The UEFA Plaque
# The UEFA Plaque

The UEFA Plaque was a honorific award given by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to those clubs that had won, at least once, the title in each of the three major international competitions organised by that confederation, namely the European Champions Cup, the Cup Winners' Cup and the UEFA Cup. It was officially established in late 1987 and its first award was given in the second half of the following year, with Italian Juventus being the club to be honoured. A second award was initially scheduled for the second half of 1992 in favour of Dutch side Ajax, but it was not conferred for unclarified reasons by the confederation after Spanish team Barcelona —who did not comply with the requirement imposed by UEFA— at the same time unsuccessfully applied to European football's governing body for such recognition, being subsequently discontinued.

## Background

Between 1971 and 1999, UEFA organised three major competitions —the European Cup, Cup Winners' Cup and UEFA Cup— which were played as part of the international fixture calendar. While all three carried prestige in their own right, the European Cup, which was the competition for clubs that had won their own domestic league title, was considered as the most prestigious, while the UEFA Cup, in which teams that finished just below the domestic league champion were generally entered, was regarded as the hardest to win.

At the start of the 1984–85 season, two clubs —Juventus and Hamburg SV— had won two of the three European competitions each, and each was competing that season in the competition that they needed to win to complete the set; Juventus in the European Cup and Hamburg in the UEFA Cup. Hamburg were eliminated in the third round of the UEFA Cup, while Juventus reached the 1985 European Cup final, winning the game 1–0 to become the first club to have won all three of UEFA's major competitions.

In December 1987, the UEFA organising committee proposed in Zürich the institution of a special award for clubs that had won all three competitions. Having been ratified, it was announced it would be awarded for the first time to all eligible clubs at the UEFA meeting planned for May 1988. While Anderlecht in European Champions' Cup and Milan AC in UEFA Cup during the 1987–88 season were potentially in a position to match Juventus' achievement, being both eliminated in the quarter-finals and in the second round, respectively; when the new UEFA Plaque was finally conferred in July 1988, it was to Juventus alone that it was awarded. In a similar situation were both Ajax and Bayern Munich, which unsuccessfully participated in the 1988–89 UEFA Cup.

## Description

The award consists of a rectangular silver plaque on which are superimposed silhouettes of three trophies that represent the tournaments mentioned, above a golden laurel wreath and the European football government body badge, also in gold. Also, the plaque have the following inscription in French, then the confederation's leading administrative language, which translated to English:

## Recipients

On 12 July 1988, at the beginning of the 1988–89 European competitions seeding held in Geneva (Switzerland), then UEFA president Jacques Georges presented the prize to then Juventus president Giampiero Boniperti.

In July 1992, after winning the European Champions' Cup, then FC Barcelona president Josep Lluís Núñez requested of UEFA a similar recognition, stating that his club had equalled Juventus' record, having won formerly the Cup Winners' Cup and the UEFA Cup. European football's governing body, now led by Lennart Johansson, who replaced Georges in the charge, rejected it because the Spanish club had never won the UEFA Cup proper, and UEFA does not recognize its predecessor, the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, previously won by the Blaugrana, as an official competition. Eight months later, Johansson proposed, unsuccessfully, to merge all three seasonal competitions in a unique pan-European championship which the better teams in the continent would be involved.

Since UEFA awarded Juventus with the UEFA Plaque, four other clubs have won the three seasonal European competitions: Ajax (1992, to whom the recognition was initially scheduled after their triumph in 1991–92 UEFA Cup, notwithstanding the confederation latter decided not to award them for unknown reasons), Bayern Munich (1996), Chelsea (2013), and Manchester United (2017).

