Welcome to Soccer 101. My name is Ryan Bailey, and today I'm tackling the question that young Arsenal fans will be asking their parents in years to come, what is the Champions League?

Just kidding, listener, those young Arsenal fans will of course know that it's the competition

their team used to play in. But to give it a more general definition, the Champions League

is an annual soccer tournament organized by UEFA in order to crown the best domestic team in Europe.

It runs concurrently with the European domestic season.

It is organized in a round-robin group and knockout stage format.

The teams are awarded entry by finishing at or near the top of their respective domestic leagues per UEFA coefficients.

Before its 1992 rebrand as the Champions League, it was known as the European

Cup, and you can still refer to it as the European Cup. It's taken place every year since

Marty McFly went to the Enchartment Under the Sea School Dance in 1955. It purports to be the most

prestigious domestic tournament in the world, and it also purports to have the highest standard of soccer for any competition.

The reigning champions are by in Munich, who defeated Paris Saint-Germain in the final in Lisbon back in August.

Now before we dig more into the specifics of the current tournament and its format, let's go back in time, just like Marty McFlyer, and take a look at its history and the history of pan-continental soccer in Europe.

The first time two European teams from different countries ever met was all the way back in 1887, when F-A Cup winner's Aston Villa hosted Scottish Cup champions Hibernian in what was called the World Club Championship.

And yes, that is a bit like Major League Baseball calling their championship the World Series when the whole world very much isn't invited.

With a 3-0 win, Villa became the first ever, and I quote, world club champions.

Essentially, that was the first ever Cup Winners Cup, a UEFA tournament that formerly started in 1960 and ran until 1999 when it was replaced by the UEFA Cup, which in turn was rebranded 10 years later as the Europa League, Europe's secondary domestic competition.

The first real example of actual champions playing each other, not cup winners,

and thus the earliest technical iteration of the purest form of the European Cup or Champions League,

came in 1895. That's in the World Club Championship 2,

when English champions Sunderland beat Scottish

Champions Hearts 5-3 in Edinburgh. Just four editions of this World Club Championship tournament

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