The origins of modern FIFA Club World Cup are to be found in Intercontinental Cup, a tournament created in 1960 which allowed both the winners of Champions League (former Champions Cup) in Europe and Copa Libertadores in South America to decide who's "the best team in the world" every season.

Originally, this competition was played as a two game final (home and away) in Europe and America. Until 1968 only final scores, instead of goal average, decided the champion of Intercontinental Cup, so that a third game was necessary whenever each team won a match (or both ended up with a draw). In the 70s there were some brawls between American and European teams, resulting in the refusal of some champions in the Old Continent to play the final. Whenever this was the case, runners-up in Champions Cup were allowed to participate in this tournament. In 1975 and 1978 this competition wasn't even played due to some major discrepancies. Starting in 1980, sponsored by Toyota (whence called Toyota Cup), Intercontinental Cup was played as a single-game final in Tokyo.

In 2005, the original Intercontinental Cup merged with FIFA Club World Championship (an experimental competition introduced in 2000 by the world football association in order to compete with UEFA for the control of the profitable club market, which only survived its first edition) in a single tournament called FIFA Club World Cup (still sponsored by Toyota), which from that year on gathered not only the European and South American champions, but those of all the continental confederations: Asia (AFC), Africa (CAF), North & Central America (CONCACAF), South America (CONMEBOL), Oceania (OFC), and Europe (UEFA).

NOTES

• Official UEFA and Toyota Cup/FIFA 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 editions before 2001, the main information sources I've used are the archives of Spanish newspapers ABC (1902-), El Mundo Deportivo (1941-), Marca (1942-) and As (1967-). 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."