

1) Cristiano Ronaldo: 134
2) Lionel Messi: 120
3) Robert Lewandowski: 73
4) Raul: 71
5) Karim Benzema: 70

Flip it to goals per game and it’s a list of some of the best players ... ever:

1) Gerd Muller: 0.97
2) Ferenc Puskas: 0.88
3) Jose Altafini: 0.86
4) Alfredo Di Stefano: 0.84
5) Lionel Messi: 0.81

A place on one of those lists means that you’ve achieved a special level of greatness -- both at a team level (you’re always in the Champions League) and at an individual level (you’re scoring more goals against the best competition in the world than anyone else). But what about a place on the same list for the Europa League? What does that mean? Here’s the top five:

1) Henrik Larsson: 31
2) Radamel Falcao: 30
2) Klaas-Jan Huntelaar: 30
4) Dieter Muller: 29
5) Aritz Aduriz: 26

Larsson played in the Scottish league through his 30s, and might’ve been the coolest player in the world for a five-year stretch according to an impressionable pre-teen version of yours truly. At age 32, he moved to Barcelona, where he struggled with injuries and mainly functioned as a squad player before finally getting his moment in the sun: assisting on both goals in Barcelona’s come-from-behind 2-1 win against Arsenal in the 2006 Champions League final. After blowing up at Ajax, Huntelaar played a year with Real Madrid and AC Milan before settling in as a prolific scorer for Schalke. Dieter Muller holds the record for goals in a Bundesliga match (six) but unfortunately shared a country, a last name, and a position with one of the most prolific goal-scorers of all time. Aduriz, meanwhile, only managed 13 caps for the Spanish national team but also holds La Roja’s record for oldest goal-scorer.

These players were all fantastic and beloved and imperfect. And Falcao is no different. He was lights out at Porto and with Atletico Madrid -- especially from 2010 through 2012. Porto won the Europa league in 2011, led by Falcao’s 17 goals. They sold him to Atleti that summer for $44 million, and Falcao proceeded to score 12 more Europa League goals -- including two in the final -- en route to his second-straight Europa League title. He became King of the Europa League

Only two players -- in the history of the tournament -- have scored more goals than Falcao scored in just those two seasons. He replaced Sergio Aguero at Atletico, and he was supposed to become the next world-class striker to come off the club’s conveyor belt, but it never quite happened. He scored 28 league goals for Atleti the following year before moving to Monaco at age 27 for $47 million. He tore his ACL in how first year in France -- the second ACL tear of his career -- and didn’t hit 20 league league goals again until 2017, which was his own kind of Larsson-in-2006 moment, as a then-30-year-old Falcao the line for the uber-talented Monaco side with Kylian Mbappe, Fabinho, Bernardo Silva, and more as they reached the Champions League semifinals and beat Qatari-backed Paris Saint-Germain to the Ligue 1 title. In the years between, he struggled with fitness and ill-fated loan moves, once to Manchester United and once to Chelsea. The ACL also meant he missed his one shot at playing in his prime for Colombia at a World Cup.

As he now winds things down for Galatasaray in Turkey, Falcao’s career feels like a big what if, but ultimately, he falls into the same bucket as these other top scorers in the Europa League. They’re elite versions of baseball’s so-called AAAA players: dominating triple-A but didn’t quite stick it in the big leagues. Falcao and Larsson and Huntelaar and Muller and Aduriz were never able to consistently carry the scoring burden for one of the 10 or so best teams in the world, but not many can. Not many are capable, not many are given the chance. Instead, they each, at various moments for various teams, dominated the competition, just one step below.