The Biggest Surprises in the History of the UEFA Super Cup
Tottenham Hotspur were just two agonizing minutes away from becoming the first UEFA Europa League-winning team since 2018 to defeat the Champions League holders in the European Super Cup. However, normal service was resumed when it comes to Tottenham and trophies. Normal service was also resumed when it comes to who usually wins the UEFA Super Cup.
The world is healing and soon enough global warming will probably start reversing itself. On paper it seems normal that the Champions League winners would come out on top, and since 2010 only three Super Cups have been won by the Europa League holders, but it wasn’t always this way. So let’s do some procrastinating of the actually important tasks in our lives and take a look throughout the history of the European Super Cup and celebrate all the times the underdog came out on top.
The idea of a European supercup was proposed by Dutch reporter Anton Witkamp during the golden age of Ajax’ total football team. He probably wanted to see them win even more trophies. The first match was held in 1972 when Ajax defeated Rangers but UEFA did not recognize this as an official game since Rangers were banned from European competitions due to the behaviour of their fans at the European Cup Winners’ Cup final.
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The very next year Ajax defeated Milan in the first recognized European Super Cup and just two years later the first surprise was on the cards. Ajax’s dominance over the European Cup had been replaced by Bayern who had just won their second consecutive trophy against Leeds United. Their opponents in the Super Cup were Dynamo Kyiv, who had defeated Ferencváros 3-0 in the Cup Winners’ Cup final.
The Hungarian team might have been considered an easy opponent for the team managed by the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskyi and featuring Ballon d’Or winner Oleh Blokhin, but Bayern didn’t fare much better. A 1-0 loss at home in the Olympiastadion was compounded by a 2-0 defeat in Kyiv in front of 100,000 spectators and Dynamo became the first Cup Winners’ Cup winners to upset the big boys.
In 1976 Bayern, who had just won their third consecutive European Cup suffered another heartbreak, this time against Anderlecht. Despite Gerd Müller turning the game around in the first leg in München, the Bavarians completely capitulated in Brussels losing 4-1, effectively putting an end to their first golden generation. That young Anderlecht team on the other hand was just getting started and two years later they won their second Cup Winners’ Cup, lining up a game against Liverpool.
Both legs played out in almost the exact same way when it came to how the goals were scored. The home team opened the scoring, the away team equalized and then the home team scored again. The only difference between the two legs was that in the game in Brussels, Anderlecht managed to add a third goal in the 87th minute, which proved the difference maker in the tie.
Two years later another English club would go home empty handed and this time the margins were even smaller. Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest who had just won their second consecutive European Cup were due to face Valencia who had defeated another English team, Arsenal to win the Cup Winners’ Cup. Forest did their job in the first leg played at home , however crucially they only won their game 2-1 conceding an all important Valencia goal. In the second leg Valencia kept a clean sheet and with a 1-0 win took home the trophy on away goals.
The 1983 and 84 editions marked the first time the underdogs won the European Super Cup on a bounce. First came Aberdeen under Alex Ferguson who had just caused a major upset defeating Real Madrid in the Cup Winners’ Cup final and Hamburg were equally powerless against them with the Scottish team winning 2-0 on aggregate. Then in 1984 the two legged final was scrapped as both Liverpool and Juventus were experiencing fixture congestion. The final was to be held in Turin but not in Juve’s stadium so as to deny them a home advantage.
Juventus won 2-0 through two Zbigniew Boniek goals. At the end of that very same season the two teams would meet again, this time in the final of the European Cup. That game was sadly overshadowed by the Heysel disaster causing not only the ban on English teams in European competitions which meant that the 1985 Super Cup was not held as Everton, who had won the Cup Winners Cup were also affected by the ban.
Our next inclusion in 1988 featured the shortest ever distance in a major European final, just over 100km between PSV Eindhoven and Mechelen, a distance you can nowadays drive in an hour. Mechelen had already defeated a Dutch team, Ajax, in the Cup Winners’ Cup final and were looking for the same inspiration against PSV.
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Part of this game was also a very interesting personal battle between the Koeman brothers as Ronald, playing for PSV would face his older brother Erwin, playing for the Belgian team. Erwin would ultimately have the last laugh as Mechelen’s 3-0 home win in the first leg was enough to win the Super Cup.
In 1991 Ferguson picked up his second European Super Cup, this time with Manchester United. In an illustration of how much the power balance has shifted in European football, Manchester United, who had won Europe’s second competition were the underdogs to European Cup winners Red Star Belgrade. The game, which was the first time the two teams had met since the game that caused the Munich air disaster, was sadly overshadowed by the beginning of the Yugoslav wars.
This caused not only the final to be played over just one leg in Manchester but also the beginning of the disassembly of the Red Star team. Five players that played the European Cup final had already left and over the next two years the rest of them would follow suit. United on the other hand, who had just caused a major upset defeating Barcelona in the Cup Winners’ Cup final were without captain Bryan Robson and were watched on by Sir Matt Busby from the stands, who had been part of the Munich plane crash.
Red Star’s manager, Vladica Popović, had been on the pitch in 1958 in Belgrade and watched on as his team dominated the first half to no avail before United’s Brian McClair scored the winning goal in the 67th minute. One of the players that had left that Red Star team, Dejan Savićević, ended up losing a second Super Cup final two years later whilst playing for AC Milan.
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Their opponents in the 1993 Super Cup were a club that had just been promoted to top flight football three years earlier. How does one do that you might ask? Simple. Dairy products. Parma, the club in question, was owned at the time by Parmalat, one of the wealthiest Italian corporations back then. After their promotion to the top flight they really started pumping in the cash and within 3 years they had won the Coppa Italia and the Cup Winner’s Cup.
Milan on the other hand had won two Champions League titles in the last 3 years but more importantly had lost the 1993 final to Marseille. So how were they playing in the Super Cup then? Well Marseille, in their hunger to win the first Champions League title by a French team had done a little match fixing in Ligue 1 before the final to ensure their players were fit for the big game.
Although the club weren’t stripped of the 1993 title, they were denied entry to the Super Cup. In the Super Cup games Parma started out weakly, losing at home 1-0 to Milan but shocked the Rossoneri at the San Siro 2-0 to win on aggregate. In 2000 an important shift in the Super Cup was implemented by UEFA, as the game would now be disputed between the winners of the Europa League, or UEFA Cup as it was called back then.
Straddling this decision, from 1997 to 2001 no Champions League winning team won the Super Cup. First up, in the last final to be played over two legs, Barcelona brought Borussia Dortmund right back down to earth after the German side had overcome Juventus, one of the strongest sides in the world at that time, in the Champions League Final.
Then, Chelsea’s magical side of the late 90s and early 2000s, whose success some might say caused them to catch the eye of Roman Abramovich beat Real Madrid 1-0 in Monaco. And then in 1999, at the height of joy for Manchester United fans, Lazio decided to ruin their celebrations in the Super Cup.
Two years later Juan Sebastian Verón, who played in that final for Lazio, moved to Manchester for a British record fee, arguably causing even more grief to Sir Alex. The next two inclusions, Galatasaray’s 2-1 victory over Real Madrid in 2000 and Liverpool’s 3-2 win over Bayern that showed the world how not to squander a 3 goal lead in an European final, are part of an interesting phenomenon I like to call the little treble. Basically teams winning a treble that includes the secondary European competition.
What is certain, is that these victories are sort of last hurrahs, as the footballing landscape of Europe started to shift more and more rapidly. Since the 2000s money has been more and more the mark of success in football, as opposed to academy products, fanbase, historical relevance or similar vestiges of the past. I mean after all, even history can be bought.
Only four clubs since have managed the Super Cup upset. First up is Valencia in 2004, winners of the 2004 UEFA Cup who faced giant killers Porto. As both teams were looking ahead to their new seasons and their Super Cup final, they were simultaneously being relieved of the managers that had made them successful. José Mourinho joined Chelsea and his very good friend Rafa Benitez moved to Liverpool. In came Víctor Fernández and Claudio Ranieri and it was Ranieri who led his team to victory in Monaco.
It was increasingly becoming obvious that the only chance to achieve a Super Cup upset was to either have a truly overpowered team for the UEFA Cup, like Sevilla, who thrashed Barcelona 3-0 in 2006 or to simply come out swinging at the superior opposition and hope to keep them on the back foot, like Zenit did to Manchester United in 2008.
If neither of those are possible your last recourse is to become Atlético Madrid, maybe utilising a Being John Malkovich type situation, and win the last three Super Cups as a non-Champions League winning team, in 2008, 2012 and 2018. Since the rich are getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, and I’m not talking just about football here, it will probably take a while before we see another Super Cup upset. Then again it might happen next season, and that is probably the best explanation of why people watch football so passionately.
By: Eduard Holdis / @He_Ftbl
@GabFoligno / Matthew Ashton – AMA / Getty Images