UEFA SUPER CUP

The European Super Cup is a pre-seasonal tournament which every year confronts the two winners of Champions League (C1) and Europa League (C3) from the previous season. Until the disappearance of Cup Winners' Cup (C2) in 1999, it was the champion of the latter competition who challenged the C1 winner in the Super Cup final (usually played as a two-legged match on unspecified dates before or during the European season). From that year on, the champion of UEFA Cup was the rival for the Champions League winner (already in a single-game final at the neutral venue of Monaco), and from 2009 on, with the new format of C3, it was UEFA Cup's sequel, Europa League, the competition which provided the contender for the C1 champion.

Just like Champions Cup (C1) was originally conceived by a French journalist, Gabriel Hanot, as a way to decide the best team in Europe, the Super Cup came up to life in 1972 thanks to another Dutch reporter, Anton Witkamp, with a similar intention: crown the "Champion of Champions" in a final between the winners of UEFA's two main competitions at the time: Champions Cup and Cup Winners' Cup. However, the first "official" edition of Super Cup, organized by UEFA, was that of 1973. Prior to this there was an "unofficial" edition, in 1972, with AFC Ajax and Rangers FC (UEFA refused to organize this final because the Scottish team was banned from European competitions after the incidents in the 1972 Cup Winners' Cup final).

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."