Super Cup (English Football)

Super Cup (English Football)

The Super Cup (known under its sponsored name as the ScreenSport Super Cup) was a one-off football club competition held in England in the 1985–86 season. It was organised by the Football League and was intended as some form of financial and sporting compensation for the English clubs which had qualified for European competition in the previous season but had been banned from entering European tournaments by UEFA following the Heysel Stadium disaster. With the ban set to last into the foreseeable future, England's clubs stood to lose a great deal of revenue, and would also have fewer opportunities to win silverware, so the Super Cup was established in order to hopefully generate at least some of this lost income, as well as offering additional competition for them.

The Football League's original intention was to hold the Super Cup annually for the duration of the UEFA ban on English clubs (which ultimately turned out to be five years) but the competition was largely seen as a poor substitute for the glamour of European tournaments and offered nothing different to the two domestic knockout comps that already existed, the FA Cup and League Cup. Consequently, it generated minimal interest from the clubs involved. With the competition's final postponed until the beginning of the following season due to fixture congestion, the Super Cup was ultimately abolished after only one tournament had been held.

Interest in the competition was so low that the Football League initially failed to attract any form of sponsorship for it. Cable TV sports channel Screensport agreed to sponsor the tournament's final in September 1986.

Ironically, Martin Edwards, the Chairman of Manchester United, wrote in his programme notes for United's opening group match against Everton that he hoped that the Super Cup would "only last for one season", meaning that he hoped that the UEFA ban on English clubs would only last for that long. The cup's demise was indeed swift, but that had nothing to do with any relaxation of the ban, which eventually lasted until 1990. As some indication of how the clubs felt about the ignominy of the situation, Howard Kendall recalls that, prior to his Everton side's group match at Norwich City, he sent his team out with the following team-talk: "What a waste of time this is – out you go."