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CLUB COMPETITIONS
“The Champions League brings the
elite clubs of our continent together
and the other European Cup
competitions also guarantee top
European events. However, as the
conditions for club matches differ
tremendously from country to
country, it is extremely difficult to
find a competition system that suits
the needs and capacity of everybody”
EHF President Staffan Holmqvist (2002)
Women‘s Champions League, as had in fact
been expected. Indications of the big potential
yet to be tapped, though, were visible
in the finals of the Women’s EHF Cup
1994, when the Danish club Viborg HK attracted
more than 5,000 supporters in the
first leg of the final against the Hungarian
players of DVSC Debrecen.
In pure sporting terms, the EHF Champions
League was dominated by two great
teams throughout the 1990s. In the women’s
competitions, it was the multiple Austrian
champion HYPO Niederösterreich,
personified by its manager and coach Gunnar
Prokop. Between 1989 and 2000,
HYPO was eight-time winner of the world’s
most prestigious club title, including four
times the EHF Champions League title. This
made HYPO the most successful women’s
team in handball history.
Prokop’s counterpart in men’s club handball
was the Spanish star coach Valero Rivera,
who at FC Barcelona had first started
and then dominated a great era. The glorious
Catalans continued the Spaniards’ winning
streak in 1996 and, up to 2000, took
the title five times running. The high social
esteem that handball players enjoyed at
the time was highlighted by the attendance
of King Juan Carlos of Spain at the second
leg of the final versus Zagreb at Palau Blaugrana
in 1999. That year, Inaki Urdangarin,
the King’s future son in law, was among the
key protagonists of the team along with
left wing Xavier O’Callaghan, pivot Andrei
Xepkin and goalkeeper David Barrufet.
FC Barcelona was still the dominant
team when the EHF Champions League
playing system was first reformed for both
the women‘s and the men‘s events before
the 1996-97 season. The revised system
provided for four groups of four teams
each, not all of which had to play qualifying
matches to enter the group phase (teams
that were big league champions were seeded).
While under the previous system only
the group winners had advanced to the
finals, from then on, the two top teams of
each group went on to play in the quarter-finals,
which, like the further rounds,
were played as knock-out matches. This
resulted in a significant expansion of the
Champions League.
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