THE BIRTH OF THE EUROPEAN CUP

MIKE MILES LOOKS BACK TO THE STARTING POINT OF THE FAMOUS COMPETITION AND ENGLISH FOOTBALL’S LACK OF INTEREST...!

AT A time when this country wants to separate itself from Europe politically, there is one competition where entry is almost the raison d’etre for Premier League football clubs.

I refer, of course, to the UEFA Champions League, once known simply as the European Cup.

When Wolverhampton Wanderers beat Honved of Hungary 3-2 in December 1954 on a heavy Molineux pitch (Ron Atkinson, one of the Wolves apprentice staff, under manager Stan Cullis’s instructions, watered the pitch until it resembled a bog), some in the English press saw this as good enough a reason as any to pronounce Wolves ‘world champions’.

The Daily Mail’s David Wynne-Morgan titled his report on the match: “Hail, Wolves, Champion of the World.”

Present at the match was the French journalist Gabriel Hanot, of the French sports newspaper L’Equipe.

But what he had in mind was a genuine pan- European football competition.

He put his proposals for just such a European club tournament to UEFA, which itself had only been set up in June 1954.

However, his plan was rejected by a majority of delegates at the UEFA Congress in Vienna in October 1954, who argued that UEFA was not well enough established to organise a European competition.

L’Equipe recognised that it did not have the capacity to organise such a competition on its own but needed the support of national and international football federations.

But FIFA said no and even Hanot’s own French federation turned him down.

Someone who was keen was Spain’s General Franco who saw football as a means of overcoming his regime’s isolation.

L’Equipe organised a meeting of Europe’s top 15 clubs at the Ambassador Hotel in Paris in April 1955. They came to an independent agreement to establish a European club football competition.