The UEFA Europa League

The UEFA Cup was the original brainchild of Switzerland's Ernst Thommen, Italy's Ottorino Barrasi - both future FIFA vice-presidents - and England's Sir Stanley Rous, the future president of FIFA.

Their idea was to organise a tournament for representative sides from cities in Europe that regularly organised trade fairs. The concept was agreed upon and the forerunner to the UEFA Cup, namely the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup was founded on 18 April 1955, two weeks after the founding of the European Champion Clubs' Cup.

The first Fairs Cup involved teams from Barcelona, Basle, Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Lausanne, Leipzig, London, Milan and Zagreb. Originally conceived as a two-year tournament, it lasted for three, during which time 23 games were played. Barcelona, using players purely from FC Barcelona, beat a London representative side 8-2 on aggregate in the final.

For the second tournament the organisers reverted to club participation with the knockout format continuing, but the teams still had to come from cities staging trade fairs. Sixteen clubs took part in the 1958-60 tournament, after which it was staged on an annual basis. By 1962 the number of entrants had risen to 32; there were 48 in 1967; 60 in 1968; and, as from the 1969-70 season, there were 64 teams on the starting grid. There are now more than 100. The 1971/72 tournament, was the first to be known as the UEFA Cup.

From 1999/2000, domestic cup winners also qualified for the UEFA Cup after the decision was made to end the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. In addition, clubs eliminated from the third qualifying round of the UEFA Champions League and the eight third-placed finishers at the end of the group stage of the same competition move across to contest the UEFA Cup. The competition also includes three Fair Play representatives, three UEFA Intertoto Cup 'winners' and winners of some selected domestic league cup competitions.

From the 2009–10 season, the competition has been rebranded as the UEFA Europa League in a bid to increase the competition's profile. As well as changing the competition's name, an extra 16 teams now qualify for the main stages of the competition, with the group stage now consisting of 12 groups of four teams (in a double round robin), with the top two placed teams in each group progressing. The competition then progresses in much the same way as the previous format, with 4 rounds of two-legged knockout rounds and a one-off final held at a neutral ground meeting UEFA's Elite stadium criteria.