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.”