As I write this introduction the final qualifying round for the 2023/24 Champions League season is about to take place. For the twelve clubs involved the consequences cannot be understated. They can taste the budget-busting windfall the tournament brings, the prestige that comes with having your name drawn alongside the grand houses of European football. The chance to have the Champions League Anthem ring out in your stadium.

For the likes of Rangers and Royal Antwerp it will be essential to stop their domestic rivals gaining an advantage, for Raków Częstochowa, venturing beyond anything that has ever gone before and for PSV and Panathinaikos it is a chance to relive the great campaigns of 1988 and 1970 respectively. Sadly few teams dream of glory other than a select few. A notable scalp at home, perhaps sneaking through into the knockout rounds. Those might be the height of a club’s ambitions.

It will be the last incarnation of the current format as from 2024 onwards the competition will move to a Swiss-style league format, the workings of which remain much of a mystery to most football followers. It’s another format change to a tournament that largely remained untouched for thirty seven years yet has been constantly tweaked since 1992 when the logic determined that the public wanted more games to generate more money, create less jeopardy and less likelihood of clubs like Red Star Belgrade, Steaua Bucharest and PSV Eindhoven lifting the iconic trophy. The logic from a business perspective was undoubtedly correct but now we are left with a situation in which the ‘Champions’ League allows only guaranteed entry to 11 of the 55 UEFA associations represented with the other 46 playing off for four spots.

Though the format has changed, for 70 years the concept has stayed consistent. An additional layer beyond the domestic figuratively and literally. The theatre in which great clubs become legendary. The number of stars on the side of your shirt, an indicator of your place in the hierarchy of Europe’s elite. Take Manchester City and Pep Guardiola, winners in 2023. Financially the Premier League brings in more, it could (according to who you listen to) be harder to win, yet nothing can bring everlasting glory like winning the European Cup/Champions League. As Guardiola said prior to the final against Inter:

‘If we are considered one of the best teams we have to win the Champions League. My opinion is not going to change but to be in the books, the real books, you have to do that.’

Inter of course are already in those books. One of which you are about to read.

A year previous, Guardiola’s City had thrown away a 5-3 aggregate lead going into the 90th minute against a club that burned their name into those books thirteen times over. As Karim Benzema turned in the third goal to put Real Madrid ahead on aggregate, as the chants of Hala Madrid reverberated around the Bernabéu it was easy to make the observation that his team had been propelled by an unshakable belief in their legacy within the competition. Tweets, quotes, articles in the aftermath were littered with references to Real’s DNA, their history, ‘their competition.’

The adjustments to the format for season 2023/24 and all those that have come before it have been made in response to the lingering threat of a breakaway European Super League. A concept that has been discussed since shortly after the European Cup was launched. Although in the most recent instance in the spring of 2021 the threat became a reality. Twelve clubs self-determined that they were deserving of superior status to the rest of the continent. With the exception of Bayern Munich, the Instagram followers and the corporate sponsor dollars probably suggested they had a point. And so did the trophy cabinets many of which were erected or expanded between 1955 and 1969.

Of the twelve clubs who originally committed to the project, nine reached the semi-finals of the European Cup in the period covered in the following pages. Barcelona would be losing finalists. Milan, Inter, Manchester United and, of course, Real Madrid would win eleven of the first fourteen titles between them. All but Arsenal (they would make their first appearance in 1971) and Chelsea who were chose/told not to compete in the inaugural season, did not appear.

Early success in the European Cup was not solely responsible for building these major brands of European football. Other elements played a part, most notably market size (Benfica and Celtic did not get an invite) and plenty of these clubs were already highly successful before the inception of competition. However, it is impossible to ignore that this, in the early advertising age, was a time when reputations were constructed. For FIFA’s club of the 20th Century, Real Madrid, the tournament arrived at the perfect moment in their otherwise solid but unspectacular history. It is to Di Stefano and Puskas that Florentino Perez can thank for the reason Jude Bellingham got goosebumps when he heard of Real’s interest.

Five years earlier, or five later, we would have been having a very different discussion. Torino, Wolves and Dynamo Moscow all may hold different places in the game’s pantheon had circumstances been slightly different. Kylian Mbappé may have been willing to sit out a season of football before sealing his dream move to Budapest to pull on the iconic crimson of Honved.

And what of the competition itself? The tournament that now provides the richest pot of prize-money in all of sport, beamed across the globe as the manifestation of the highest level for the World’s most popular sport. Just like the clubs, this wasn’t preordained. A decade earlier, the continent had been at war with itself, and now they seemed on the verge of another conflict as Cold War tensions continued to ramp up. There was no European Football Association until 1953 and even then the idea of where its borders started and ended was not as obvious to us as it seems now.

The European Cup was another competition, like a few that had come before it that had risen and fallen. Consider the way we look at ideas for a World Championship now and laugh them off. There was little guarantee that it would work. The way Europeans now scoff at the benefits and challenge of playing an Egyptian or Australian side in such a tournament is not too dissimilar to how an English side may have looked at a Dutch or Belgian team when the European Cup was mooted. Although this doesn’t seem such a distant proposition, as we absorb the impact of the ‘Saudi Summer’ of 2023.

As a written history, it is very simple to go through the history books and create defining lines that bookmark specific eras, but the truth is always more fluid. In focusing on a specific time-period, one can see how the nature of the game gradually shifted throughout the 50s and 60s and give due credit to the pioneering figures of that first decade and a half. Ending after the 1970 final would have been cleaner, but Feyenoord’s victory just feels like it belongs in the next volume of this planned trilogy.

In analysing a competition of almost 70 years, it becomes hard to not focus on who won the final, who scored and who it was against. Within a shorter time-frame there’s more room to dig into the nearly men and the unique stories of those early seasons. History is written by the winners, but there’s room for some losers in here.

Aside from limited footage of the early finals, advances in technology have allowed for these grand games to be viewed with a couple of clicks of a mouse. Football’s great writing boom since the turn of the century has shed greater light on football beyond Britain’s shores and the ease of accessing contemporary sources and wonderful archival work of many fan media websites, has allowed an opportunity to paint as rounded a picture of the competition with the benefit of a modern lens.

What follows is the story of how a simple idea became the vehicle for creating the greatest club competition in football. It is not a work of nostalgia. As a child of the mid-1980s, my most formative memories are of the early days of the Champions League. Despite its excesses and its semi-closed shop nature and its predictable group stages, I remain a fan of the competition. At its basest level, when March, April and May roll around, the premise remains the same just as it did nearly 70 years previous. Europe’s best settling the debate for a place in those history books Pep talked about.

In the upcoming pages, you will be transported back to the 50s and 60s and the tournament’s first fifteen seasons and the famous matches that gripped nations. This is the story of great players, iconic coaches and forward-thinking administrators who changed the face of the European game, Connecting the Continent for the first time.

I hope you can take half as much enjoyment from reading as I did in writing.

Gavin MacPhee August 2023

A note on terminology. The official name for the tournament this book covers is the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, often shortened officially to the Champions Cup (hence the Champions League). In the UK the tournament is known as the European Cup and as such, this is the term I have used throughout.