EUROPA LEAGUE

The competition presently known as Europa League (C3) was created in season 2009-10 as a sequel of former UEFA Cup, which in time had been the continuation of a seminal European competition known as Fairs Cup, created in 1955. The philosophy behind the original Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (in its full name) was to establish a European tournament for cities where trade fairs were celebrated, parallel to the other two continental competitions organized by UEFA: Champions Cup (C1) and Cup Winners' Cup (C2). Beginning in 1971-72 season, the name of Fairs Cup changed to UEFA Cup, as the European football body fully took over the organization and development of this tournament. After its merge with C2 in 1999, the competition was renamed New UEFA Cup, although it was still commonly referred to as UEFA Cup, since its format was basically a sequel of the old tournament. As new changes were introduced in the summer of 2009, the name of the competition was changed once more, and it became the present Europa League.

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."