UEFA club competitions

UEFA club competitions are UEFA competitions for club teams. The most important in men's senior football are the UEFA Champions League (begun in 1955), UEFA Europa League (begun in 1971) and UEFA Conference League (begun in 2021). UEFA club competitions are distinct from both UEFA competitions for national teams (such as the European Championship and Nations League) and from domestic competitions, confined to the clubs of a single UEFA member football association (FA), such as the Scottish Premier League and Scottish Cup for Scottish Football Association clubs. Clubs qualify for one season's edition of a UEFA competition based on performance in the previous season in either a UEFA competition or a domestic competition. Colloquially, UEFA club competitions are called European football; a club may be said to have "qualified for Europe" or be "playing in Europe". Performances in recent UEFA club competitions by a given club (and by all clubs in a given FA) are used to calculate a UEFA coefficient for the club (and FA). This coefficient in turn determines number of slots for an FA, and seedings for a club, in the next UEFA club competitions.

There have been non-UEFA international club competitions, such as the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup and Mitropa Cup, which were organised not by UEFA but rather by clubs, member FAs, or private bodies unaffiliated with UEFA. Although the Europa League (then called the UEFA Cup) was a de-facto replacement for the Fairs Cup, UEFA disregards the latter in its statistics as not being a UEFA club competition. Exceptionally, although UEFA did not take charge of the European Cup Winners' Cup until after the completion of the , that inaugural season is retrospectively considered a UEFA club competition. In 1962 UEFA adopted the principle that "competitions open to the clubs of all National Associations affiliated to UEFA may only be organized by UEFA itself", although the Fairs Cup was allowed to continue until 1971. Non-UEFA multinational club competitions restricted to a subset of member FAs were still permitted, such as the Baltic League or Anglo-Italian Cup.