Is is a bird, is it a plane, is it the end of European football?
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
By Gary Oswald.
In a previous article, I discussed how National Leagues for Association Football emerged in England, Scotland, Ireland and other European countries in the late 19th century. And as soon as that happened, there was debate over which of the winners of those leagues were better.
From 1876 to 1905, there was a series of matches, grandly titled the ‘World Championship’, between the best teams in England and Scotland. Hilariously in 1895, in a match between Hearts, the Scottish League Winners, and Sunderland, the English League Winners, no Englishmen were involved as both teams put out teams of 11 Scots, a sign of the dominance of Scottish players in those earlier years. But as each league expanded, the fixture was removed from the schedule to make room for more profitable games.
And by 1905, there was challengers to the idea that the best football teams in the world had to be in either England or Scotland. Continental European nations formed their own invitational trophies between teams from different nations. Most regularly, the best teams in France and Spain played out the Pyrenees Cup from 1910 to 1914. More interestingly, in 1908, 1909 and 1911, there were tournaments in Turin, Italy, the first of which was won by Servette from Switzerland and the latter two of which were won by an obscure amateur village North East England team, West Auckland. The amateur team from the closest town to West Auckland, Bishop Auckland, also won two continental invitationals, those held in Belgium in 1909 and 1910 (with Belgium running international tournaments from 1898 to 1925)! This dominance by the district of Bishop Auckland perhaps explains why these Western European invitationals tended to not attract the best teams from England.
The best football in Continental Europe during the 1910s and later was happening in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the best British teams came over to compete for the Budapest Cup and Vienna Cup in 1914, something that could have become an annual thing had another event in 1914 not happened in Sarajevo. The various nations within the empire competed in national leagues, same as happened in the UK, for Hungary, Austria, and Bohemia, but they also played the challenge cup between them all. And after the Empire collapsed, their successor nations wanted to still play each other, so they formed the Mitropa Cup, which started in 1927.
The Mitropa Cup originally brought together clubs from Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia but they would later add teams from Romania, Italy and Switzerland. The result was a competition that featured some of the best players in the world during the 20s and 30s such as Sindelar and Meazza. It is possible that this competition could have just expanded further from a Central European Cup to just a European Cup, but WWII and the Warsaw Pact both vastly complicated the logistics of running such a tournament. While it officially continued until 1992, the Mitropa Cup fell in status due to not being held from 1940 to 1955.
The rest of the best players in the world, at this time, were either in the British Isles or South America. And in 1948 the South American Championship of Champions was held in Santiago, between the winners of all the leagues in South America. This inspired European football fans to ask for the same in Europe.
Another domino towards that was, in 1953 and 1954, English team Wolverhampton Wanderers held a series of invitational friendlies at their newly updated stadium, where they beat the champions of Scotland, Argentina, Hungary, Israel and the Soviet Union (and drew with the champions of Austria). As a result their manager, Stan Cullis, declared that his team was ‘the best in the world’. This was furiously disputed by European journalists, who pointed out that winning at home was significantly easier than winning away. If Cullis was going to claim superiority, he’d have to prove it by winning an actual trophy. As a result in 1954, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) was formed to create that competition.
In 1955, just as the Mitropa cup restarted, two European wide trophies were started which overshadowed it. One was UEFA’s European Cup, a tournament meant to be competed for by the winners of every league in Europe, though in reality a lot of winners said no and so the first edition became an invitational of who would come. Only seven of the sixteen teams were champions with the others being replaced by less successful teams, and the champions of the Soviet Union and England both were withdrawn by their federations. The teams who did make it played each other in a knock out tournament played over two legs, with games both and away.
The most interesting team invited was Saarbrücken, a team from the German lower leagues, who were invited as the best team from Saarland, a semi-independent state split off from Germany post-WWII who had no football league. This precedent, of inviting the best team from a country that lacks a league, was never repeated, though it could have been with Welsh teams in England and Liechtensteiner teams in Switzerland. Instead that one choice offers an interesting glimpse into a world where you could have more acceptance for national teams formed from by non-independent countries with a longer 19th century and surviving Austria-Hungary and Sweden-Norway. If we have, say, a German League, a British League, a Soviet League and an Austro-Hungarian League, but individual international teams, then you could easily see the European Cup working so that the top Ukrainian/Welsh/Bohemian/Prussian team gets entry to the European Cup even without winning anything, which is how Rugby Union does it.
In our timeline however, Saarbrücken never came back. The winner of that first European Cup was Real Madrid, who, as the defending champions, became the only non-league champion to be in the following year’s competition. That year had only league champions and the holders, which would become the standard for the next few decades. The number of leagues to send their champions grew steadily until it reached thirty-two in 1966-67 which (though it wasn’t always filled due to bans and withdrawals) remained the number until 1992-23. In the 1990s this number increased in fifty-four thanks primarily to a number of new countries emerging from the collapse of Yugoslavia and the USSR.
The European Cup was very successful and in response the South American clubs brought back the South American Championship of Champions, as the Copa Libertadores, in 1960 to find the best team in South America. They would play the European Cup winners in the Intercontinental Cup to find the best in the world (though violence marred those games to the extent that European teams often withdrew from them). That Intercontinental Cup later became the Club World Cup, with teams from the other continents also joining, though the difference in income means European clubs dominate it and don't tend to take it seriously.
The important thing in terms of the context of this article, is the European Cup, and its imitators in other continents, were not invitationals. This was something you qualified for by winning your own league. UEFA’s second club tournament, the Cup Winners Cup which started in 1960, was likewise competed between the winners of each country’s domestic cup. But the other competition to start in 1955, was slightly different. It was the Fairs Cup, which was started by FIFA and not UEFA, and qualification was not dictated by league position but rather whether your city had a trade fair, as it was designed to promote international trade fairs. This was a competition that saw huge attendances and so carried on for sixteen years. But the competition saw, for instance, Birmingham be England’s only entrant in 1960-61 even though they finished 19th in their own league. Even after that rule was loosened, there was still a rule that only one team could represent one city, so in 1968-69, England’s four entrants finished 2nd, 4th, 7th and 9th, because the teams in 3rd, 5th, 6th and 8th were from the same cities as previously qualified clubs even though they were better.
The idea of European qualification being solely by merit had not yet been entirely accepted, given the often invitational nature of these early competitions (including the first European Cup). It was only after UEFA took over the Fairs Cup and renamed it the UEFA Cup in 1971 that a truly meritocratic system was enforced. The league winner went into the European Cup, the Cup Winner went into the Cup Winners Cup, and the four best remaining teams (2nd to 5th normally) went into the UEFA Cup and this was the status quo for the next two decades. This meant extra games but not many thanks to a straight knockout format and the money wasn’t hugely transformative for the teams involved.
That began to change in the 1990s thanks to new TV deals and the change to a group stage format to have more guaranteed games, so a team couldn’t just be out after two games. As such there was more pressure to get more teams into the European Cup, now renamed the Champions League. In 1997-98, for the first time the leagues whose teams were most successful sent their runners up too, with the less successful leagues being forced to go through more qualifiers to make the lucrative groups. The Cup Winners Cup was cancelled so those teams could play in the richer competition instead and more and more games were added to the Champions League.
This created opportunities for the top teams, who were now guaranteed multiple money spinning European matches a year, though at the cost of an increasing workload for their players with a far busier schedule. But there was also increasing fear of missing out, as that money was used to pay their inflating wage bills. The richest clubs kept pressuring UEFA to make it easier and easier for them to qualify for their top competition, and UEFA wanted more big clubs with big fanbases involved.
In 2025-26, England got six automatic teams, Spain got five, Germany and Italy four, and France three, taking up half of the available slots in the group stages without having to qualify at all, while the other forty-eight confederations (and the fourth team from France) had to fight for the other half. UEFA kept capitulating to the demand that the richer clubs could have almost guaranteed access to the further riches of European football, increasing the gap between the haves and have nots.
But even this still wasn’t enough. One bad season of finishing 7th in England, or 5th in Italy and a top team could see a huge hit in their income, something that in years like 2020-21 (where covid reduced clubs income by preventing them from selling tickets to fans) could prove disastrous to their ambitions.
Their answer: The European Super League.
The key was this league, unlike the UEFA competition but like its predecessors, would not be meritocratic but rather invitation only. These clubs would withdraw from UEFA entirely and instead play more games against each other, but this league would be made of unchanging members. It did not matter if the richest club in England came 15th domestically or the richest club in Italy came 17th, they would be in Super League regardless. And any other team would be locked out permanently from those riches.
For UEFA, this would be a death knell. They had spent thirty years telling their fans that teams from Romania and Finland didn’t matter, what they wanted was to see Real Madrid vs Bayern Munich – and if this went through, they couldn’t offer that anymore. Part of the reason UEFA paid the Danegeld of more places for the rich teams was to buy them off from doing this but like all Danegeld it just made the Danes more powerful.
In April 2021, the European Super League was officially announced with billions of euros from investors behind it and twelve teams announcing they would take part in it, six from England, three from Italy and three from Spain (though mostly these teams were owned by Americans). This was less than the twenty teams they needed to run the league because, as it would turn out, they’d been spooked to make the announcement early because it had been leaked to UEFA.
And a lot of the other teams who might have considered it, quickly backed down once it was public. Because it turned out those twelve clubs had vastly misjudged the public response. Fans, journalists, sportsmen, other clubs, governments and sporting organisations universally condemned it and threatened huge punishments if the clubs went ahead with it. Punishments including all players in those clubs being banned from playing internationally.
After all, this had to be stopped as how could a team like Aston Villa, outside the super league, ever compete on a fair level domestically with a team guaranteed this huge extra income every year when Villa was guaranteed to not have it? And for teams like Bayern, which due to German law, have fans as the majority share owner, they could not ignore the fans the way privately owned clubs could. Even in England, the government threatened to pass legislation to prevent it ever happening, because it would be an easy win for Boris Johnson. This is just how unpopular it was.
Meritocratic qualification had never initially been an innate part of international competition, but it had become so in fans minds and however unfair European Competitions had become in practice, it was still meritocratic in theory. The places in the competitions were distributed based on results. Should Polish teams somehow miraculously overcome the huge gulf in finance and be the best teams in Europe, then they would get the six teams in the Champions League that England currently had, and should England waste all that money and lose every European game, they will get only a place in the qualifiers like Poland. This will never happen, but it could and going from 0.001% chance to 0% was simply too much for people.
The Super League collapsed before it was formed and to this day it has never played a game. The clubs who wanted to leave were welcomed back by UEFA with no consequences at all and UEFA continues to kowtow to them by giving them more matches and more guaranteed spots.
But could the Super League have ever happened? After all, there is an argument to be made that legally UEFA and FIFA were unfairly enforcing a monopoly by trying to squash a competitor and the Super League has gone to court over that belief and seen some success. If the Super League had their ducks fully in a row, all twenty teams and their lawyers ready, they might have held out through the storm. Especially since lockdown made fan protests hard to organise. And there are reasons for the club to hold together. When Barcelona withdrew from the Super League, Real Madrid went public with evidence of them bribing referee organisers to get more of their preferred referees assigned to their games. It’s possible that sort of blackmail material was held by a lot of the Super League clubs over each other.
It feels unlikely to ever happen given how all-consuming the backlash was but unpopular things do happen and it would have huge consequences for the future of European football if UEFA had essentially been removed as the primary supplier of intra-league European matches. Does the UEFA club competitions limp on without their top teams and if so, does that mean smaller leagues such as the Dutch get better results and start claiming more places? Do UEFA rejig their plans and give more places to other leagues? Are the domestic leagues going to try and ban the Super League clubs even if that would hurt then financially? It would be a huge running sore in so many ways.
A particularly interesting club in this is Zenit St Petersburg, which refused to leave UEFA to join the Super League despite being invited, as they were owned by Gaspron who at the time were a sponsor of the Champions League. Zenit were then banned from all UEFA competitions in February 2022 anyway because Putin invaded Ukraine. If the Super League went ahead with Zenit in it, already going against UEFA and FIFA, would they enforce that ban?
But there is perhaps an easier way to get the Super League than it succeeding in 2021: if UEFA and the meritocratic qualification they enforced simply never became the standard. Would there have been the same anger if fans were used to a Fairs Cup where certain clubs could never be eligible because of their hometown rather than a UEFA Cup?
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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