Matt Spiro charts the birth of the Champions League

This week Uefa are happy to describe the Champions League as "the world's greatest club competition" on their website, yet remarkably they wanted nothing to do with it when the idea was originally conceived 51 years ago.

As the excitement surrounding tonight's glamorous showdown grows, as Thierry Henry and Ronaldinho shirts sell at a faster rate than ever, and as black-market tickets are sold to desperate fans for four-figure sums, Uefa must be feeling mightily relieved that just over half a century ago they were coaxed into taking responsibility for what has become club soccer's most lucrative event.

The European Cup was the brainchild of the former editor of L'Equipe newspaper, Gabriel Hanot, who, riled by a headline he saw in an English newspaper, proposed the initiative in one of his columns in December 1954.

Hanot, a former defender and manager of the French national team, had travelled to England to watch Wolverhampton Wanderers play Spartak Moscow and Honved. The English champions won both games and, to Hanot's shock, the back page of the Daily Mail boomed proudly: "Hail Wolves, champions of the world now".

"No! Wolves are not the world club champions yet," retorted Hanot in L'Equipe, going on to suggest that the creation of a European super league would end the debate once and for all.

Hanot's colleagues instantly recognised the merits of such an idea. "I was just a young reporter then," said former L'Equipe journalist Jacques Ferran, now 86. "But I realised that this would be great for journalists, great for the clubs and the fans, and also great for L'Equipe because their sales would soar."

The paper started championing Hanot's idea and canvassed the views of Europe's leading clubs. "They were extremely positive," Ferran said. "Particularly Real Madrid who identified with the European Cup from the outset."

L'Equipe's biggest concern was finding a competition organiser. They knew it would be foolhardy to take on the responsibility themselves, and addressed a letter to Fifa asking for support. Fifa, though, had enough on their plate with the World Cup and declared themselves "incompetent" to run such an event. Uefa, formed just months earlier, represented L'Equipe's final hope, so Ferran and Hanot boarded a train for Vienna to attend the first-ever congress in March 1955. Again, they received no encouragement. Uefa's general secretary Henri Delaunay was determined to get his own project - a European Championship for nations - up and running.

Still convinced they were onto a winner, they chose to call Uefa's bluff. "We had the support of some of soccer's biggest names so we took a risk," Ferran explained. "We invited representatives from 17 clubs to attend a meeting in France. It was like a game of poker. We knew we couldn't organise the competition ourselves, but we also knew that the authorities would find it difficult to sit back and watch this happen."

So it proved. Real president Santiago Bernabeu, Hungary boss Gusztav Sebes and Switzerland's esteemed coach Karl Rappan were among those to attend the gathering at Paris's Ambassador Hotel, and within a month Fifa had re-contacted L'Equipe, informing them that the competition would be organised by Uefa.