The league phase of the men’s Champions League begins today, Tuesday, September 8, the main European competition for club football. There will, of course, be the matches. But before the football comes another familiar ritual: the anthem.
It is called, simply, “Champions League,” and its lyrics are just as simple, built around a handful of words repeated in three languages: “the best,” “the masters,” “the champions.” Or, more importantly: the Chaaaampiooooons.
It has existed since the early 1990s. No one seems particularly interested in replacing it — it has only been updated and re-recorded — and if you want to hear live, outside a Champions League stadium, the original anthem that inspired it, you have to wait for the coronation of a British monarch.
“Champions League” dates to 1992, when the old European Cup changed its format and its name. Since then, it has been played in stadiums before matches — where many players have described feeling excited or emotional when they hear it — and broadcast on television, in front of millions of fans who often feel much the same way.
Musically, however, it is not an especially original creation. It was inspired by a coronation anthem composed by Georg Friedrich Handel, who died more than two centuries before modern football was invented.
And yet it works. Very well, and for decades. One reason is that it is rarely heard in any context other than the Champions League. It is, of course, available on YouTube and Spotify, but UEFA, which owns the rights, is careful about allowing it to be used elsewhere.
The anthem was composed by Tony Britten, a British musician who studied at London’s Royal College of Music. He was commissioned to write it after his agent learned that UEFA, which was turning the newly redesigned Champions League into a global brand, wanted an anthem as part of the competition’s branding.
A senior executive at TEAM, the company working on that project, told The New York Times that European football had an image problem after the 1980s, amid hooliganism and the Heysel disaster. The competition needed something that would give it a more prestigious air — something that would, in his words, “class it up.”
Someone inevitably suggested “We Are the Champions” by Queen. Fortunately, the brainstorming went further.
The timing was also right. In 1990, the Three Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti — performed together for the first time at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, the day before the World Cup final of Italia ’90. For millions of people, it was a spectacular demonstration that football and classical or operatic music could belong to the same story.
“To be honest,” Britten recalled years later, “when they offered it to me, it was just another job.” He spent about a month on it. At the time, he was working mainly on film scores and advertising jingles, and he sent TEAM a handful of “fragments of classical compositions” to see what direction they might like.
TEAM chose “Zadok the Priest,” one of four anthems Handel composed in 1727 for the coronation of George II of Great Britain, who would reign for more than 30 years.
The original title comes from the biblical text Handel set to music: a passage from the First Book of Kings describing the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet. “Zadok the Priest” remains one of the traditional anthems performed at British royal coronations. It will therefore return whenever Britain crowns a new monarch — something that, after Queen Elizabeth II’s extraordinarily long reign, has not happened very often.
Britten was asked to turn that music into something new and contemporary, but Handel’s imprint remained unmistakable. He was also asked to include a choir singing in three languages — English, German and French, UEFA’s three official languages — and he kept the lyrics as simple as possible, choosing words largely for the way they sounded.
He considered several alternatives to “the champions.” Among them were “the greatest,” “the finest” and “the most exciting.”
“Looking back, some of them would have been a disaster,” he said. He was similarly unpretentious about the final version: “I wasn’t trying to create a work of art. I was concerned that it did what it was designed to do.”
And it does.
Britten, now 71, does not own the anthem’s rights, but he receives royalties. “It’s not as if I’m making millions from it,” he said in 2020. He is a Crystal Palace supporter, a club that has never played in the Champions League, but the anthem has allowed him to attend numerous Champions League finals in person, sometimes conducting its performance before kickoff.
He did so, for example, in 2001 at San Siro, with the La Scala choir, before the final between Bayern Munich and Valencia.
Musically, Britten’s anthem has been criticized mainly because it is so close to Handel’s original that it can seem more like an adaptation than an independent composition.
But that may also be one of the reasons it has worked so well. Britten did not have to invent something from scratch that sounded solemn, ancient, European and immediately recognizable. He took music that had been associated with royalty for centuries and turned it into the sonic emblem of a new aristocracy: European football.
Britten was told, he recalled, that the anthem was as important to the Champions League as the color red was to Coca-Cola. Over the years, some have even described it as “the true anthem of Europe”: perhaps the only major European cultural product created in the 1990s that is genuinely shared, widely distributed and instantly recognizable across the continent.
That is also why a few notes are enough to tell you exactly where you are. It does not matter whether you are in a stadium, watching on television or simply sitting in a room: the choir begins, the crescendo arrives, and somewhere, inevitably, someone hears it already — the Chaaaampiooooons.
A couple of years ago, as part of a broader rebranding of the competition, the anthem was re-recorded and slightly modified, giving greater prominence to the choral section. A separate, more rhythmic and triumphant version was also created for the moment after the final, when the trophy is lifted.
The anthem, in other words, has changed just enough to keep sounding exactly the same.
And that is probably its greatest achievement: for more than 30 years, it has announced the same thing. That, for a few seconds before kickoff, the champions are about to take the field.
