In 2009 the UEFA Champions League final eclipsed the Super Bowl as the most-watched annual sporting event on earth.
Research conducted by London-based Initiative Futures Sports and Entertainment found that the final in May between Barcelona and Manchester United attracted an average audience three million viewers superior to the Steelers-Cardinals contest the previous February, and when overall figures were examined soccer’s centrepiece had outdrawn the gridiron game by nearly 22 per cent.
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Skyrocketing numbers in the Asia-Pacific region was cited as the major factor behind the Champions League final’s chart-topping performance, and given its “distribution and popularity” in key growth markets, the report concluded the UEFA showcase would continue to outgrow its NFL counterpart, which, it pointed out, “lags far behind” the Champions League in global appeal.
The research considered neither the Olympic Games nor FIFA World Cup, but when asked about the Champions League’s importance ahead of the 2010 final, then-Inter Milan manager Jose Mourinho left little doubt where he stood on the matter of soccer’s marquee event.
“This game is the most important in the world,” he remarked ahead of the match between his Nerazzurri and Bayern Munich. “It is even bigger than the World Cup because the teams in it are at a higher level than national teams, who can’t buy the best players.
“If you hold that to be important,” he added, “you have to transmit that to the players.”
And the players, without question, have saved some of their best soccer — their most memorable performances — for the Champions League final.
From Zinedine Zidane’s winner against Bayer Leverkusen to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s injury-time strike against Bayern Munich to Steven Gerrard’s inspirational showing against AC Milan, Europe’s most prestigious club competition has continually served up the very best the sport has to offer.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Champions of the world
In 1953, French journalist Gabriel Hanot travelled to England to see Wolverhampton Wanderers play Honved Budapest and Spartak Moscow in a pair of friendly matches at Molineux. Honved, at the time, included the likes of Puskas, Kocsis and Czibor, and the core of the team had won Olympic Gold for Hungary in 1952. Wolves defeated both of them, and after the victories the Daily Mail newspaper proclaimed the West Midlands side to be “Champions of the world.”
You can almost picture Hanot crumpling up the paper and tossing it into his hotel room wastebasket in disgust.
The editor of French sports magazine L’Equipe, Hanot had long been advocating for a proper, continent-wide soccer championship, and it seems the boasting out of England was the motivation he needed to set the thing up, himself.
Not that such a tournament was a revolutionary idea.
More than half a century earlier a man named John Gramlick had tinkered with the idea of bringing national champions together in a unique competition. And while his Challenge Cup, established in 1897, didn’t exactly encompass the continent, it did include the best teams from the Austro-Hungarian Empire — Gramlick’s own Vienna Cricket and Football Club defeated Football Club 98 (another Vienna club) in the maiden final.
By the time of its disbanding 1911 the competition had grown from four to 12 teams, expanding from its Vienna roots as far away as Budapest. But the notion of a European championship had taken root, and by 1927 legendary Austria manager Hugo Meisl had taken Gramlick’s Challenge Cup once step further with the establishment of the Mitropa Cup.
Now Czechoslovakia, Italy, Romania and Switzerland had been brought in alongside Austria and Hungary, but after the Second World War and a reincarnation as the Zentropa Cup, enthusiasm for the tournament declined, at least until Hanot made that fateful trip to Wolverhampton.
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Upon arriving back in Paris the 64-year-old conferred with L’Equipe colleague Jacques Ferran, and the two got down to work. Ferran drafted the rules and format of the proposed competition and Hanot took the document to Vienna, where he presented it to a UEFA gathering.
Two years later, on September 4, 1955, Portugal’s Sporting club hosted Yugoslavia’s Partizan Belgrade in the inaugural match of the new European Cup.
Sporting’s Baptista Martins and Partizan’s Milos Mulitinovic each bagged a brace in a 3-3 draw, but neither player, nor Hanot, Ferran, Meisl and Gramlick, for that matter, could have had any idea what they were on to.
Biggest show on earth
Excitement for the 2013 Champions League final will continue to build during a four-day festival to be held at the International Quarter in Stratford, next to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, beginning on May 23, two days before the match, itself.
And when Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund finally walk out of the tunnel at Wembley Stadium they will be presented a match-ball created exclusively for the occasion and pause to listen to an anthem adapted from a George Frideric Handel composition and played at the outset of every Champions League match.
Everything about the evening will be extravagant, and the 90 minutes contested between the Bundesliga rivals will seem almost extracurricular.
About €1.3 billion in revenue will have been generated through broadcasting and sponsorships by the time it all comes to a close, and celebrations will continue long into the night — and morning, and afternoon —in cities and time zones and on continents where a cable hook-up is the only connection to the biggest show on earth.
Jerrad Peters is a Winnipeg-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.