As football grew in popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, there was an appetite to not only prove the dominance of a team against their domestic rivals, but also to test themselves against the best of the European neighbours. For some, this meant leaving their home country to embark on tours; for the most successful teams, invited to tour in the Western hemisphere, it sometimes even meant withdrawing from a league campaign for a season to accommodate what were usually very lucrative playing schedules. But the friendlies played in these tours conferred only dubious bragging rights. There was a need for something bigger, something more official, where the best of the best would play against each other for more than bragging rights.
The first meeting between two champions from different leagues was as early as 1895, when Hearts lost to Sunderland 5-3 in what was dubbed the World Championship. The bastion of Old World football, Austria-Hungary, followed two years later with their Challenge Cup, which pitted the champions of the nations of the empire against each other and ran for 14 years. When it was expanded into the Mitropa Cup, involving teams from across Central Europe, we had our first real inter-continental competition.
The visionary behind such a competition was the legendary Austrian manager Hugo Meisl. Alongside his on-pitch expertise, he was fluent in the business of football. Having driven the idea of professionalism in his homeland, many Austrian clubs struggled to manage the finances of professional sport, and Meisl, seeing an opportunity, began to think big. The travelling demands of a continent-wide competition were prohibitively expensive in the 1920s, but the railways in Central Europe were better than those further afield, making the possibility of a competition between just teams from those nations both possible, and potentially lucrative.
With it’s first iteration in 1927, the competition was a testament to the progressiveness of interwar Central Europe. Teams from Austria and Hungary, obviously, were joined by Czechoslovakians and, surprisingly, Yugoslavians. Yugoslavia had been deeply suspicious of Austria-Hungary and had subsumed Serbia, whose independence movement from the old empire was the spark that started the First World War. Sparta Prague won the initial competition, but the real success was how, through the 1930s, the Cup brought nations across Central and Eastern Europe together, at a time when the forces of fascism were determined to divide them. Through the life of the competition, as transport links improved, they were joined by Italy, Romania, Latvia, the Soviet Union, Switzerland and even the British Mandate of Palestine, what we now know as Israel.
The old empire dominated the competition between 1927 and 1940, a result of Meisl’s influence and the spread of his ideas through former players. Austria and Hungary won four cups each, Czechoslovakia three, and Italy got two through Bologna. But in 1938, Austria withdrew from the competition as their footballing structure was added to Germany’s, who had never been invited to compete. It was a signal of what was to come, and the 1940 final was stopped because of the outbreak of war, making Ujpest of Hungary the final pre-war Mitropa Cup champions, in 1939.
Following the devastation of war, football was not a priority, especially in central Europe where there had been some of the fiercest fighting, power structures has collapsed into disappearance, and a new political struggle threatened to spill over into a second, perhaps even more deadly, war. On top of that, traditional friends and rivals now found themselves divided by an Iron Curtain, making the idea of a competition all the more difficult. But in 1951, there was an attempt to revive the Mitropa Cup as an unofficial competition under the new name of the Zentropa Cup. It was won by Rapid Vienna but proved logistically challenging, meaning another attempt was not made for four years.
In 1955, the competition was restored for the long term. It was greatly reduced in prestige and importance because, at the same time, Meisl’s vision of a continent-wide competition was enacted, mostly by Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian clubs who had outgrown their own Latin Cup. The Mitropa slipped down the pecking order of priorities as UEFA added a roster of competitions to its European schedule, but while the footballing importance of the cup diminished, the symbolic importance, I think, remained.
Without the Mitropa Cup, it is difficult to imagine the Latin Cup, and then the European Cup, taking the shape they did. But perhaps more importantly, the post-war Mitropa Cup was a statement that central Europe was still going, trudging on through the disaster of war and the turmoil of division. That it survived right up until the fall of the Soviet Union is perhaps the clearest indication that it was a symbol of unity in a deeply divided world, for those who participated on either side of the curtain. Even European giants like Milan continued to enter, and the cup is every much a part of the European footballing legacy as anything else.
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