The Euro Cup, also known as the UEFA Cup or the CE3, is the second most prestigious of the football competition hosted by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).  It is second only to the UEFA Champions League, and teams which qualify for the Champions League do not traditionally play in the Euro Cup.  The Cup evolved out of a number of other international football league competitions, and its history can be traced back over hundreds of years of European football.

The first international football competitions in Europe were hosted by Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1890’s.  This early competition, called the Challenge Cup, was designed to give clubs who would, in normal league competitions, never play one another an opportunity to compete on a level playing field.  After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the competition was reorganized as the Mitropa Cup.  This was during the early days of professional European football clubs, and the pan-European Mitropa Cup was meant to provide a forum which would give these newly founded clubs much needed exposure and financial support.

The following hundred years saw a series of changes in European club football, as the Mitropa Cup declined in importance and was replaced by other league championships, including the Coupe des Nations and the Copa Latina.  The European football community became more and more unhappy with these competitions, as earning a championship in one did not necessarily mean a team was the most successful club in Europe.  This mounting discontent led eventually to Gabriel Hanot’s call for a more comprehensive tournament, which was published in the magazine L’Equipe in the early 1950’s.

In 1955 the first in a series of tournaments that was to become the Euro Cup was put together by representatives of the sport from Switzerland, Italy, and England.  This competition, known as the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, was only for teams representing European cities that held trade fairs.  The earliest Fairs Cup games coincided with the trade fairs from which the competition got its name.  Over the following several years the competition expanded and became less and less associated with the trade fairs. However, it wasn’t until the 1971/72 season that the competition was renamed the UEFA Cup.

In its early years, the UEFA Cup was dominated almost entirely by clubs from southern Europe.  Clubs representing Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia, Milan, and Lisbon all won consistently throughout the late 1950’s, the 60’s, and well into the 70’s. In 1967 the Celtic club out of Glasgow became the first English team to win the competition, heralding the beginning of an age of northern dominance of the tournament.  This was to be the only English win for the next fifteen years, during which the Cup was dominated by the clubs AFC Ajax, Total Football, and Bayern Munich.  This streak was to come to an end in 1977, when Liverpool won the Cup and ushered in nearly a decade of English wins.  English teams won seven of the next eight Euro Cups, including multiple wins by clubs representing Nottingham and Liverpool.

The Liverpool club was ultimately to win five Euro Cups, but events surrounding their final championship game resulted in the exclusion of English clubs from the Cup for the next five years.  This fateful game, played between Liverpool and the Italian Juventus club in 1985, saw the deaths of 39 fans after an altercation in the stands led to the collapse of one of the stadiums walls.  This event, known as the Heysel Stadium Disaster, was described by the UEFA Chief Executive as the organization’s “darkest hour.” Most of the casualties were supporters of the Italian club, and responsibility for the disaster was placed at the feet of the Liverpool fans, who caused the disaster by rushing the Italian fans and forcing them en masse into the faulty wall.

The exclusion of English clubs from Cup play opened up the field to teams from other European countries, and the late 80’s saw winners from a range of countries.  Starting in 1992, Italian clubs dominated the Cup for nearly a decade.  The Italian clubs faired very poorly in the late 90’s, but have returned to the top in several recent championships.  The Cup underwent a series of other changes in the years following England’s readmission in 1991, as the competition was combined with the UEFA Winners Cup and other qualification rules were changed. The establishment of the EU also drastically affected the teams qualifying for the cup, as this restructuring changed the rules regarding player’s foreign/European status.

The latest championship game, played on May 21st, 2008, was the first all English match in UEFA Cup history.  This game, played in Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, was the first Cup championship played in Russia and only the third in history contested between two teams from the same country.  Manchester United won the game 6-5 on penalty kicks.