ABSTRACT
The European Cup, introduced in 1955, has grown from strength to strength in popularity and the idea of a European Super League is regularly and increasingly put forward. One of the most striking characteristics of the first European football teams is undoubtedly their cosmopolitan nature. Until the War, football in Europe seems to have been more a way of meeting than of competing. The militarization of football in Italy and Germany in the thirties sums up the development of football in those twenty years rather less well than the game which brought together central Europe against western Europe in Amsterdam, in July 1937. This chapter focuses on the autonomous phase of the sport in the various regions during the inter-war years, following a phenomenon which Eric Hobsbawm has termed, ‘the invention of traditions’.
