DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME?

Some competitions start with shrugged disinterest; others begin with more of a bang. The European Championship did both. The maiden Euros was scheduled for 1960, and its early days were a triumph of contradiction. Struggling to generate enough entrants to even get off the ground, its very first match in qualifying promptly set an attendance record that still stands (more on that later).

Back then, Europe was a very different place. French Football Federation secretary-general Henri Delaunay had first come up with the idea of the Euros in 1927, some three years before the inaugural World Cup, but it took 33 years for his dream to come