UEFA Super Cup: The competition that found its place
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
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Launched in the early 1970s, the UEFA Super Cup is a star attraction on the European football calendar. UEFA.com looks at how the competition took shape.
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Just as the renowned French sports newspaper L'Equipe had been instrumental in the birth in 1955 of UEFA's flagship club competition, the European Champions' Club Cup (AKA the European Cup and now the UEFA Champions League), another popular European daily, Amsterdam-based de Telegraaf, laid the foundations for what we now know as the UEFA Super Cup.
Initially featuring the respective holders of the European Cup and now-defunct European Cup Winners' Cup, it is now contested by the winners of the previous season's UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League.
As with the development of the European Cup, the Super Cup's launch was fuelled by the eternal debate over who could lay claim to the title of 'best club team in Europe'.
'Something new'
It was 1972 when Anton Witkamp, then a reporter and later sports editor of De Telegraaf, came up with the idea of "something new" to determine the top club side in Europe.
Another aim of the idea was to further test the strengths of Amsterdam club Ajax during a period when they were dominating the European Cup – winning the competition three times in succession between 1971 and 1973 with their swashbuckling 'total football' style. Dutch club football was riding the crest of a wave at that time, with Ajax's hat-trick of triumphs following Rotterdam outfit Feyenoord's success in capturing the 1970 European Cup.
"The idea was conceived in the era of total football. Our era – four consecutive European Cups between Feyenoord and Ajax," Witkamp said. "More than money and glory, they were pursuing the right to be called the best.
"But who was the strongest team in Europe, which team ought to have been the strongest? The team that won the European Cup? In principle, yes. Yet football is often a hymn to relativity and, for this reason, can be an imprecise art. So why not pit the holders of the European Champion Clubs' Cup against the winners of the [European] Cup Winners' Cup? Why not throw down a challenge to Ajax?
“[Scottish club] Rangers had won the Cup Winners' Cup in 1972. I put forward my plan to the Ajax boss [Jaap] van Praag, who found it an excellent idea. Consequently, the way was clear, with the patronage of my newspaper."
Unofficial debut
Witkamp and Van Praag sought official endorsement for the new competition from UEFA, but European football's governing body was unable to give its blessing – at the time, Rangers were serving a UEFA ban owing to fan misconduct. Nevertheless, the match went ahead, albeit in an unofficial capacity. Moreover, the game would have a special significance for Rangers, because the Glasgow club would be celebrating their centenary in 1973.
Witkamp decided on a two-legged format to maximise revenue for both clubs. The two matches, financially backed by De Telegraaf, took place on 16 and 24 January 1973 in Glasgow and Amsterdam respectively – and proved successful in both sporting and financial terms. Ajax won an entertaining contest on a 6-3 aggregate scoreline and, importantly, the public response was positive – 57,000 spectators watched the game at Glasgow's Ibrox Stadium, and another 26,000 fans attended the return fixture in the Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam the following week.
The European Cup and Cup Winners' Cup winners in 1972/73 – Ajax and AC Milan respectively – also expressed an interest in a head-to-head encounter. Considering "that it would be wrong if UEFA did not take under its control these matches," the UEFA Emergency Committee decided in June 1973 to lay down some guiding principles, ratified by the UEFA Executive Committee four months later.
The new competition was named the 'Super Competition'. Participation was optional, and this principle was reconfirmed by the Executive Committee when it met in Marbella, Spain in January 1976. Ajax comfortably beat Milan 6-1 over two legs to win the inaugural official edition in January 1974, and the fledgling competition began taking its first steps within the European club football landscape.
Finding a niche
The 'Super Competition' struggled at the outset to find its place in the European calendar, not least because of its initial home-and-away format. Furthermore, participation was not compulsory. It had not been possible to schedule the two legs of the first edition until the start of 1974 – and what should have been the second edition, in 1975, had to be cancelled altogether.
A feature article on the competition in the two-volume book '50 Years of UEFA', published to celebrate UEFA's Golden Jubilee in 2004, described it as: "the cuckoo of the footballing world. You received acoustic signals, but you very rarely got a sight of it … Television companies could hardly pencil into their schedules an event that wandered like a vagrant round the calendar. It was the only UEFA final that had no time or place (…) Unless something dramatic happened, it tended to be a private party which was thoroughly enjoyed by those who took part – especially the ones who went home with the silverware."
The 'party' still showed that it could hit the headlines – no less than 105,000 fans were present in Kyiv in October 1975 to see 1974/75 Cup Winners' Cup titleholders, the USSR's Dynamo Kyiv, complete an aggregate 3-0 win over the same season's European Cup winners, West Germany's Bayern München.
The competition did not take place in 1981 or 1985, in the latter case because of that year's Heysel Stadium tragedy rather than any calendar constraints. In addition, unlike in UEFA's other competitions, there was no trophy at the time. The winners received a plaque embossed with the UEFA logo.
A winners' trophy
It was not until after the 1983 edition, when Scotland's Aberdeen beat West Germany's Hamburg, that the match delegate from the second leg – Dutchman and future UEFA treasurer Jo van Marle – suggested that a cup be presented to the winners. This proposal was supported by the then UEFA president, Jacques Georges. The trophy, produced by Italian firm Bertoni, was presented for the first time in 1987 to the Steaua București captain Ştefan Iovan, following the Romanian team's victory over Dynamo Kyiv.
in parallel, UEFA had embarked in 1983 on a new approach to the competition. Various problems meant, however, that these plans did not reach fruition until the match between 1985/86 club competition winners Steaua and Dynamo Kyiv. The encounter was played as a single match on neutral territory in Monaco, but not until 24 February 1987. Nor was the match able to generate sufficient general interest to get sponsors behind the new format. The old format was duly reinstated for the following season, but calendar issues immediately reappeared, resulting in the second leg between 1986/87 club competition titleholders Porto (Portugal) and Ajax not taking place until January 1988.
Moreover, since the club that staged the second leg considered the game as a home match, "criteria regarding UEFA's protocol for such events were barely met," as the UEFA general secretary Gerhard Aigner explained in a memo to the UEFA Executive Committee. "This affected transportation, ticket allocation, hotel reservations, protocol in the VIP box, order around the pitch and press work, causing unreasonable situations for the UEFA delegation," he added.
Raising the competition’s profile
Given that the competition no longer seemed to be matching its initiators' vision of serving as the ultimate decider between the best club sides of the season, serious questions were raised about its future. However, at its meeting in Moscow in March 1995, the UEFA Executive Committee deemed that a great deal could and should be done to raise its profile and overall appeal.
The result was another new formula, introduced in 1998. The only aspect retained from the first attempt at staging the competition as a single match was the venue – Monaco's Stade Louis II, which was felt to be an ideal size for this sort of occasion. With the clubs that qualified now obliged to take part, what was now called the UEFA Super Cup became the sporting highlight of events staged in Monaco every August to herald the new UEFA club competition season – including club competition draws and awards for the best players of the season.
"By linking it with the first-round draw, we hope to achieve a dual effect: to associate the competition with the excitement of the draw, on the one hand, and to bring a purely sporting element to the draw ceremony, on the other. Both events should be reinforced as a result, as should football as a whole," wrote Gerhard Aigner in an editorial for the UEFAflash publication.
Key recent changes
This format remained in place from 1998 to 2012, with a few small adjustments along the way, including the replacement, from 2000, of the Cup Winners' Cup holders (this competition was discontinued after the 1999 final) by the holders of the UEFA Cup. In turn, the UEFA Cup would become the UEFA Europa League from the 2009/10 season, and the latter competition's reigning titleholders now take on the winners of the UEFA Champions League, the new name given to the remodelled European Cup in the early 1990s.
From 2013, the Super Cup has also played another essential role within European football. Since then, the match has been staged each year in different cities across the continent – a move designed to share the prestigious occasion among Europe's national associations, giving many of them a cherished and unique opportunity to play host to a major international club competition event between two top teams fielding some of the game's stellar names.
In 2019, French referee Stéphanie Frappart became the first female official to referee a major UEFA men's competition event when she took charge of the all-English Super Cup match between Liverpool and Chelsea in Istanbul. The 2020 match between Bayern and Sevilla in Budapest was moved from August to late September owing to the rescheduling of the club competition calendar amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and served as a pilot match to test the partial return of spectators to stadiums.
From uncertain beginnings nearly 50 years ago, and following complications and doubts along the way, the UEFA Super Cup is now fully assured of its place and status on the European football scene – and the kick-off of every new UEFA club competition campaign would be much the poorer without it.
UEFA Super Cup format and venues
UEFA Super Cup winners
UEFA Super Cup records
Sources:
'UEFA – 60 Years at the Heart of Football': André Vieli, UEFA 2014
'UEFA 50 Years 1954–2004': Edited by Frits Ahlström, UEFA 2004
UEFA.com