Mitropa Cup: the tournament that paved way for Champions League

C ontemporary football fans may be surprised to learn that the Mitropa Cup, an ante litteram version of the Champions League, was reserved for clubs from nations, with the exception of Italy, which have disappeared from the map of football that counts. Countries such as Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia evoke, in the most scattered exploits, outstanding performances that can be traced back to a few editions of World Cups or European Championships that took place over the decades.

In the same way, modern fans might be surprised that European football was dominated almost 100 years ago by teams that have fallen into oblivion. A quick glance at the list of Mitropa winners, for example, reveals the absence of the German, Spanish, Dutch and English teams that would dominate the scene after the second world war. In addition, when fans think of the Mitropa their minds tend to go to the most recent editions, those played between 1979 and 1992 which were reserved for the winners of the nations’ respective second divisions.

The event, which in each European nation took on one or more different names – in Italian newspapers, for example, it was renamed the Coppa Europa – took its name from the German company Mitropa AG, founded in 1916, which managed the sleeping and dining cars of the trains that travelled through central Europe. Starting in the 1920s, Mitropa AG began to sponsor sporting events, albeit indirectly and by granting discounts, and thanks to the founding of the Mitropa competition it acquired a hitherto unheard-of customer: the fan who travelled across the continent to attend their team’s away matches.

Some clarifications are necessary: although the tournament was a progenitor of the Champions Cup, the latter