The notebook
European club football has handed out five major trophies. One of them officially does not count. Another no longer exists. And the heaviest of the three that remain is not the one everybody photographs.
Every number below is sourced, and the sources are listed at the end.
The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup ran from 1955 to 1971 — sixteen years, three more than the Conference League has existed. Ask UEFA and you will be told it was the forerunner of the UEFA Cup. Ask for the honours list and it is not there.
It was not run by UEFA at all. It was organised by the Fairs Cup Committee, led by FIFA executives, and the entry rule was extraordinary: the competition was only open to cities that hosted trade fairs. Where a club finished in its own league was irrelevant. There was also a «one city, one team» rule. It was a tournament for trade-show towns that happened to feature some of the best clubs in Europe.
Source: Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, Wikipedia.
When the competition folded in 1971 and UEFA took over with the UEFA Cup, one question remained: who keeps the actual cup?
It was settled the only way it could be — with a match. On 22 September 1971, at the Camp Nou, Barcelona beat Leeds United 2–1 in front of 45,000 people, and took permanent possession of the trophy.
A one-off play-off, in front of a full stadium, for an object from a competition that had already ceased to exist and that the governing body would decline to recognise. It is one of the strangest fixtures in European football and it is barely ever mentioned.
The UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup ran for 39 seasons, from 1960 to 1999, and was contested by the winners of each country’s domestic cup. It was a real trophy with real prestige, and it was killed by arithmetic.
When the Champions League expanded in 1997 to admit several clubs per country, the big teams that would previously have entered the Cup Winners’ Cup were now going into the Champions League instead. Within two seasons the competition had lost its reason to exist and was merged into the UEFA Cup.
The last final was played on 19 May 1999 at Villa Park, Birmingham: Lazio 2–1 Mallorca. Barcelona holds the record with four titles (1979, 1982, 1989 and 1997).
Sources: UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and the 1999 final.
Here is where the expectations break. The tallest is the one you know; the heaviest is not.
The Europa League trophy is the heaviest of the three — 15 kg, four more than the Champions League cup and more than twice the World Cup trophy, which weighs 6.175 kg in total. The second-tier competition hands over the hardest trophy in Europe to lift.
📌 And a connection worth noting: Silvio Gazzaniga designed both the Europa League trophy and the FIFA World Cup trophy — the two most recognisable cups in football came from the same hands, as we covered here.
The famous one with the enormous curved handles — «big ears», in about six languages — is not the original European Cup. It is the second.
The first was retired for a simple reason: Real Madrid won five in a row and kept it, permanently, in 1960. A new trophy had to be commissioned, and Stadelmann made it in Berne in 1967. Celtic were the first club to win the cup as we know it.
The rule that created it still exists in a softer form: win it three times in a row or five times in total and you are entitled to keep a full-size replica. Nobody takes the original home any more.
Source: European Champion Clubs’ Cup and UEFA’s own trophy page.
The Conference League started in 2021, although UEFA had been considering a third-tier competition since at least 2015, to give clubs from lower-ranked national associations a realistic route into Europe.
Its trophy is the most literal design of the three. It has 32 hexagonal columns — one for each of the 32 teams in the original group stage — and they curve upwards to represent a ball bending through the air towards the goal. Once you know that, you cannot unsee it.
The first winners were Roma, who beat Feyenoord 1–0 on 25 May 2022 at the Arena Kombëtare in Tirana.
Sources: UEFA Conference League and the 2022 final.
Almost nobody, and that is the pattern across the whole sport.
It is the same story as the World Cup, which stays in Zürich, and the FA Cup, which is on its fifth physical trophy. The cups in the photographs are handed over for twenty minutes and then go back in the case.
Everything above comes from these, and they are worth reading if you want the full detail:
If you find something here that is wrong, tell me — corrections get made and noted.
One practical advantage of a tabletop competition: nobody takes the trophy back.
Play Toy Soccer Cup — free, in your browser
There are 57 leagues and 57 cups in it, and winning one takes an afternoon rather than a season. Against the computer, two players on one device, or someone in another country.
More on this: every World Cup match ball and why they changed and why the World Cup trophy is hollow.
