The Best Team In the Land & All The World, Part Two: The Best Team in Europe vs The Best Team in South America

The post-war years saw slow moves towards a global club competition for football clubs, but there already were signs of trouble to come brewing by the late 1950s.

The second part of a series chronicling football’s struggles to determine a world club champion reaches the post-war period, with a series of invitational tournaments taking teams from Europe to South America and vice-versa. This is a split piece, with an extra section on the remarkable 1957 Tournoi de Paris for paid subscribers after the jump.

The end of the Second World War brought about a new era of optimism that ended up having considerable ramifications. In a new–and, as things turned out, extremely brief–period of international political cooperation, there was hope that perhaps this time the mistakes of the recent past might actually be learned and football got very much caught up in all of this.

But the first high-profile club tour of this country wasn’t intercontinental in any way. Dynamo Moscow toured Britain in November 1945, drawing with Chelsea and Rangers, narrowly beating Arsenal 1-0 in a match played in a fog so bad that barely anybody could see what was actually going on, and running up a 10-1 win against Cardiff City. The tour was curtailed early, with the Soviet team being summoned back to Moscow before a proposed final match at Villa Park against an England XI, but wheels were being set in motion elsewhere for more cross-border matches.

In December 1954, a 3-2 win for Wolves against the Hungarian side Honved led to a hysterical reaction in the British press, describing the winners as "champions of the world", a presumption which led to outrage in the European press, not least the French magazine L’Equipe, leading to the formation of the European Cup the following year. Wolves, for the record, took part in that competition twice towards the end of the decade, but never got past the quarter-finals.

But elsewhere, moves towards a global competition had already started to be taken a couple of years earlier. South America hadn’t been as ruinously damaged by the war as Europe, and years immediately following 1945 were boom years across the continent. Brazil hosted the 1950 World Cup, and that tournament brought about the first South American world champions and the highest attendance ever recorded for a match for the final match between Brazil and Uruguay at the newly-built Maracana in Rio de Janeiro of almost 200,000.

The club game was nowhere to be seen in this, but two years after this a tournament did land which has been considered a prelude of what was to come. The ‘Small World Cup’ (known more locally as Pequeña Copa del Mundo) was first played in 1952 in Venezuela, between Milloniaros and La Salle from the host country, the Brazilian champions Botafogo and, representing Europe, Real Madrid.

The tournament was played as a double round-robin, meaning that it was a small group only with no final and each team playing six matches, with all of them being played at the Estadio Olimpico in Caracas over a 17 day period in July 1952. Real Madrid won the first iteration on goal difference from Botafogo, and things were tight, with Real only confirming their title with a goalless draw against Botafogo in the final match.

The following year the tournament was played twice so as not to interfere with the 1954 World Cup, and South America won both of them. In the first tournament in February 1953 there were only three entrants, with Millonarios winning and the European entrants Rapid Vienna coming last. Later that year in August, the Brazilian side Corinthians won all six of their matches, with Roma finishing second. In 1955 two European sides–Valencia and Benfica–made the trip to Venezuela, but another Brazilian side, Sao Paolo, took the title by a point from Valencia. The following year Real Madrid and Roma made the trip and Real won it for a second time, with Roma finishing last.

The 1957 edition of the tournament would be the last for six years. The European Cup, introduced two years earlier, was now sucking up all the attention and despite three European sides–Real Madrid, Porto and Roma–making the trip, it was the last to be played until 1963. Real Madrid won it, finishing two points clear of the only South American team in the tournament, Vasco da Gama.

But in the same year another tournament was played which ended up very much as the precursor to the international club tournaments that would follow. Racing Paris were celebrating their 25th anniversary and opted to hold a competition called Le Tournoi de Paris to mark the occasion, to be played as a knockout competition over three days at Parc de Princes in June 1957.

Real Madrid, of course, were invited. They’d won the first iteration of the new European Cup a year earlier and came into this tournament fresh off the back of having retained their title with a 2-0 win against Fiorentina in a final played in front of a crowd of 124,000 in their home stadium, a match played just twelve days prior to the start of this tournament. Racing Paris were there, of course, while Rot-Weiss Essen were also there as the champions of West Germany. South America was represented again by Vasco da Gama.

It was a huge surprise that the competition was won by Vasco da Gama, who beat Real Madrid 4-3 in the final. There’s a lot more detail about what turned out to be an extraordinary tournament after the jump, but its influence and legacy were undeniable. When it was played again the following year Real were unable to take part because it was scheduled for a few days before the European Cup final, but the seed of an idea had already been planted.

The 1957 final had been the first match to be widely publicised as “the best team in Europe vs the best team in South America” (and was reported in the Brazilian press as “a club world cup match”), although whether Vasco da Gama could be considered as such was at best debatable, considering that their invitation had been sent on the basis of having won the 1948 South American Championship of Champions, the nearest that the continent had to a European Cup until the formation of the Copa Libertadores in 1960. The Intercontinental Cup was coming, and this would prove to be both the first FIFA-approved attempt to define a world club champion and a highly controversial and contentious competition indeed.