They secured a full 5-0 victory, with Arsenal's Cliff Holton scoring a hat-trick. A precedent had been set for European club football, if not for the ability of Arsenal players to succeed in it. When the group stage ended two years later, London won, beating Frankfurt and Basel for first place. They would face another Swiss team in the round of 16, which luckily went straight to the semifinals, beating Lausanne 3-2 on aggregate.
The final of the Interurban Fairs Cup in 1969 was the last of the eleventh editions of the Interurban Fairs Cup that were held in history. It was played on May 29 between Newcastle United and Ujpesti Dozsa from Hungary. Newcastle won the tie 6-2 on aggregate, winning both games (3-0 at home and 2-3 away from home). After the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, UEFA indefinitely banned all English teams from competing in Europe; the ban was lifted in the 1990-91 season and Arsenal entered the 1991-92 season, giving Arsenal the opportunity to play in the European Cup.
As Arsenal finished fourth in the league, the following season the club had to play a third qualifying round, against Dinamo Zagreb, in order to participate in the group stage of the Champions League. A highly experienced soccer player, in the 1950s he combined his role as vice-president of FIFA with a lucrative secondary activity as managing director of the Swiss Football Pools (SFP). Arsenal participated for the first time in European football during the 1963-64 season, through the Interurban Fairs Cup. Club competitions between teams from different European countries date back to 1897, when the Challenge Cup was created for clubs from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which did not face each other under normal circumstances.
Arsenal returned to European club football in the 1978-79 season, after finishing fifth in the previous league season. In December 1954, the French sports magazine L'Equipe published an article by journalist and former professional soccer player Gabriel Hanot, which proposed the introduction of a European club competition. Arsenal faced RFC Liège in the second round; the Belgian club won 4-2 on aggregate to advance to the quarterfinals. Wenger had a great experience in UEFA club competitions; in Monaco he reached the final of the Cup Winners' Cup in 1992, lost 2-0 to Werder Bremen and led the club to the semifinals of the European Cup in 1993-94. The club's first European football match was played against Copenhagen XI on September 25, 1963, and since then it has participated in European club competitions on several occasions, most of which were organized by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
French forward Thierry Henry holds the club's record for the most games with 89, and is the club's top scorer in European competitions with 42 goals. Founded in 1930, the Coupe des Nations featured clubs from ten of the major European football leagues and was considered a success. After defeating Glentoran from Northern Ireland, Sporting de Lisboa from Portugal and Rouen from France, Arsenal faced Romanian club Dinamo Bacău in the quarterfinals.
