The origin of the Champions League: a key match, the team that thought it was the best and the French invention

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The Champions League begins this Tuesday the path of its 70th celebration. But its creation has a great history behind it. It all started in England, with Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C., The club was dubbed “world champions” in 1954. However, this nickname did not satisfy others on the Old Continent and it was thanks to a French journalist from the newspaper L’ Equipe, who was also a footballer, who presented a project to create a competition “reserved for the great European teams”. In this scenario, there was total support and in 1955, the first European Cup was played, a name that it carried until 1992.

During the 1950s, Wolverhampton shone in English football. Between 40 and 60 Wolves were big winners of the Football League First Division, which was the old Premier League, the FA Cup and also the Community Shield, among other trophies. This positioned them among the best teams on the European continent. By 1954, the team from the city located in the west of England decided to remodel its stadium called Molineux. Everything was in the process of growth.

To raise funds invited great teams from all over the world to play a friendly tournament. Some of the clubs that participated were Spartak Moscow, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Celtic, Racing de Avellaneda and Honved from Hungary. The latter was made up of many footballers from the “magic magyars” of the Hungarian team that amazed the Old Continent In those years and with the help of players like Sándor Kocsis and Ferénc Puskas, They beat England in 1953, 6-3, at Wembley and 7-1 in Budapest, but then lost to Germany in the final of the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland.

The page of the newspaper L’Equipe entitled “No, Wolverhampton is not yet a world champion of clubs”, with the project presented by the journalist Hanot in which the European Cup is presented

In that friendly tournament, Wolverhampton were due to face the Hungarian team The match was one of the first to be played under floodlights in Britain and was also broadcast live on the BBC. The visitors started 2-0 up with first-half goals from Kocsis (10th minute) and Ferenc Machos (14th minute). But the home side turned the score around in the second half and won 3-2 thanks to goals from Johnny Hancocks and Roy Swinbourne, who scored twice.

That victory reverberated loudly in England and after defeating Honved, Stan Cullis, coach of Wolverhampton Wanderers, said: “We are the world champions.” The next day, the British newspaper Daily Mail did not stay behind and added value to the victory that meant that England had recovered its pride as owners of football. That is why it headlined its cover with Cullis’s phrase: “Hail, Wolves, Champions of the World now”.

However, This headline did not please some media from other parts of Europe and one of them was the diary The team. Gabriel Hanotwho was a modest French footballer but who was at the duel between Wolverhampton and Honved as a journalist for the French newspaper, had the perfect idea. The editor of L’Equipe and of the magazine France Football thought it would be good for the sport to be able to measure the best teams of the continent and crown a champion.

Two days later, the French sports daily presented on its pages the project of the creation of a supertorneo continental. The same, called “Draft Regulations for a European Football Cup”, stated: “A football competition reserved for the major European teams was organised from the 1955-56 season onwards by the newspaper L’Equipe. It was called the “L’Equipe European Cup”. The teams invited by the organisers took part in this competition. An Organising Committee, which included representatives of the main European associations, was to be empowered to enforce these regulations.”

This proposal had the support of UEFA and big clubs like Real Madrid, chaired by Santiago Bernabéu, who sent a letter to the French newspaper expressing his agreement. In the end, 18 teams responded and supported the initiative, one from each territory represented, attending by invitation. And it was on September 4, 1955 that the first European Cup began to be played.

Great teams participated in the 1955/56 cup, such as Sporting Lisbon, PSV Eindhoven, Milan, Partizan Belgrade and Real Madrid, who took the crown after defeating Stade de Reims in the final by 4 to 3 at the Parc des Princes in Paris. Remarkably, the first trophy would go to the man who is currently the most successful Champions League winner with 15 conquests.

Real Madrid was crowned champion of the first European Cup in historyUniversal – Sygma

Another peculiarity is that in the first Champions League (called the European Cup until 1992) no teams from England participated. Chelsea were to play for the English after winning their league title in the 1954/55 season. However, they withdrew at the request of the Football League, which feared that European qualifiers in the middle of the week would negatively affect attendances at domestic matches.

For its part, Wolves only participated in the 1958/59 European Cup. In that competition, they were eliminated in the first round by Schalke 04 of Germany. A year later they reached the quarter-finals where they were eliminated by Barcelona. From those times until today Wolverhampton never again took part in the competition they had inspired.

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