The UEFA Cup was originally the idea of Ernst Thommen from Switzerland, Italy’s Ottorino Barrasi (both of whom became future vice-presidents of FIFA and Sir Stanley Rous, the future president of FIFA.

The idea was to have a tournament for representative sides from the cities in Europe that hold trade fairs regularly. Once everything was agreed, this was the founder for the UEFA Cup and was called the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup which was founded on 18th April 1955. This was two weeks after the European Champion Clubs’ Cup was founded.

The Clubs that were involved in this tournament came from Barcelona, Basle, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Lausanne, Leipzig, London, Milan and Zagreb. This tournament was only supposed to last for two years but it ended up lasting for three. In which 23 games were played. The winner was Barcelona, who only fielded players from FC Barcelona beat the London side 8-2 on aggregate in the final.

In the second tournament the organisers decided to go back to club participation with a knockout format, but the teams still had to come from cities the hold trade fairs. In the 1958-60 competition there were sixteen teams, after this it was then held every year. In 1962 the number of entrants had gone up to 32, and again in 1967 to 48, 60 in 1968. And for the 1969-70 tournament there were 64 teams starting. Today there are more than 100.

In the beginning of this tournament the teams from southern Europe tended to dominate, in particular Barcelona having won the Fairs Cup three times and Valencia CF that won it twice. Then in 1968 Leeds United AFC won it making them the first northern European team to win the trophy. This started a run of wins for English clubs.

In the 1971-72 season the fifth win was by an English club called Tottenham Hotspur FC and the tournament had changed its name to the UEFA Cup. The decision to change the name came from the fact that competition didn’t need the ties with the international trade fairs anymore; this meant giving it to UEFA as they were the only organisation to have a good administration and knowledge of the sport to run it.

In the 1970s German, Belgian and Dutch sides started to compete with the English for the trophy and it was the Swedish side, IFK Gotenborg that won it in 1982 and 1987. Juventus FC in 1977- is the only team from the south to win the trophy upsetting the dominance of the northern Europeans that included Leeds, Liverpool FC, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Tottenham all winning twice in this time.

With the successive victories from Real Madrid CF in the mid 1980s, the Italian clubs then began to dominate in the 1990s. With SSC Napoli winning in 1989 and it was the Italian sides that won the UEFA Cup eight times out of eleven seasons. Internazionale FC won it three times, Galatasaray SK claimed it as Turkey’s first European club prize in 2000.
The final has always been a two legged placing but with the exception of 1964 and 1965 when the finals were played in Barcelona and Turin. For the 1998 season the format changed for good to a one tie final.

This was won by Inter beating S.S. Lazio 3-0 at the Parc des Princes in Paris. In the next season at Luzhniki stadium in Moscow Parma AC won by beating Olympique de Marseille, which was the third time a French side has got into the final and lost for the third time.

For the 1999-2000 season saw the domestic cup winner also qualified for the UEFA Cup. This was decided when the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup came to an end. This also meant that clubs that were eliminated in the third round of the UEFA Champions League and the eight third placed teams at the end of the group phase could go and compete in the UEFA Cup. Also the competition has three Fair Play representatives, three UEFA IntertotoCup ‘winners’ and winners of some selected domestic league cup competitions.
Just with every other tournament this tournament also has regulations. And these are that the UEFA Cup is handed to the winning team for a year, and each champion can keep a four-fifth size replica.

The regulations also states that the original trophy is handed to any club that wins the UEFA Cup three times in a row, or five times overall. This has not happened, yet.