Red Bull Salzburg’s captain Andreas Ulmer was strolling through the city centre with his newborn baby one day in 2019 when a car pulled up at the traffic lights with the windows rolled down and music blasting. Rocking along to the iconic orchestral tones of the official Champions League anthem was his teammate Erling Haaland. A few days later, the future Manchester City superstar marked his debut in the competition with a hat-trick.

Haaland continues to use the signature score as his ringtone. There is a long queue of legendary footballers who have gushed about a 40-second burst of music which sweeps around the grounds of Europe’s best teams before each game in the most prestigious club competition on the planet.

Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale have all shown their appreciation for the Champions League anthem. The inspiring melody is world-famous, but the origins behind a song crafted by a Crystal Palace fan are not so familiar.

Champions League Anthem Lyrics (Plus Translation)

Three languages, but not quite as dramatic as the musical accompaniment

UEFA didn’t know the lyrics they wanted for their new anthem but had decided what languages they wanted it to be in – which was a start. The competition’s signature piece of music would have to incorporate French, German and English – UEFA’s three official languages.

The anthem’s English composer, Tony Britten, “came up with a set of superlatives”, to use his own words. Settling upon ‘the greatest’, ‘the best’, ‘the masters’, ‘the main event’ and ‘the champions’, these painfully vague terms would be translated into the set dialects and blasted out alongside the accompanying hymn.

The lyrics are lost in the royal swells of the overpowering composition, leaving little more than the words ‘the champions’ audible for most fans and players. The translated version doesn’t offer much more nuance, creating a series of repetitive verses which relentlessly underscore the lofty status of the competition. Ironically, the Champions League rebrand in 1992 coincided with an opening up of the tournament. While only domestic league title winners qualified for the European Cup, a wider pool of non-champions were treated to the new Champions League anthem.

Origin of the Champions League Anthem

Created in 1992 when the tournament was rebranded

Sporting themes and anthems had rarely strayed into the rich realm of classical music before the 1990s. Variations of pop and the chirpy Match of the Day tune were widespread until the BBC made the transformative decision to plump for Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of ‘Nessun Dorma’ as the accompaniment to the opening credits of the 1990 World Cup, which was held in Italy.

Inspired by this universally acclaimed choice, UEFA wanted their own classical hit for the rebranding of their landmark competition in 1992. “The old European Cup had become a very tired competition,” the anthem’s composer, Tony Britten, told the BBC, “and to UEFA’s credit they wanted to elevate the sport around the time when there was of a lot of hooliganism right across Europe. UEFA wanted this competition to be about the best of football rather than the worst and said they must have an anthem.”

The new tournament ditched the European Cup tag which had existed since the 1950s in place of the Champions League branding. The executives at European football’s governing body had been sent a series of tapes for inspiration by Britten and requested something similar to Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ – which was originally used for the coronation of Great Britain’s King George II in 1727.

Britten is a Crystal Palace fan born and raised in south London who described himself as “a hired hand, a composer for rent”. The task of conjuring a unique spin on a piece of music from the 18th century had to be juggled alongside his work on Amstrad computer adverts and TV dramas. Britten found enough time to gather the choir of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at a studio in north London for a historic – and lucrative – recording session.

“The PRS [royalties] from that help me to fund all the other things!” Britten told M Magazine in 2011, allowing him to embark upon a career creating his own films and musical scores. The gig has also afforded the Norfolk-based composer numerous trips to some of the greatest Champions League finals ever contested. Such a lofty legacy was not what Britten was expecting when he reluctantly shelved his commercial work back in 1992. “If everyone is totally honest,” Britten later reflected, “at the time we made this we had no idea it was going to become as big as it has.”

Changes to the Champions League Anthem

There was some refinement in 2024/25

Many composers would be wary of tampering with their masterpiece but not Britten. As the English artist once admitted, he doesn’t even consider it to be his greatest contribution to the arts. “Of course, I’m proud of its popularity,” he shrugged, “but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best thing I’ve ever written.” While Britten regards the 2016 film ‘ChickLit’ which he wrote and directed as his magnus opus – The Guardian review derided it as a “groanworthy bonkbuster” – he had no hesitation in tweaking the Champions League anthem.

It wasn’t until the 2024/25 campaign, that a new version of the anthem was belatedly released. In the same season that a dramatic format change was unveiled, the musical alterations were relatively minor. There are no synthesizers or dubstep beats and neither the lyrics nor vocals have been touched. The instrumental section of the original anthem is slightly richer than the new, accentuated version, but the powerful impact of an iconic hymn is still in full effect.

How it compares to Handel’s Zadok the Priest

Each deals with coronation

As noted, Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ served as the sonic underpinning for Britten’s Champions League Anthem and, though one can certainly hear the foundational inspiration, they remain very different songs. For one, Handel’s anthem runs to over six minutes long, as opposed to the 40-second burst of Britten’s effort.

Nevertheless, they both deal with coronations – Zadok with the anointing of King George II and the Champions League Anthem with the crowning of the European champions.

If you are a fan of Britten’s Champions League Anthem, it is very much worth taking the time to familiarise oneself with the song that served as its artistic bedrock.

Stats via UEFA.