A brief history of EUFA Champions League

This is Wolverhampton Wanderers vs Budapest Honvaid, and the year was 1954. The English club Wolverhampton claimed a 3-2 victory over their Hungarian rivals.

“Smith races down the left wing, kicks the pass to Swinborn who cracks in his second goal! The goal that makes the final score 3-2.

The happy Wanderers Wolves have licked the greatest club side in the world in 1954. The Wolves were the English champions and top of the league when they faced the mighty Hungarian team at the newly built Molyneux stadium. The Honvaids were the four-time Hungarian champions and boasted a team of top stars, seven of whom were runners-up in the 1954 World Cup, including the great Puskas. The hundred game Wolverhampton wondrous 3-2 comeback victory made many enthusiastic British journalists to declare them the best club team in the world.

Now, declaring a team the best in the world without the inclusion of other top teams in a competition is at best suspect.

Gabriella Hanot former French footballer turned journalist at L’Equipe wasn't having this decoration. Hanot along with his colleague Jack Farrow devised the plan to start the European Cup, which eventually morphed into the Champions League. It is a competition that drew inspiration from the South American Championships of Champions or what we now know today as the Copa Libertadores.

The Champions League as we know it today is a modern football spectacle with a global fan base and commercial partners of the highest accord, and in the view of many the Champions League eclipses the World Cup in terms of quality of football. If we go back to the Wolverhampton Wanderers’ hundred game of 1954, Gabriella Hanot in witnessing Wolves’ stunning comeback declared in his editorial for L’Equipe that without the likes of Real Madrid and AC Milan the grandiose declaration of the best in the world cannot be made. He then set things in motion to design a competition that could declare the best club team in Europe. A list of 16 teams considered to be the best in the various European Leagues was assembled. Executives from each club were invited to Paris to discuss the formation of a new competition. Part of the strategy of the organizing committee was to name the competition La Coupe de President Seeldrayers.

Naming football tournaments after administrators was conventional practice at the time, for example the World Cup trophy is named after former FIFA President Jules Rimet. Seeking to name the competition the Seeldrayers, who was then FIFA President was intended in part to gain his support for the launch of the new competition. Seeldrayers died less than two years after becoming FIFA president, but the prevailing opinion for why he refused the cup to be named after him was that he believed regional competitions had no business being named after FIFA presidents.

At this point we should be asking why FIFA was approached to set up a new European competition and not EUFA. To be clear the creation of the European Cup now the Champions League had nothing to do with UEFA, the organizing group established by the French newspaper L’Equipe, mentioned prior. Earlier led by Ernest Prodignants, went to FIFA because it was FIFA that had the authority to sanction tournaments. However, the move to smooth over FIFA to rally support did not go very well with some of the FIFA executives. L’Equipe in 1955 also presented the proposal for the European Cup to the UE for congress meeting in Venice. For the most part it was well received, but the French delegation was unsupportive. How ironic! Henri Deluanay, the French football administrator and UEFA General Secretary was against the proposal because he was in the midst of establishing the European Championships, a competition between national teams in Europe. Deluanay didn't want anything to meddle with the establishment of these championships.

Despite concerns by Deluanay and others in Europe, FIFA on May 9, 1955 called an emergency committee meeting in London and approved the creation of the competition. When we think about how big the competition is today we would think it was smooth sailing after FIFA gave the green light. However, the European cup was up against the Latin Cup which was in place since 1949 and the inter-city fierce cup the predecessor to the Europa League. The biggest obstacle the competition faced at the time were national associations the English Football Association faced in particular. It did not allow Chelsea to play in the first year of the European Cup. It was Sir Matt Busby who managed to convince the English Football Association to allow Manchester United to participate the following year, making Man U the first English team to enter the competition.

The European cup started with 16 teams, all champions of their home countries leagues. They would all face each other in two-legged knockout ties - home and away and a one-legged final would crown the winners of the European Cup. The competition structure remained largely unchanged for several decades. The only exception is the addition of other European Domestic League winners, and allowing the defending champion a place in the competition if they fail to qualify for the next tournament.

UEFA introduced group stages in 1991. Thirty-two teams started the tournament in a two-legged knockout round which was then reduced to eight teams. The final eight teams were placed in two groups of four and the winner of each group played against each other in the final. In 1992 UEFA underwent a major rebrand and changed the name to the UEFA Champions League. We also got the UEFA anthem and the UEFA for Champions League match ball with the star logo in 1997. The second place finishers from some leagues were granted entry. In 1999 a maximum of four teams from the big European Leagues could enter the expansion and format changes of the UEFA Champions League. Since the late 1990s reflects a commitment to integrating Europe, a post-World War II effort at peace and stability throughout the world, throngs of people hail the end of the war in Europe.

More than five years since Hitler marched into Poland the growth in teams in the competition also corresponds to the globalization of football where football reached television screens around the world. This of course meant revenue generation has increased, but the honest truth is that changes to the competition are now always a response to the powerful European clubs wanting a bigger share of the pie as well as the threats to break away and form alternative leagues. As we saw in 1998 when the G14 clubs threatened to form their own league and most recently the launch of the super league in 2021, which was criticized for trying to destabilize the structure of football. It illustrates the power big clubs have.