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Cup Winners' Cup

The UEFA Cup Winners' Cup (also known as the European Cup Winners' Cup) was a football club competition contested annually by the most recent winners of all European domestic cup competitions. more...

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The cup is one of the many inter-European club competitions that have been organised by UEFA. The first competition was held in the 1960/61 season, and the last in 1998/99. The competition was then abolished to make way for a further expansion to the UEFA Champions League, with domestic cup winners now gaining entry into the UEFA Cup.

During its existence, the Cup Winners' Cup was regarded as the second most prestigious European club competition out of the three major tournaments, behind the UEFA Champions League/European Cup and ahead of the UEFA Cup, although many commentators felt the Cup Winners' Cup was the easiest of the three competitions to win.

From 1972 onwards, the winner of the tournament would go on to play the winner of the European Cup (later the UEFA Champions League) in the European Super Cup. The Cup Winners' Cup was eventually discontinued mainly due to the expansion of the UEFA Champions League in the late 1990's, and the CWC's Super Cup place was taken by the winner of the UEFA Cup.

From its inception until 1994, the competition was known only as the 'European Cup Winners' Cup' - from the 1994/95 season onwards, UEFA officially named the tournament the 'UEFA Cup Winners' Cup'.

Format

Throughout its 39-year history, the Cup Winners' Cup was always a straight knock-out tournament, with two-legged home and away ties up until the single match final staged at a neutral venue, the only exception to this being the two-legged final in the competition's first year. The format was identical to the original European Champions' Cup, with 32 teams contesting four knock-out rounds prior to the showpiece final, with the tournament usually running from September to May each year. In later years, a regular August preliminary round was added to reduce the number of entrants to 32 following the influx of new UEFA member nations during the 1990's.

Entry was restricted to one club from each UEFA member association, the only exception being to allow the current Cup Winners' Cup holders to enter alongside their nation's new domestic cup winners in order to allow them a chance to defend their CWC title. The most recent winners of each national association's domestic cup competition would normally be the only club eligible to enter from any country.

There is an exception being when a club completed a domestic league and cup 'double' - in these circumstances, that club would enter the European Cup/UEFA Champions League and their place in the Cup Winners' Cup would be taken by the domestic cup runners-up. In 1998/99, the competition's final year, SC Heerenveen of the Netherlands entered the CWC despite only reaching the semi-final of the previous season's Dutch Cup - this was due to both Dutch Cup finalists Ajax Amsterdam and PSV Eindhoven qualifying for the recently expanded Champions' League (PSV were allowed entry as Dutch 'vice-champions'). Heerenveen won a third-place playoff and became the only club to enter the Cup Winners' Cup without even contesting their own domestic cup final the previous year.