WorcsBlues
No desire to be a pedant or such like, but, the European ‘adventure’ in the early 60’s was NOT under the banner of Birmingham City.
UEFA was trying to get a tournament off the ground as a stable mate to the European Cup, it was given the title of the European Inter City Fairs Cup, comprising of teams from a number of Cities around Europe including Rome, Barcelona, Paris & London, plus two others & it was by invitation only.
That’s where the problems for UEFA began, to try & compile a team to represent London was, well an impossible task as there were numerous ‘issues’ between the clubs from the smoke as to how many players they could each release for this new European adventure, how would it be managed? What would happen if key players were injured? Not to mention some sort of compensation for such occurrences.
Given all this, UEFA withdrew the offer to London, & offered it to Birmingham.
No problem, chance to shine a light on the place in the middle of the country which didn’t get that much exposure.
So ‘Birmingham’ took part in the tournament with representatives from B6, B9 & B71.
It’s a funny old game. 😎
So the highlighted bit above is bullshit though...
"It commenced in 1955 and finished in 1958. Cities that entered teams included Barcelona, Basel,
Birmingham, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, Cologne, Lausanne, Leipzig,
London, Milan, and Zagreb. The first competition included a group stage and also featured some city representative teams instead of clubs. The eventual
finalists were the city of Barcelona, dubbed Barcelona XI, and a
London XI."
ALSO:
From the club's own history section on bcfc.com:
"Additional endeavours included a new Main Stand constructed midway through the 1950s and an inaugural floodlit match versus Borussia Dortmund in 1956. That game ended 3-3 and was a further milestone in the Club’s continent-wide tradition.
Earlier that year, Blues had become the first English club side to compete in European competition, beating Inter Milan on the way to a semi-final against FC Barcelona in the Fairs Cup.
Such pioneering exploits and achievement was followed up in 1960 when Blues became the first side from England to reach a European final, losing out to their previous last-four nemesis’ before reaching the showpiece event again in 1961 where it was this time AS Roma who pipped them to the trophy."
