History Of the European Cup and Champions League Tournaments

The Euro­pean Cup and sub­se­quently the Cham­pi­ons League are the ulti­mate prize in Euro­pean club foot­ball. To become cham­pi­ons in your own coun­try is a feat which clubs are rightly proud, but to become a mem­ber of a Cham­pi­ons League win­ning team is some­thing that most foot­ballers dream of. For British clubs it was a long hard jour­ney and it was not until the mid 1960s that a British team would be crowned Euro­pean champions.

Club com­pe­ti­tions between Euro­pean teams go back as far as 1897, although it would be 1930 before a tour­na­ment for national cham­pi­ons became a real­ity, but even then, this lasted only one sea­son for finan­cial rea­sons. Although the idea was raised sev­eral times it was not until 1955 that the UEFA Con­gress approved a pro­posal that saw the Euro­pean Cup start the fol­low­ing season.

The com­pe­ti­tion was dom­i­nated in the first five sea­sons by Real Madrid. With leg­endary stars Fer­enc Puskas, Alfredo di Ste­fano and Gento, ‘Los Blan­cos’ were almost invin­ci­ble in that era. At Ham­p­den Park in 1960, 135,000 peo­ple, still the largest atten­dance for a Euro­pean or Cham­pi­ons League final, saw Real Madrid demol­ish Ein­tra­cht Frank­furt of West Ger­many 7–3. The match, played in front of Europe’s tele­vi­sion cam­eras is still remem­bered as one of the great­est matches ever played.

The first British suc­cess came in 1967 with Celtic becom­ing cham­pi­ons. In 1968, ten years after the Munich air dis­as­ter when a young Man­ches­ter United team were dec­i­mated in a plane crash as the team left Munich after a stop over fol­low­ing a Euro­pean Cup tie against Red Star Bel­grade, Man­ches­ter United con­tain­ing play­ers such as Bobby Charl­ton and George Best, became Euro­pean champions.

Over the fol­low­ing sea­sons teams from dif­fer­ent coun­tries, Hol­land, Ger­many, Italy and Eng­land have had peri­ods of dom­i­nance. How­ever some of the big clubs, in par­tic­u­lar Milan, Real Madrid and Mar­seille were becom­ing increas­ingly unhappy that some of their tour­na­ments were only last­ing for two games if their teams got knocked out in the first round of what was then a knock out com­pe­ti­tion. So, the for­mat was changed to a league for­mat in the early stages, and the com­pe­ti­tion would be renamed the Cham­pi­ons League for the 1992–93 sea­son which French club Mar­seille won before being stripped of the crown for match fix­ing alle­ga­tions. In that year Leeds United, Stuttgart, Rangers, Mar­seille, Glen­toran, Dinamo Bucharest, CSKA Moscow, Barcelona and Viking of Nor­way made up Group A. Group B con­tained other famous clubs, Milan, IFK Gothen­burg, PSV Eind­hoven and Porto.

The com­pe­ti­tion was fur­ther extended to include the run­ners up from the top Euro­pean leagues in the 1997–98 sea­son. Today the com­pe­ti­tion still attracts huge inter­est. If you would like to keep up with Cham­pi­ons League news go to foot­ball blog.

Tagged as: champions league, European Cup