Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
This was a hiatus presumably conditioned, to some degree, by climate, given the domestic winter breaks in Scandinavia and parts of eastern Europe, and the scarcity of playable pitches in those countries there before the arrival of undersoil heating and artificial grass. To illustrate this point, when Dynamo Kyiv hosted Aston Villa in the European Cup quarter-finals in March 1982, the game was played more than 600 kilometres away from Kyiv in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula. The following year, Dynamo travelled even further – to the Georgian capital Tbilisi, then a warmer outpost of the Soviet Union – to host Hamburg for their quarter-final ‘home’ leg.
In 1991/92, the last season before the old European Cup morphed into the Champions League, December games returned as the competition changed to incorporate the very first group stage, which ran from the end of November until mid-April. In a book exploring the first 50 years of UEFA, to mark the governing body’s golden jubilee, venerable football writer Graham Turner focused a chapter on the debate sparked by the introduction of the rebranded Champions League. “Thirty-five years of tradition translate easily into conservatism,” he said as he recalled the scepticism that this “commercially driven” new format provoked in some quarters.
It is not just changes to calendars and formats that prompt doubts and discussions. In the same book, it is fascinating to read about early responses to games under floodlights following their introduction to football stadiums in the 1950s. According to Turner, goalkeepers’ errors were regularly “blamed on the lighting”. Moreover, the wish to accustom players’ eyes to a different stadium’s floodlighting led to “the habit of training on the pitch at an away venue on the evening before an international match so that they could ‘take a look at the lights’.”
A debate about night kick-offs appears in another tome on my bookshelf, Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, a much-loved British football magazine of the 1950s and 60s. Writing an opinion piece in November 1958, Buchan debated the merits of Football League games under the lights on Fridays and Saturdays. “New ideas are always welcome in soccer,” began Buchan, whose reservations included concerns about travel for fans – still very valid today – though his suggestion that “such matches would lose a lot of publicity from the press” has aged less well.
As for the argument that “there will be little pleasure watching a game on a bitterly cold, and possibly foggy, evening,” that point appears largely lost now too. He might have had a case about that Anglo-Italian Cup tie on a freezing night in Newcastle in 1992, but when it came to the Champions League matches this January, the cold was no deterrent at all as that first league phase drew to its dramatic close.
Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
This was a hiatus presumably conditioned, to some degree, by climate, given the domestic winter breaks in Scandinavia and parts of eastern Europe, and the scarcity of playable pitches in those countries there before the arrival of undersoil heating and artificial grass. To illustrate this point, when Dynamo Kyiv hosted Aston Villa in the European Cup quarter-finals in March 1982, the game was played more than 600 kilometres away from Kyiv in Simferopol on the Crimean Peninsula. The following year, Dynamo travelled even further – to the Georgian capital Tbilisi, then a warmer outpost of the Soviet Union – to host Hamburg for their quarter-final ‘home’ leg.
In 1991/92, the last season before the old European Cup morphed into the Champions League, December games returned as the competition changed to incorporate the very first group stage, which ran from the end of November until mid-April. In a book exploring the first 50 years of UEFA, to mark the governing body’s golden jubilee, venerable football writer Graham Turner focused a chapter on the debate sparked by the introduction of the rebranded Champions League. “Thirty-five years of tradition translate easily into conservatism,” he said as he recalled the scepticism that this “commercially driven” new format provoked in some quarters.
It is not just changes to calendars and formats that prompt doubts and discussions. In the same book, it is fascinating to read about early responses to games under floodlights following their introduction to football stadiums in the 1950s. According to Turner, goalkeepers’ errors were regularly “blamed on the lighting”. Moreover, the wish to accustom players’ eyes to a different stadium’s floodlighting led to “the habit of training on the pitch at an away venue on the evening before an international match so that they could ‘take a look at the lights’.”
A debate about night kick-offs appears in another tome on my bookshelf, Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, a much-loved British football magazine of the 1950s and 60s. Writing an opinion piece in November 1958, Buchan debated the merits of Football League games under the lights on Fridays and Saturdays. “New ideas are always welcome in soccer,” began Buchan, whose reservations included concerns about travel for fans – still very valid today – though his suggestion that “such matches would lose a lot of publicity from the press” has aged less well.
As for the argument that “there will be little pleasure watching a game on a bitterly cold, and possibly foggy, evening,” that point appears largely lost now too. He might have had a case about that Anglo-Italian Cup tie on a freezing night in Newcastle in 1992, but when it came to the Champions League matches this January, the cold was no deterrent at all as that first league phase drew to its dramatic close.
Winter football? For a fan of my age, those two words are an instant transporter to memories of Christmas and early January fixtures in the bitter cold, of orange balls and snow piled up around the sides of pitches. For younger readers, an FA Cup fourth-round tie from 40 years ago – York City’s giant-slaying of Arsenal – is worth visiting on YouTube for a glimpse of that world: the players’ frosty breath, the bumpy surface streaked with snow and ice, conditions which facilitated a classic cup upset by third-tier York against an Arsenal side stuffed with internationals.
Such conditions may be better enjoyed in the stands than on the pitch, though scarves and bobble hats and steaming Bovril only provide so much protection – said from the bitter experience of joining a university friend on the terraces at Newcastle United’s St James’s Park, along with 4,607 others, for an Anglo-Italian Cup tie against Cesena on a December night in 1992 (still the coldest I’ve ever felt at a football match).
But I digress. Winter football these days means something else too: the Champions League. Prior to this season, there had not been a European Cup or Champions League fixture played in January since 1964. In the first month of 2025, however, we had back-to-back weeks of action as the league phase concluded. For many fans, there is comfort to be found in the familiar old rhythms, yet on Matchday 8 – with 18 games unfolding at the same time and the final standings taking shape – there was no shortage of excitement. The shock of the new came with a flood of goals too.
Time, as ever, will enable surer judgements of the new format, but it is safe to say that Europe’s elite club competition is no stranger to evolution. Indeed, amid the novelty of these January fixtures, I was intrigued to see how the competition calendar had shifted over the decades. During the inaugural 1955/56 European Cup campaign, there were quarter-final games spread between late November and mid-February, with Real Madrid hosting Yugoslavian side Partizan for their first leg on Christmas Day.
The odd January European Cup game appeared on the fixture list until the mid-60s – including a Burnley-Hamburg tie at a no doubt very chilly Turf Moor in 1961 – before the 1970s and 80s brought a more fixed schedule, with the competition shutting down each year between the second week of November and the start of March.
