The UEFA Super Cup acts as the curtain raiser for the new UEFA club competition season, pitting the winners of the previous season's UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup against each other. It is played in Monaco at the end of August to coincide with the draws for the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup, as well as the UEFA European Football Awards ceremony.
Since 1998 the UEFA Super Cup has been played as a single match at Monaco’s Stade Louis II, which will continue to host the event until 2008 at least. The competition was first staged in the 1973/74 season, and initially featured the European champions and their UEFA Cup Winners' Cup counterparts. Since 2000, the match has been contested by the winners of the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Cup, following the abolition of the Cup Winners' Cup after the 1998/99 final.
The match format is now the same as any final in a UEFA club competition. If the scores are level at the end of normal time, two 15-minute periods of extra time are played. If the result remains deadlocked at the end of the second period of extra time, a penalty shoot-out determines the winners.
The UEFA Super Cup trophy was designed and crafted in silver at the Bertoni workshop in Milan, and it is no surprise that the competition’s most successful side comes from that city. AC Milan have won the UEFA Super Cup a record four times, most recently as European champions in 2003.
Milan also participated in the first Super Cup match when they defeated AFC Ajax 1-0 at the Giuseppe Meazza stadium courtesy of a Luciano Chiarugi goal on 9 January 1974. Ajax, however, won the return leg 6-0 in Amsterdam a week later to claim the trophy.
Milan became the first and, to date, only club to complete back-to-back victories in the competition when winning in both 1989 and 1990. The Rossoneri defeated FC Barcelona 2-1 on aggregate in 1989 after first securing a 1-1 away draw at the Camp Nou, then 12 months later triumphed 3-1 on aggregate against Sampdoria UC in the first final held between two clubs from the same country.
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