To do this I counted the nationalities of every player that appeared on the winning side in a UCL/EC final from 1955 until 2019, including anyone that came off the bench. I toyed with the idea of including the nationalities of every player that featured at any point in the competition for the winning side but this would have taken too long. Moreover there is something romantic about the European Cup Final that you simply don’t get anywhere else in football, players that appear in it deserve to be highlighted in the history books.
Naturally the list is dominated by European countries, but of course Brazilians and Argentines have featured heavily in recent years. I was staggered to find out that Brazil has more Champions League Final winners (46) than France (37), and even more so to discover that Brazilians have featured on the winning side in UCL/EC finals more than any other country (25) despite not being a UEFA state.
The following table ranks the 51 nationalities that have made an appearance on the winning team in UCL/EC Finals by four metrics:
Total - the total number of players of that nationality that have featured for the winning side in a final. Note that the same player can be counted twice – for example Cristiano Ronaldo has added five to Portugal’s tally.
Apps - the number of times that nationality has had any player feature for the winning side in a final. This should give an idea of where the foreign talent is coming from and how many teams they are spreading out to play for.
Adjusted UCLs - this is a fun one, don’t take it too seriously! This metric attempts to predict how many European Cups a particular nationality has directly contributed to by having their players feature on the winning side in the final. Take the 2004 Champions League Final for example, Porto won the title that year and had 14 players feature on the night, ten of them were Portuguese, two of them were Brazilian, one was Russian and one was South African so we can say that the contribution to the European Cup for that year was as follows:
| Nationality | No. Players | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Portuguese | 10 | 0.714 |
| Brazilian | 2 | 0.143 |
| South African | 1 | 0.071 |
| Russian | 1 | 0.071 |
Actual UCLs - the number of UCL/EC titles won by clubs in that particular country.
*Table can be sorted by individual columns by clicking on them if you have RES.
| Country | Total | Apps | Adjusted UCLs | Actual UCLs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spain | 143 | 23 | 10.940 | 18 |
| Italy | 103 | 13 | 8.243 | 12 |
| England | 84 | 16 | 6.936 | 13 |
| Netherlands | 78 | 20 | 6.411 | 6 |
| Germany | 75 | 19 | 6.091 | 7 |
| Portugal | 55 | 15 | 4.412 | 4 |
| Brazil | 46 | 25 | 3.387 | 0 |
| France | 37 | 23 | 2.749 | 1 |
| Scotland | 35 | 10 | 2.972 | 1 |
| Argentina | 22 | 14 | 1.623 | 0 |
| Romania | 15 | 3 | 1.155 | 1 |
| Yugoslavia | 12 | 2 | 1.000 | 1 |
| Croatia | 9 | 9 | 0.666 | 0 |
| Republic of Ireland | 9 | 6 | 0.735 | 0 |
| Denmark | 8 | 6 | 0.677 | 0 |
| Sweden | 8 | 7 | 0.639 | 0 |
| Wales | 8 | 8 | 0.602 | 0 |
| Cameroon | 4 | 4 | 0.291 | 0 |
| Czech Republic | 4 | 3 | 0.291 | 0 |
| Uruguay | 4 | 4 | 0.297 | 0 |
| Costa Rica | 3 | 3 | 0.214 | 0 |
| Ghana | 3 | 3 | 0.220 | 0 |
| Ivory Coast | 3 | 2 | 0.231 | 0 |
| Mali | 3 | 3 | 0.220 | 0 |
| Nigeria | 3 | 2 | 0.231 | 0 |
| Norway | 3 | 2 | 0.225 | 0 |
| Poland | 3 | 3 | 0.225 | 0 |
| Serbia | 3 | 3 | 0.214 | 0 |
| Austria | 2 | 2 | 0.160 | 0 |
