{"id":868573,"date":"2026-10-02T19:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T19:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/868573\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T19:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T19:14:10","slug":"antonio-puerta-trophy-aston-villa-play-sevilla-in-the-trophy-youve-never-heard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/868573\/","title":{"rendered":"Antonio Puerta Trophy: Aston Villa play Sevilla in the trophy you&#8217;ve never heard of"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">On Friday evening, Aston Villa will walk out at Sevilla&#8217;s Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan stadium to compete for a piece of silverware that, outside of Spain, few supporters will have heard of, the Antonio Puerta Trophy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It&#8217;s a friendly match held in memory of Sevilla academy graduate Antonio Puerta, who died in August 2007 at the age of 22.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Puerta suffered a cardiac arrest during a La Liga match against Getafe and, despite initially appearing to recover and walking to the dressing room, collapsed again and died three days later in hospital.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">His death stunned Spanish football. He had been one of Sevilla&#8217;s own.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Puerta made his first-team debut during the 2003-04 season and went on to make 88 appearances for the club and one for Spain, in 2006.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He helped his team win five trophies in 15 months, including two consecutive Uefa Cups, now known as the Europa League.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A year after his death, Sevilla created a trophy in his honour and what began as a relatively modest pre-season fixture has become an annual part of the club&#8217;s calendar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday evening, Aston Villa will walk out at Sevilla&#8217;s Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan stadium to compete for a piece&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":868574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-868573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/868574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}