Champions League (C1)—traditionally known as Champions Cup—is the main European competition. It started as an original idea by the French journalist Gabriel Hanot, editor of the sports magazine L'Équipe, who proposed the creation of a European competition to decide the best team in the Continent. During its short (yet intense) history, this tournament has undergone several changes in design and number of teams, leading to the present format. Champions League is currently considered the most prestigious team competition in the world.

NOTES

• Official UEFA scores and statistics extended and corrected with multilingual edition. All the names of teams, players, referees, stadiums, and cities are written in their original spelling (or a standard transcription into Latin characters, in the case of other alphabets). This is the reason why some names may slightly differ in form with respect to other unstandardized information sources.

• In the case of seasons previous to 2001, the main information sources I've used are Euro Cups Online (Miloš Radulović), Spanish newspapers ABC (1902-), El Mundo Deportivo (1941-), Marca (1942-), As (1967-) and data collected by Romeo Ionescu. From 1985 on, when I started collecting my first statistics on paper, then with an Olivetti typewriter and finally using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS in an IBM computer (sweet old days...), scores and statistics are registered "on real time."