Qualla: 1997-98 UEFA Champions League

1997-98 UEFA Champions League: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 20 May 1998, in Amsterdam Arena, with the score 0-0 and 66 minutes gone, a Montenegrin forward named Predrag Mijatović collected a flick from Roberto Carlos and tucked the ball under Angelo Peruzzi's body. The Juventus goalkeeper got a hand to it. The ball rolled in anyway, slowly, almost unwilling, and Real Madrid had ended a thirty-two-year wait for the trophy their identity was built on. Juventus were playing in their third consecutive Champions League final. They lost it 1-0 to a club that had not won Europe's top prize since 1966, three years before Mijatović was born.

Image: Tsonga4 | CC BY-SA 4.0

1997-98 UEFA Champions League: A Tournament Redrawn

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 43rd European Cup was the sixth under the Champions League name, and UEFA kept tinkering. For the first time the competition expanded to six groups instead of four, forcing the runners-up of eight domestic leagues into the draw and bringing back the champions of smaller natio...

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1997-98 UEFA Champions League: The Long Wait

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. Real Madrid had won the European Cup six times by 1966, more than anyone, and the trophy was woven into the club's mythology. Then it stopped. Generations of fixtures passed - Cruyff at Ajax, Liverpool's English run, Milan's Sacchi years - while Madrid won La Liga and lost in Eur...

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1997-98 UEFA Champions League: Dortmund and the Semifinal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. The defending champions Borussia Dortmund came into the semi-finals carrying the prestige of the previous year's title. Madrid eliminated them. Heynckes' team had survived a group containing Bayer Leverkusen and squeezed through quarter-final ties on the kind of narrow margins th...

Image: Tsonga4 | CC BY-SA 4.0

1997-98 UEFA Champions League: The Goal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. The final at Amsterdam Arena was tense and tactical, not the open showcase UEFA had hoped for. Madrid's central midfielder Clarence Seedorf later remembered the silence in the locker room at halftime - both teams scoreless, both convinced one mistake would decide it. The mistake ...

Image: Tsonga4 | CC BY-SA 4.0

1997-98 UEFA Champions League: What Came After

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tsonga4, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Seventh, as Madrid fans call it, started a run that defines modern European football. Real won again in 2000, again in 2002, and the club's institutional confidence - the assumption that the Champions League is somehow theirs to lose - dates from this night in Amsterdam. Juve...

Image: Tsonga4 | CC BY-SA 4.0