The predecessor of the Champions' League used to be called the European Champion Clubs' Cup. That's a mouthful in many European languages, but especially in man

The predecessor of the Champions' League used to be called the European Champion Clubs' Cup. That's a mouthful in many European languages, but especially in many of the Eastern languages. It used to be referred to as the European Cup in most of the English-speaking or English-influenced West, but we called it the Champions' Cup or the European Champions' Cup in most of the East. Here's why. Most sports clubs around here used to be very diverse in terms of sports, on account of the Party insisting that the working class has to practice sports and on account of there not being much entertainment. It would be routine for the same club to have a football team, a basketball team, a handball team and a hockey team, all playing at the highest domestic level. Red Star Belgrade or Dynamo Moscow would, at one point or another, have several teams participating in some sort of "Club Champions' Cup" (e.g. in 1986, Steaua Bucharest football team won the Club Champions' Cup, and the handball team came in third in the handball Champions' Cup) Consequently, for most of this period, we did not take "club" to mean footbal club. This still persists today, in fact -- it was only around 2000-2005 that most clubs disbanded everything but their football teams, or football-only clubs began to be founded, so except for folks who are now in the 13-18 age group, everyone grew up with "club" meaning "an organization that organizes and maintain a great diversity of sporting events". (Ironically enough, the party press experimented with an augmented version of the cup's name, which would be translated roughly as "European Football Club Champions' Cup". Suffice to say that did not turn out to be too popular. It took two lines of a narrow newspaper column to print it and there was no way you could pronounce it after the third beer or so). "European Cup" didn't catch up, either, probably because it would inevitably attract the question "which one?" It didn't help that "European competitions" wasn't a useful term back then: there were various regional competitions as well, such as the Balkans Cup, and less important European competitions, such as the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, so in order to refer to the UEFA Cup, the Champions' Cup and the Cup Winners Cup, we'd say "European cups". Consequently, everyone here called in "the Champions' Cup", or "the European Champions' Cup". That's how me, my friends or my parents' friends from (what used to be) Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland and the Czech Republic called it. Unfortunately, my Russian isn't exactly top notch, so I can't say much about the USSR, but I'd be surprised if they called it anything else.