Global capital of silverware
Clubs with most trophies in football might come as a surprise
Real Madrid are expected to become the champions of the world on Sunday when they take on Japanese title winners Kashima Antlers in Tokyo for the Club World Cup, and in doing so they will wrest the title as the best club side on the planet from their great rivals Barcelona. More importantly, they will be one trophy closer to the Catalans.
As titles go, the Club World Cup is one of the most recent, but it has fast become a valid source of bragging rights and another trophy in the cabinet.
In recent years, the likes of the Club World Cup, European Super Cup and the various domestic curtain-raisers between the previous season’s league champions and the cup winners have come to be viewed as trophies worth winning rather than meaningless baubles.
You can be sure that the Catalans counted this season’s win over Sevilla to secure the Spanish Super Cup, coming just a week or so after Real beat the same opposition to lift the European Super Cup. Such trophies can massively inflate a club’s haul when it comes to their roll of honor.
Spanish giants
Again, Barcelona and Real come to mind. The clubs are often regarded as the two most successful club sides in the world. Right now, Barcelona have 86 “major” trophies and Real have 81.
A closer look shows that in their 117-year history the Blaugrana have won 24 Spanish championships, a record 28 Copa del Rey, five European Cups or Champions Leagues, a record four Cup Winners’ Cups and a record three fairs cups. A great success but nowhere near 86 without the 17 combined wins of the Spanish and European Super Cups and a variety of other super cup style or ill-fated competition wins.
As you’d expect, it’s much the same for their Madrid rivals, with the Merengues having the record for the European Cup/Champions League and La Liga and creditable records in the other traditional trophies that’s then padded out with a number of wins in the super cup-style. So it is that such trophies have come to be counted but does that really mean that Barcelona have won the most in the world?
To provide some context one
widely circulated top 10 for the most successful clubs in the world limits the field to Europe’s top-four leagues, which means you get a list that reads Barca (86), Real (81), Bayern Munich (66), Manchester United (64), Juventus (60), Liverpool (59), AC Milan (47), Arsenal (43), Inter Milan (39) and Atletico Madrid (28).
Outside of Europe
This format ignores some of the giants of the European game who don’t happen to fall in the geographical boundaries of those leagues.
Ajax have won more than 70 trophies that would earn them a place on the top 10, while Portugal’s Porto and Benfica would both feature on a top 10 with their similar hauls – to strengthen their case for inclusion all three clubs have had continental success despite not featuring in one of Europe’s “big leagues,” while there are also cases for the domestically dominant Olympiacos in Greece and Ukraine’s Dinamo Kiev.
If we are willing to look past the so-called big leagues, then there are more successful clubs than even Barcelona and Real Madrid.
There’s no better place than Glasgow to start the search for the global capital of silverware. Rangers have won the Scottish league title 54 times, the Scottish Cup on 33 occasions and the Scottish League Cup 27 times. That’s 114 trophies before the 1972 European Cup Winners Cup and recent lower league titles are taken into account – and there is not a super cup in sight.
Their great rivals Celtic, meanwhile, just added their 100th trophy to the cabinet with a win over Aberdeen in the Scottish League Cup final last month.
Whatever criticisms that can be leveled at the Scottish league are comfortably more successful than any club mentioned so far.
However, just over the water in Northern Ireland, Linfield make a case that is even stronger. The club has won 51 league titles – second only to Rangers for the world record – and have twice won a world record seven trophies in a season. Linfield’s 258 trophies would take them top of the list, followed by the Glasgow giants.
Casting the net outside of Europe, the current Uruguayan champions Penarol would be in the global top 10 with more than 60 trophies, including record 50 domestic championships, the thirdhighest in the world, and five Copa Libertadores, the third-highest on the continent. Not bad when there is no domestic cup competition.
What’s interesting is that all of the clubs mentioned for this new-look top 10 of trophies won have had the benefit of over a century of history. Not every country has had a league for that long and many clubs were founded much more recently.
So who might join the top 10 in the decades to come? Al Faisaly in Jordan, Egypt’s Al Ahly, Ghana’s Asante Kotoko and Chinese side Guangzhou Evergrande are making up for lost time in filling their trophy cabinets and could be global household names in the future.
Until then, though, club owners and fans know that there is one thing that matters – having more trophies than your rivals, no matter how you have to massage the stats, and if that fails, being the current holders always counts more.