UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

HERE's CHAMPIONS LEAGUE HISTORY... The UEFA Champions League (which used to be named and isoften still called the European Cup) is an annual club football competition organized by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) for the most successful football clubs in Europe. It is one of the most prestigious club trophies in the sport along with South America's Copa Libertadores. It has a global audience of more than a billion people.The tournament was inaugurated in 1955 at the suggestion of the French sports journalist and L'Équipe editor Gabriel Hanot,[1] as a competition for winners of the European national football leagues under the name of the European Cup, but since the 1992–1993 season the competing teams have been the top performing domestic teams of Europe and the tournament has been renamed the UEFA Champions League, though some teams competing have never been champions in their respective countries. The UEFA Champions League is not to be confused with the UEFA Cup, the secondary championship for European club teams, or with the now defunct Cup Winners Cup.The current holder of the UEFA Champions League trophy is Barcelona who beat Arsenal 2-1 at the Stade de France in St-Denis, Paris on 17 May 2006.The tournament consists of several stages and begins with three preliminary knockout qualifying rounds. Different teams start in different rounds, according to their position in domestic league and the UEFA coefficients of their league, while the sixteen top ranked teams spread across the biggest domestic leagues qualify directly. In each subsequent preliminary round, participating teams are paired, with aggregate winners proceeding into the next round. Qualifying rounds span from mid-July to late August. The losers of the third qualifying round are transferred to the UEFA Cup, while the sixteen winners of the final qualifying round are joined by the sixteen teams who have qualified directly, to participate in the group stage. They are drawn into eight groups of four teams, each team playing every other team in the group twice (home and away). The group stage is played between mid-September and early December. The teams finishing third in their groups are transferred to the UEFA Cup, while the top two teams from every group qualify for the next round. Here the sixteen remaining teams take part in the knock-out stage, which starts in late February and ends with the final match in May.All qualifying round and knock-out ties are two-legged, with each team hosting one match. The team which scores the greater aggregate number of goals qualifies for the next round. The away goals rule applies. Extra time and penalty kicks are used to determine the winner, if necessary. An exception is the final, which is a single match played at a predetermined venue. The draws are currently structured to ensure that clubs representing the same national association cannot play each other until the quarter-finals. In addition, seeding of the teams according to their UEFA coefficients is used. The competition system has been undergoing changes since the 1991/92 season (see history). The current system was adopted in 2003.Originally known as the European Champion Clubs' Cup, or simply abbreviated to European Cup, the competition began in 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. This qualification system continued until 1997. From the 1997/98 season, the rules were changed to provide the cup with more exposure (and the extra sponsorship money that came with it), and to try to make it more "exciting". Teams other than national champions were allowed to compete, based on the relative strength of the football in that nation - from UEFA's point of view, a team finishing second in the Spanish La Liga would be more deserving of an automatic place in the Champions League than a team finishing first in, for example, Polish Orange Ekstraklasa. As a result, the system was restructured to force "weaker" national champions to qualify for the group stages, while other, "stronger" national runners-up would automatically get places.The competition is organised and run annually in a similar manner to the Copa Libertadores in South America.