UEFA European Championship

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The tournament now called the UEFA European Championship did not start under that name. When it was first played in 1960, in France, it was called the European Nations' Cup, and it stayed that way for its first two editions before UEFA renamed it the European Championship in 1968. The Soviet Union won that first, differently named tournament, beating Yugoslavia 2 to 1 in the final, in a competition that fielded just four finalists, a fraction of the twenty four that qualify for the modern tournament. The field grew in stages rather than all at once: eight teams from 1980, doubling again to sixteen from 1996, and growing by half again to the current twenty four in the most recent expansion.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Spain holds the UEFA European Championship record with four titles, the most of any nation, but the number that actually separates Spain from the rest of the field is smaller and more specific: Spain is the only team ever to have won the tournament in consecutive editions, doing it in 2008 and again in 2012. Every other multiple champion in the competition's history has had its titles spaced apart by at least one tournament somebody else won in between. In a competition held only every four years, with a field that has grown from four finalists at its 1960 founding as the European Nations' Cup to twenty four teams today, winning once is already difficult; winning twice with no gap at all is a record nobody else in the tournament's history has matched.