This is an article on world’s biggest club football championship called the UEFA Champions League and in this article you will know almost every important detail about this competition you need to know but in brief. So without wasting your time further, let us get into the article.
All You Want to Know about UEFA Champions League
The UEFA Champions League is better and popularly known as Champions League only amongst the football fans across the Europe and the world. It is an annual continental football competition, which is organized by the Europe’s biggest football administrative body UEFA (Union of European Football Associations). UEFA Champions League is considered to be world’s most prestigious football tournament because of the nature and the quality of football is played in it.
Not only this, but it is the world’s most watched sport tournament as well. The final of the 2012-13 UEFA Champions League got the highest number of eyeballs. This tournament has been watched by around 360 million television viewers every year as an approximation.
Brief History about UEFA Champions League
The first ever European football competition was used to play in the early 1900s between the Austria and Hungarian clubs which was called The Mitropa Cup. Later The Mitropa Cup was revised to the Challenge Cup. During 1927 one more competition started between the Central European countries. More and more such competitions were started in various parts of Europe and there were reports in different newspapers across the Europe about which competition is better than the other or which European club can be considered as the best among the all despite not being played with all the clubs ever. After the establishment of UEFA in the year 1954 finally all the clubs under one umbrella decided to have one single club championship between the champions of the Europe and thus European Champion Club’s Cup came into the existence, which was later named as UEFA Champions League in 1992.
Format of the UEFA Champions League
This was initially a straight knock out competition and had many clubs participating in it as all the national champion clubs were invited to play in it. During the 1990s the tournament was expanded to many more clubs and a round robin group stage was introduced. All the major European League provides 5 teams to the competition now. UEFA Champions League begins in mid July which has three knockout qualifying rounds and then a play-off round. The 10 teams who survive these two rounds then join the 22 other teams who are already qualified by virtue of their winning their domestic competitions. Then these 32 teams are drawn in to 8 groups and they play with each other twice. The winners of these eight groups and eight runners up then goes further in to the knockout phase which finishes with a final in May. The eventual champion of the UEFA Champions League automatically qualifies for the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup.
Real Madrid has been the most successful team in the UEFA Cup as it has won 10 titles including the 2013-14 title.
