Super Cup (English football)

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This was a special English football event. For England's equivalent of the Super Cup in the traditional sense, see FA Community Shield.

The Super Cup (known under its sponsored name as the ScreenSport Super Cup) was a one-off football competition held in England in the 1985-86 season. It 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 following the Heysel Stadium disaster. Presumably the original intention was to hold the Super Cup annually for the duration of the European ban on English clubs (which ultimately turned out to be five years) but the competition was largely seen as a failure having struggled to attract sponsorship and after generating minimal interest from the clubs involved. As some indication of the clubs' attitude towards the tournament, the then Everton manager Howard Kendall recalls in his autobiography that prior to his side's Super Cup match at Norwich City, he sent his team out with a team-talk consisting of "What a waste of time this is - out you go."

The six clubs invited to participate, and the European competitions they would have qualified for, were:

To create a sufficient number of games, the teams played home and away in two groups of three, with the top two teams in each group going through to the knockout stages. Liverpool and Everton won the semi-finals, but due to fixture congestion (the two clubs also contested that year's FA Cup Final), the Super Cup final was held over to September 1986, by which point the competition had finally attracted some sponsorship. Everton however fielded a virtual reserve team in the two-legged final (although they were in the middle of a genuine injury crisis) and Liverpool won the trophy 7-2 on aggregate. Legend has it that after Liverpool were presented with the trophy and were leaving the field, Reds striker Ian Rush threw the trophy to an Everton ballboy and suggested that he keep it and put it in his bedroom, perhaps indicative of how the players involved felt about the competition.[citation needed]

The Super Cup was not a success, as it was felt to be a very poor substitute for games against the best sides in Europe in prestigious UEFA competitions and it has not been held since.

A competition launched the same season for similar reasons, the Full Members Cup, ran until 1992.

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