Did you know there was once a tournament exclusively for retired footballers aged 35 and over, where Pele laced up his boots again a full decade after calling it a career?
Or that the oldest football trophy ever contested was played for just once, in 1867, to help rebuild a burnt-down theatre?
Football history is full of competitions that burned brightly for a while and then disappeared entirely, swallowed by expanding calendars, shifting priorities, or simple lack of interest.
Most of them deserve to be remembered. Here are eleven of the best.
The Youdan Cup (1867)
The Youdan Cup holds a remarkable distinction: it is recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest football trophy ever contested.
The tournament was staged across several grounds in Sheffield in 1867, including Bramall Lane, which remains one of the oldest football stadiums still in active use today.
Twelve clubs entered. Eleven of them no longer exist. The one that does, Hallam FC, also happens to have won it, defeating Mackenzie in extra time on 9 March 1867.
The competition existed for a single edition and served a specific practical purpose: raising funds to rebuild a theatre owned by Thomas Youdan that had recently burned down. Having achieved that, it was never repeated.
The rules under which it was played feel distinctly alien from a modern perspective. Each side fielded twelve players rather than eleven. Two umpires operated alongside a referee.
If a match remained tied after ninety minutes, up to an hour of additional time was played, with the first team to score declared the winner. If no goal came in extra time, the match was replayed entirely.
As for the trophy itself, it was lost for decades before a Scottish antiques dealer recognised what they had and sold it back to Hallam FC in 1997 for £1,600. A silver specialist from the BBC's Antiques Roadshow has since estimated its true value at closer to £100,000.
The British Home Championship (1884 to 1984)
For a full century, the British Home Championship served as the backbone of international football between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It holds the distinction of being the oldest international football tournament ever played, with its first edition taking place in 1884.
The format was straightforward: the four home nations competed in a round-robin tournament, with England claiming the title more often than any other side across the competition's hundred-year lifespan. The final edition, in 1984, was won by Northern Ireland.
Its demise was driven by two converging problems. Hooliganism had become a serious and growing concern at British football in the early 1980s, with the tournament providing a concentrated flashpoint.
At the same time, the fixture calendar had grown increasingly congested, creating pressure on clubs and players across all four nations. The organisers concluded that the competition was no longer sustainable and brought it to a close.
For the best part of a century, though, it was one of the most keenly contested events in the international game.
The World Cup of Masters (1987 to 1997)
The World Cup of Masters was essentially a celebration of football nostalgia, designed to give retired legends one more turn on the pitch and give supporters one more chance to see them.
The concept was simple: gather players aged 35 and over and organise a competitive international tournament.
The headline act at its 1987 launch was Pele, who returned to competitive football at the age of 46, more than a decade after his final professional match. He was followed by a roster of similarly celebrated veterans: Bobby Moore, Socrates, Paolo Rossi, and others whose names still carried enormous weight.
The tournament travelled to Sao Paulo, Miami, Trieste, and Klagenfurt across its ten-year run. Brazil were the competition's most successful side and fittingly claimed the final title before the event was discontinued in 1997.
The Lipton Challenge Cup (1909 to 1911)
The Lipton Challenge Cup came from an unlikely source. Sir Thomas Lipton was a British tea magnate with a passion for sport and an enthusiasm for ambitious projects that frequently outran his success in them. He is best remembered in sailing circles as the man who lost five consecutive America's Cup campaigns without ever getting close to winning.
His football legacy is more significant. Between 1909 and 1911, Lipton organised a tournament in southern Italy and Sicily that brought together clubs from England, Switzerland, and Germany.
The cross-border nature of the competition led historians to later describe it as an unofficial world club championship, making it one of the earliest genuine attempts at an international club competition.
It ran for just three editions but planted an idea that the football world would eventually develop into something considerably larger.
The Coupe des Allies (1915 to 1916)
The Coupe des Allies was a brief and modest competition, but its context gives it a significance far beyond its modest scale.
Organised in 1915 and 1916, the tournament brought together representative teams from Allied nations during the First World War. Football provided a rare form of relief amid the chaos of the conflict, and this competition offered soldiers from across the Allied front the opportunity to compete and, briefly, to set aside the conditions surrounding them.
It was never about trophies or prestige. It was about demonstrating that football could function as a form of solidarity, that the sport retained the capacity to bring people together even in the most extreme circumstances imaginable.
The UEFA Cup Winners' Cup (1960 to 1999)
The Cup Winners' Cup occupied a distinct and well-loved corner of European football for nearly four decades.
Its entry criteria were simple and democratic: win your country's domestic cup competition and you earned a place in a continent-wide knockout tournament. No league position required, no coefficient calculations needed.
That format produced a wonderfully unpredictable competition. Barcelona collected the most titles, but the roll call of winners included clubs that would never have featured in the European Cup.
Dinamo Tbilisi and Dinamo Kyiv represented the former Soviet Union with distinction. Aberdeen, in 1983, defeated Real Madrid to claim the trophy in one of the competition's most celebrated upsets.
As European football modernised and the fixture calendar filled up, UEFA eventually concluded that a third continental club competition was no longer viable. In 1999, the Cup Winners' Cup was merged into the UEFA Cup and ceased to exist as a separate entity.
The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (1955 to 1971)
The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup had perhaps the strangest origin story of any major football competition. It was conceived not by a football authority but by the organisers of international trade fairs, with entry initially restricted to teams representing cities that hosted such events.
The early editions produced some genuinely unusual participant lineups as a result, and in certain years the competing sides were city representative selections rather than individual clubs.
As the competition developed, it evolved into a more recognisable cross-border knockout tournament. Barcelona dominated the early years. Leeds United became one of its more prominent champions in the later editions.
UEFA assumed control in 1971, renamed the competition the UEFA Cup, and the Fairs Cup name passed into history, though its legacy runs directly through to the modern Europa League.
The UEFA Intertoto Cup (1961 to 2008)
The Intertoto Cup served a specific and practical function within European football: it offered clubs that had finished outside the continental qualification places in their domestic leagues a route into UEFA competition.
Played during the summer, it gave mid-table sides the opportunity to remain match-sharp during the off-season while competing for a place in the UEFA Cup proper. For smaller clubs, the tournament represented a genuine opportunity for continental exposure that would otherwise have been entirely out of reach.
The list of winners included sides from Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, England, and Portugal, reflecting the competition's broad geographic scope. Newcastle United and Villarreal were among the more prominent names to lift the trophy across its various formats.
By 2008, UEFA's restructuring of its club competitions had rendered the Intertoto Cup redundant. It was quietly absorbed into the Europa League system and discontinued.
The Nehru Cup (1982 to 2012)
Cricket is the dominant sporting passion in India, and football has historically struggled to compete for public attention. The Nehru Cup was one of the more sustained attempts to change that.
Named after India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the tournament launched in 1982 as an international invitational competition hosted in New Delhi.
In its early years it attracted significant global names, with Uruguay, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Yugoslavia among the sides that participated during the 1980s.
After a decade-long hiatus between 1997 and 2007, the competition returned in a reduced form. India won each of the final three editions before the tournament was discontinued in 2012.
Its final years were a shadow of what it had been at its peak, but for a period in the 1980s it served as a genuine point of intersection between Indian football and the wider international game.
The FIFA Confederations Cup (1992 to 2017)
The Confederations Cup functioned, in essence, as a large-scale dress rehearsal for the World Cup. Held in the host nation ahead of the following year's tournament, it brought together the continental champions, the reigning World Cup holders, and the host nation for a competition that served multiple practical purposes.
Host countries used it to test their stadiums and infrastructure. Major nations used it to prepare their squads and assess tactical approaches. Smaller nations used it as an opportunity for exposure on a global stage they would rarely otherwise access.
The tournament produced a number of memorable results and, for a period, carried genuine prestige. Germany's experimental young squad won the final edition in 2017. As FIFA's calendar grew increasingly congested, the competition was judged to be no longer sustainable, and it has not been held since.
The NASL Soccer Bowl (1975 to 1984)
Before MLS established itself as North America's primary football competition, the North American Soccer League made a genuinely compelling case that the continent was ready to embrace the sport at the highest level.
The Soccer Bowl was the NASL's showpiece final, the match that determined each season's champion. For a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it attracted some of the biggest names in world football.
Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, and George Best all competed in the league at various points, most of them representing the New York Cosmos or the Los Angeles Aztecs.
The 1978 final drew a crowd of more than 70,000, suggesting that the foundations for something lasting were in place. They were not. Financial problems accumulated, the league overexpanded beyond its means, and the NASL folded in 1984, taking the Soccer Bowl with it.
Why These Competitions Matter
The eleven competitions gathered here varied enormously in scale, ambition, and longevity. What they share is a place in a broader football history that rarely gets told.
Some were genuine forerunners to competitions that still exist today, the Fairs Cup's connection to the Europa League being the clearest example. Others were experiments that illuminated something real about the sport's capacity to transcend borders or circumstances. A few were simply strange and wonderful ideas that deserved more time than they received.
Football's present is built on a past far richer and stranger than most supporters realise. These tournaments are part of that past, and they are worth remembering.