The Champions League, which evolved from the European Champion Clubs' Cup, is a seasonal club football competition organised since 1992 (or overall in its older format since 1955) for the most successful football clubs in Europe. The prize, the European Champion Clubs' Cup (more commonly known as the European Cup), is the most prestigious club trophy in the sport.
The tournament consists of several stages. In the present format it begins in mid-July with three preliminary knockout qualifying rounds. The 16 surviving teams join 16 seeded teams in a group stage. Eight group winners and eight runners-up enter the final knockout rounds, which end with the final match in May. Previously only the champions of their respective national league could participate in the competition; however, this was changed in 1997 to allow the runners-up of the stronger leagues to compete as well.
The title has been held by 21 different clubs, 12 of which have won the title more than once. The all-time record-holder is Real Madrid with their nine wins.
The current holders Manchester United defeated Chelsea 6-5 on penalties, after the scores were level at 1-1 after extra time in Moscow on 21 May 2008.
The tournament was inaugurated in 1955, at the suggestion of the French sports journalist and editor of L'Équipe Gabriel Hanot,[1] as a continental competition for winners of the European national football leagues, as the European Champion Clubs' Cup, abbreviated to European Cup.
The competition began as the 1955–56 using a two-leg knockout format where the teams would play two matches, one at home and one away, and the team with the highest overall score qualifying for the next round of the competition. Entry was restricted to the teams that won their national league championships, plus the current European Cup holder. Champions League Match Live Streaming Champions League Live Matches This qualification system continued until 1992. In the 1992–93 season, the tournament was renamed Champions League and in 1997–98, eligibility was expanded to include not just domestic champions but also the best performing runners up according to coefficient ranking list[2]. In coefficient nytimes system, a team finishing second in the Spanish La Liga would be more Video Goals deserving of an automatic place in the Champions League than a team finishing first in, for example, Polish Ekstraklasa. As a result, the system was restructured so that national champions from lower ranked countries had to qualify for the group stages, while runners-up from higher ranked countries would automatically get places.
FC Barcelona, Manchester United, and FC Porto are the teams that have appeared most often in the group stages: fifteen each. FC Porto and Barcelona have only won the tournament once each since the establishment of the Group stages (2004 and 2006 respectively), whilst Manchester United have won it twice in 1999 and 2008.
