UCL Nights

UCL Nights
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Formerly the European Champion Clubs' Cup, popularly known as the European Cup, the UEFA Champions League is a club-based European tournament for the national champions and other top clubs in major national leagues of European football (soccer) associations. 

It started as the European Champion Clubs' Cup when French newspaperman Gabriel Hanot was provoked by the response of English tabloid newspapers to Wolverhampton Wanderers' defeat of the Hungarian side Honved (of Budapest) in December 1954. 

Wolverhampton had beaten the Soviet side Moscow Spartak the previous month, and the English team was hailed in the press as champions of the world. Hanot was at the game and wrote that this was an unjustified claim, and called for the launching of a European-wide competition, less episodic than the mid-European initiative the Mitropa Cup, and embracing Milan in Italy and Real Madrid in Spain. The French Football Federation supported the principle of the idea, but offered no formal leadership. 

World governing body the Fรฉdรฉration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) said it was not competent to do it, but the president Rodolphe Seeldrayers offered encouraging words, saying that FIFA dealt only with contests between national associations, but that if match dates could be balanced with the proposed tournament, then the latter ‘would be extremely interesting and would be a great success’.

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