The Best Team In the Land & All The World, Part Three: No, you're not the "world champions"

The creation of the Intercontinental Cup in 1960 would bring claims to the contrary, but FIFA weren't having Europeans and South Americans unilaterally declaring themselves "world champions".

In the third part of a series chronicling football’s struggles to determine a world club champion, a proposal is made that leads to the formation of not one but two new international tournaments. This is a split piece, with an extra section on the early years of the Intercontinental Cup for paid subscribers after the jump. You can subscribe here.

Did one only happen because of the other? One side says that the interjection was welcome but hardly necessary, yet still a narrative can be found that it was Europeans who were partly responsible for the formation of what is now South America’s leading club competition. As with anything related to this series, it’s complicated.

South American club teams had been playing each other for practically as long as football had been played on the continent, but its shape and vast distances of travel involved made regular meetings difficult, to say the least. In 1948, the Campeonato Sudamericano de Campeones was played in Santiago, a seven-nation tournament featuring club teams from Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay.

It was won by Vasco da Gama. In the absence of anything else, this win was one of the prime reasons for their invitation to play in Le Tournoi de Paris nine years later, at which they became the first South American club to beat the mighty Real Madrid. This tournament became an annual invitational and was won for the next two years by its host club, Racing Paris. It would continue to be played annually until 1993, and it was also briefly revived in 2010 and 2012.

And it was also clear that the Tournoi de Paris had lit a fuse. A rivalry was already forming. Football was being played quite differently in South America compared to Europe, and differing cultural attitudes would come to define sporting relations between the two continents for decades to come. Furthermore, the 1957 Tournoi final had been described in the press as a meeting to determine the “world champions”. No matter what any governing bodies may have felt about that–and we’ll get back to that–the very notion of being able to determine a ‘best club team in the world’ was proving to be seductive.

But first of all, South America needed a club tournament of its own. The European Cup had begun in 1955 and had been successful. That South America should have its own felt like a no-brainer. The 1950s had become the jet age, and cheaper flying made distances that may have looked insurmountable on a regular basis far more accessible. In addition to this, the take-up of television and radio meant that the shoots of far bigger audiences than those inside the stadiums alone were starting to flourish.

The subject was already well on the radar of CONMEBOL, the South American governing body, by the time of their 1958 congress in Rio de Janeiro. But that didn’t stop the secretary general of UEFA, Henry Delaunay, submitting a proposal to its head, José Ramos de Freitas of Brazil, to organise an annual two-legged match between the champions of Europe and South America. This was considered to be an incentive to move towards a pan-South American club tournament, but the reality of the situation was that CONMEBOL were getting there anyway.

Specifically, the roots of the foundation of the Intercontinental Club can be found in a conversation between Joao Havelange and Jacques Goddet of L’Equipe magazine when Havelange was a guest at UEFA’s conference that October. Havelange announced the creation of Copa de Campeones de America (it would be renamed Copa Libertadores in 1965), as a South American equivalent to the European Cup, with the aim being that the champions of each could decide "the best club team of the world" in an Intercontinental Cup, at that conference.

So there it was. From 1960, the champions of Europe would play the champions of South America to determine the best club team in the world. Except there was a hitch. It wasn’t in their remit to make such a claim. The only people who could do that were FIFA, and FIFA said no. Indeed, FIFA said no to such an extent that they repeated it as recently as 2017.

It was an inconvenient truth for both South America and Europe that you couldn’t call yourself the ‘world’ champions of a global game if only clubs from two continents can even play for it. Everybody knew, of course, that there was a vast gulf between these two continents and Asia and Africa, but that didn’t give the other two the right to unilaterally determine that only one of them could even be the world club champions.

The first couple of tournaments were played out to considerable praise in the press. It was no huge surprise that Real Madrid won the first iteration, beating Penarol of Uruguay 5-1 in the second leg at the Bernabeu following a goalless draw in Montevideo. Curiously, though, Real didn’t win 5-1 on aggregate. This tournament was decided on a points basis, with each team getting one each for the first match and Real getting two for their second leg win. Had they finished level on points, a play-off would have been played.

Indeed, this happened the following year when Benfica beat Penarol 1-0 in the first leg and Penarol demolished Benfica 5-0 in the return match. With goals not a consideration they played a third match two days after the second leg. If anything, the tournament reached its peak in 1962, when Santos beat Benfica 3-2 at home and 5-2 away to claim the trophy to a rapturous reception.

But times were changing and tensions were building. A brutal match between Chile and Italy at that summer’s World Cup, stoked by insulting depictions of the host country in the Italian press before the match, proved to be a foreshadowing of what was coming to the Intercontinental Cup as well. Two players were sent off in a match which would subsequently be dubbed The Battle of Santiago. By the time of the next World Cup, to be held in England, the spirit of pan-continental togetherness that had marked the start of this tournament had almost entirely disappeared.