| Great Game Lab
As we await this month’s fascinating European Champions League quarterfinals, we heartily recommend you watch Wolves: Champions of the World, a 13-minute documentary that sheds light on the iconic European competition’s origins. Back in 1954, Wolverhampton, then one of the English game’s top clubs, hosted a friendly match against Honvéd, the formidable Hungarian club that was home to Ferenc Puskás and many other stars of the Hungarian national team that had humiliated England’s national squad not long before. The game was one of the first televised at night on the BBC, under the floodlights at Wolverhampton’s Molineux Stadium.
Wolves’ improbable come-from-behind win led excitable newspaper headline writers to proclaim them “Champions of the World.” This naturally opened up the floodgates to all sorts of debates as to the rightful claimant to the title, and a growing sense that with more teams able to travel across Europe and more fans intrigued to see clubs from beyond their own countries, there really ought to be a continental competition. And so, a mere 18 months after the friendly at Molineux, Real Madrid won the first European Cup (at times it seems like they never stopped winning it).
The Wolves documentary, which counts the club’s General Manager and Great Game Lab Fellow Russell Jones among its producers, features moving reminiscences of players who were on the night, the wisdom of The Guardian’s erudite Jonathan Wilson, and some astonishing footage from the game itself, as well from old newsreels (why doesn’t anyone sound like those newsreel voices anymore?!). And did you know that teams initially felt that if they were playing at night, they needed to wear shimmery, fluorescent jerseys to be spotted?
All of us here at The Great Game Lab appreciate epic multi-episode, multi-season docuseries, but it’s also refreshing to be reminded of how you can tell a great story, with loads of engaging footage and commentary, in less than the time allotted for the halftime break in those upcoming Champions League matches. So, no excuses, check out Wolves: Champions of the World.