Everything started with L’Équipe, the French sports daily, which translates as The Team in English. Just pause on that for a moment: a newspaper created the European Cup. No, attendez, we stand corrected: “It was an editorial board that invented it, not a newspaper. When you say ‘newspaper’ you think about the owner, the director, the boss. No. We were journalists.” We were lucky enough to be put straight on that by Jacques Ferran, a key member of that editorial board, in an interview before his death in 2019. “L’Équipe journalists then, unlike today, wanted to play a role in sport – they wanted to be stakeholders in sport,” he added, trying to explain quite how reporters turned instigators.

Thirty-seven years later the baton passed to TEAM (there’s that word again) Marketing, as the European Champion Clubs’ Cup became the Champions League. It was a seismic shift for this prestigious tournament and it was Craig Thompson who had the job of ensuring a calm and orderly transition. “It was dicey,” he tells us, with more than a hint of understatement.

Time to get more detail from those two – to find out the particulars of two prodigious undertakings.

European Champion Clubs' Cup

Traditionally you’d expect a newspaper to be reporting the news rather than creating it; as we know, the editorial team at L’Équipe in the mid-1950s felt otherwise. The editor at the time, Gabriel Hanot, had previously played for the French national football team but, following a plane crash, retired aged 29 to become a journalist. “He went to England [in 1954] to see the English champions, Wolverhampton Wanderers, play Honvéd in a friendly match,” said Jacques Ferran. “They beat them and that was enough for an English journalist to start writing, ‘Wolverhampton, World Club Champions’. Gabriel Hanot, with his wisdom, calmness and legendary humour, wrote a big article the very next day where he said, ‘Before saying that Wolverhampton are World Club Champions, they would have to face Real Madrid and Milan first in two-legged ties. So why not organise such a competition?’”

There was no time to waste. “I would like to highlight how fast this ‘creating the European Cup’ affair went,” added Ferran. “Because us journalists, we are not like politicians who have time in front of them; if we needed to create a competition, it needed to be created right away.”

Jacques Goddet, the founder of the newspaper, was on board immediately – but not exclusively with visions of grand ideals and the beautiful game. “L’Équipe didn’t sell much during the week,” said Ferran. “On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays there was nothing on football – there was no news. So creating a European Cup played during the week was a godsend for Jacques Goddet.”

The first game finished 3-3 between Sporting CP and FK Partizan at the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon on 4 September 1955 CAPTION

Next it was time to get the approval of some key contributors. “We started working, meaning we consulted the greatest European clubs to see if they would buy into our idea,” said Ferran. Did that garner an enthusiastic response? “Very favourable, except a few. For example, Barcelona were very reluctant. And there were no English clubs, of course, because Chelsea preferred to wait and watch, under pressure from their FA.”

In March of 1955, 16 clubs were invited to Paris’s Ambassador Hotel to thrash things out; they were chosen for their “good looks”, according to Ferran: the need for timely arrangements meant it was too early in the season to know who would be crowned champions of their respective leagues. Over the course of two days, regulations (written by Ferran) setting out how the competition would be run were unanimously approved. Soon after, UEFA – at that stage itself a fledgling formation – agreed to take on the running of the new competition. And so it came to pass: the Coupe des Clubs Champions Européens was born.

The inaugural game saw Partizan Belgrade take on Sporting Lisbon at the Estádio Nacional on 4 September 1955. The scoreline set the tone: 3-3. “We were very happy that it had started,” said Ferran. Real Madrid, of course, would go on to win the first of their 13 crowns, beating Stade de Reims 4-3 in the final. The trophy (created by a silversmith on Paris’s rue de la Paix) was handed over to Santiago Bernabéu, Real’s legendary president. “It was Jacques Goddet who gave the trophy to Bernabéu and said, ‘I give you this trophy because it is the child of love.’ That’s nice. It was the coronation of our masterpiece.”

That season also happened to be when Thompson left TEAM, having learnt a lot. “When we started, I’d never watched football in my life. I’m American, you know? Nobody’s perfect. But my colleagues were football freaks. On the pitch one day at Bayern, I’d got a little meeting going when suddenly people started walking off. I said, ‘Where the hell are you going?’ They said, ‘Franz Beckenbauer’s over there!’ And I said, ‘Who’s that?’ That’s how stupid I was.”

Now that he’s older and wiser, how does Thompson reflect on the legacy of the competition he helped to usher in? “The Champions League has delivered so much to the entire system of European football that it’s pretty hard to argue with what’s been done. That said, everyone argues – but they all realise that at least it’s created something to argue about.”

The Future

So, what next? What does the future hold for this great competition? Maybe, first of all, the chance to catch our breath after a rollercoaster ride almost as dramatic as the most gripping of Champions League knockout ties. Over the course of a few days, supporters – particularly in England – united in opposition to the ‘Super League’ breakaway, proposed by a group of clubs, that would have cut off the elite from the grassroots and fundamentally altered the fabric of European football. The sight of those protesting fans with their home-made banners outside Stamford Bridge and elsewhere captured the overall sense of anger among matchgoing supporters.

“Our game has become the greatest sport in the world based on open competition, integrity and sporting merit,” said UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin. “We cannot and will not allow that to change. Never, ever.”

What will change is the format of the competition as it continues to evolve, just as Jacques Ferran predicted it would all those years ago. From the 2024/25 season, the number of teams competing will rise from 32 to 36, all taking part in a single league stage. Every club will play a minimum of ten league games against ten different opponents (five home games, five away). The top eight sides in the league will automatically qualify for the knockout stage, while the teams finishing in ninth to 24th place will compete in a two-legged play-off to secure their path to the last 16 of the competition.

“The reforms preserve the value and importance of the domestic game by retaining the principle that domestic performance should be the key to qualification,” says Čeferin, “This should and will not ever change. This evolved format will still keep alive the dream of any team in Europe to participate in the UEFA Champions League thanks to results obtained on the pitch. It will enable long-term viability, prosperity and growth for everyone in European football, not just a tiny, self-selected cartel.”

“OUR GAME HAS BECOME THE GREATEST SPORT IN THE WORLD BASED ON OPEN COMPETITION, INTEGRITY AND SPORTING MERIT”

As for Ferran, when we spoke to him in 2016 he felt the pressures the Champions League was facing. He predicted, even at its inception, the challenges on the horizon and the need to have an organisation, other than the clubs, to coordinate it. “How would it develop, under what conditions, and would it be overwhelmed by its own success? That is what we feared. Will UEFA organise it in a proper way and do everything for the competition while keeping strict sporting rules, like choosing the referees, fighting against doping? Will UEFA be up to it? Will the clubs try to take ownership in the long term, as is the case in US sports? That happened and UEFA resisted it very well.”

But that was a long way down the road as he and his colleagues at L’Équipe watched that first season unfold in 1955/56. “The main feeling was the satisfaction of having succeeded. Right until the end we were worried: will it actually take place? Will it be organised in a serious manner? Will it be successful? Even though we were convinced about that, we still had to confirm it.

“But things went so well, just like we had imagined, proposed and designed beforehand. I was convinced that this competition would be successful, that it would attract big crowds from the start. It was not easy at all but I strongly thought that, and it was so well implemented that we were happy and satisfied.”