Real Madrid played their 500th game in the European Cup/Champions League on Tuesday.
It was a 3-0 loss to Arsenal in London, but it still meant that the Spanish side are the first club in the competition’s history to reach that many matches, having also picked up the trophy a record 15 times along the way.
Madrid’s first match in Europe’s premier club competition was a 2-0 win over Swiss club Servette in Geneva in September 1955 and they have played in the tournament in 55 of the 70 seasons it has been held.
Yet what of the other 347 clubs that have participated in the European Cup/Champions League (it was rebranded as the latter in 1992)? How many countries have been represented in the competition and which haven’t? Which team made the final in their only season participating? Will Avenir Beggen ever score?
And who out of Arges Pitesti, Progres Niederkorn and Anorthosis Famagusta has beaten Madrid?
The Athletic answers all those questions and more in a statistical and geographical tour through 70 years of the most prestigious club competition in the world.
First, Madrid. There have been 5,967 matches played overall in the European Cup/Champions League — a competition which launched in 1955-56 and has been played every season since. That means the team from the Spanish capital have been involved in 8.4 per cent of the games in the tournament.
Madrid have won 300 of those matches, drawn 85 and lost 115. They have scored 1,096 goals and conceded 553, for a goal difference of 543. This is, unsurprisingly, the best goal difference in the tournament’s history. Turkish club Galatasaray, with -99 from 157 games, have the worst.
The most recent campaign in which Madrid didn’t compete in the competition was 1996-97. Their 28 consecutive seasons in a row playing in the European Cup/Champions League since then is comfortably the longest unbroken run of participating in the tournament. Madrid’s longest time out of the competition was the five seasons they missed from 1981-82 to 1985-86.
ClubSpanSeasons in a row
Below are the matches Madrid played at various milestones in the competition.
Game numberDateOpposition/roundScore
Now, to the 347 other clubs that have helped the brainchild of French journalists Jacques Ferran and Gabriel Hanot transform from a competition that in the mid-1950s some sides refused to compete in to the modern-day behemoth it is now.
That overall figure of 348 excludes teams that have only participated in qualifying and not the competition proper. It is worth noting that the first and second rounds in 1992-93 and 1993-94 (the first two seasons of the Champions League era) are classed as qualifying.
Madrid themselves have played two qualifying matches, doing so in 2004-05. But these games do not count towards the overall record. This means clubs like Skonto from Latvia, who played in those earlier rounds in 1992-93 and 1993-94, aren’t counted.
These 348 clubs have come from 44 different UEFA nations, with Germany (including sides from East Germany) providing the most different teams. Seven nations have had just one representative in the competition. The clubs are categorised in the country they are in today.
Denmark having the joint second-highest number of teams jumps out. This is down to a number of factors, including the (compared to the big nations) small size of their top flight — currently 12 teams and 14 for a large period of the European Cup era — and its underappreciated competitiveness. FC Copenhagen have played the most games of these Danish sides with 40.
Republic of Ireland, who have had just two fewer clubs than Spain play in the competition, are the country to have provided the most teams but not be represented in the Champions League era. The last of their 12 clubs to play in the competition were Dundalk in 1991-92, losing to Kispest Honved (now Budapest Honved) of Hungary in the first round in the season before the competition was rebranded.
Here are the seven countries that have only had one club play in the competition and the team in question.
CountryClubGames played
Vardar’s only appearance in the competition, in 1987-88, came when North Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia. Dinamo Tbilisi’s, in 1979-80, came when Georgia was in the Soviet Union. Ararat Yerevan’s in 1974-75 — when they reached the quarter-finals before losing to eventual winners Bayern Munich — also came when Armenia was part of the Soviet Union.
The only one of these seven clubs that Madrid have played in the competition is Sheriff Tiraspol, with the minnows securing a stunning 2-1 victory at the Bernabeu in the 2021-22 group stage in their only campaign in the competition. Madrid won the return game 3-0 and went on to win the competition. Tiraspol is in Transnistria, which is a breakaway state widely recognised as part of Moldova.
Iceland, which has a population in 2025 of just under 400,000 people, is the nation with the fewest inhabitants to have been represented in the competition — with the Nordic country providing eight teams. This is more clubs than Turkey, which has a population of more than 85million, has had (six). (Monaco has a smaller population than Iceland but their football club is classed as French.)
Malta, which is a fifth of the size of London, is the smallest country by area to have been represented in the competition, with Sliema Wanderers (14 games played), Floriana (12), Hibernians FC (12), Valletta FC (10), Hamrun Spartans (eight) and Rabat Ajax (four) its six participants.
Many of these 44 countries now struggle to get a team into the Champions League proper. The ever-growing number of places handed out to the bigger leagues and the arduous qualification process the smaller clubs have to compete in means nations such as Malta, Georgia, Armenia and Republic of Ireland are unlikely to have a team in the competition again any time soon.
Here is the total number of games played by clubs from each country.
Spain, despite having had just the sixth-highest number of different clubs in the competition, are well clear at the top — largely due to Madrid and Barcelona who account for 60 per cent of those 1,400 matches.
Portugal’s five clubs have played 493 games more than Denmark’s 17 representatives. This is mainly due to Benfica and Porto (both two-time winners) having played the sixth and eighth-highest number of games in the competition respectively.
Here are the 11 current UEFA members to have never had a team play in the competition proper.
Below are the 20 teams to have played the most games in the European Cup/Champions League — with these clubs coming from 10 different countries.
Before the introduction of the group stage in the Champions League era — which guaranteed teams six games (now eight under the new league phase brought in this season) — the European Cup was a straight two-legged knockout competition all the way to the one-match final.
This means that 47 of the 348 clubs have played just two games in the competition. Germany and Republic of Ireland (both five) have provided more of these sides than anyone else.
Two of these 47 teams played their only two matches in the inaugural season of the competition. German clubs Rot-Weiss Essen and Saarbrucken (now also of Germany but at the time part of the disputed territory of Saar Protectorate) were both knocked out in the first round by Scottish side Hibernian and Italian club Milan respectively in the autumn of 1955.
Saarbrucken actually won the first leg away against Milan, beating a team that would reach the final in 1958 by four goals to three at the San Siro, but they lost the second leg 4-1 and were eliminated. Saarbrucken’s five goals are the most in the competition among clubs to have played just two games.
It also means that the duo, who both currently play in Germany’s third tier, are — alongside Hibernian, who lost in the semi-finals in 1955-56 — on the longest waits to return to the competition.
Seventeen teams have played in the competition and never scored, with one of them — Avenir Beggen of Luxembourg — conceding 44 times despite never finding the net in their eight games. Here are all of their matches in Europe’s premier club competition:
DateOpposition/RoundScore
Beggen’s 17-0 aggregate loss to Swedish side IFK Gothenburg is the joint second-largest margin of defeat in the history of the European Cup/Champions League — behind only Benfica’s 18-0 aggregate win over Stade Dudelange of Luxembourg in 1965-66. Beggen are, unsurprisingly, the club to have played the most games in the competition without scoring.
Other honourable mentions in the played-but-never-scored category are Cypriot side EPA Larnaca, who lost 16-0 on aggregate to German club Borussia Monchengladbach in 1970-71 and Finnish side Kokkolan Palloveikot who, in the same season, were defeated 14-0 over two legs by Scottish club Celtic. Neither EPA Larnaca (who dissolved in 1994) or Kokkolan Palloveikot have played in the competition since.
Of the clubs to have only participated in the competition in one season, five have played 10 games or more.
ClubSeason Games playedRound reached
Sampdoria, captained by future Manchester City and Italy manager Roberto Mancini, got all the way to extra time in the final in 1992 before eventually being overcome by a Barcelona side containing one of Mancini’s successors in the hotseat at City, Pep Guardiola.
The closest the club from Genoa in Italy have got to getting back in the competition since was in 2010-11 when they lost, again in extra time, in the final qualifying round to Werder Bremen.
The expansion of the competition and the increased number of games that comes with it means it is no surprise that all of these sides’ one season, apart from Sampdoria, have been in the Champions League era. For context, when Madrid won the competition in its first staging, they played just seven games. Now, a team that participates in the knockout phase play-offs will play 17 games if they reach the final.
The furthest north a club has come from is KA Akureyri in Iceland, the furthest east is Astana in Kazakhstan — which is closer to Shanghai than Paris (where the tournament was founded), the furthest south is both Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv who share a ground in Israel, and the furthest west is Keflavik IF in Iceland, whose stadium is closer to Greenland than Scotland.
Israel and (almost all of) Kazakhstan are not in Europe. However, they are UEFA members, so their clubs and national team compete in European football. Overall, 10 clubs outside of the European continent have played in the European Cup/Champions League (the World Population Review classes Cyprus as Europe).
ClubCountryGames played
As for who out of Arges Pitesti (from Romania), Progres Niederkorn (Luxembourg) and Anorthosis Famagusta (Cyprus) has beaten Madrid? The answer is Arges Pitesti.
Playing in their first European Cup/Champions League campaign in 1972-73, Pitesti reached the second round after defeating Aris Bonnevoie of Luxembourg 6-0 on aggregate. There they faced Madrid and goals from Nicolae Dobrin and Ion Prepurgel earned the Romanian club a 2-1 win in the first leg in Pitesti. Madrid won the return at the Bernabeu 3-1 to advance 4-3 on aggregate.
Pitesti have only been back once since — losing to eventual champions Nottingham Forest in the second round in 1979-80 — and currently play in Romania’s second tier.
Madrid have played in 39 seasons of the competition in the intervening years, winning the famous trophy in nine of them.
(Top photo: Real Madrid players celebrate their Champions League triumph in 2024; by Angel Martinez via Getty Images)
