1991/92: Koeman ends Barcelona's wait

UC Sampdoria 0-1 FC Barcelona (aet)
(Koeman 112)
Wembley, London

The sporting gods smiled on Barcelona in 1992 as the Catalan capital welcomed both the Olympic Games and the European Champion Clubs' Cup. But while the rest of Spain claimed the former as their own, the latter was the sole property of first-time winners FC Barcelona.

Johan Cruyff's team were an amalgam of local and foreign talent - the likes of Josep Guardiola and Albert Ferrer sharing a dressing room with Michael Laudrup and Hristo Stoichkov. It was another from the superstar bracket, Ronald Koeman, who scored the only goal of a high-quality Wembley final against UC Sampdoria. The Dutch international broke the deadlock deep in extra time with a trademark free-kick past goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca.

Defeat was cruel on the Italian side, also beaten by Barcelona in the 1989 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup final. The Genoa club had topped one of the two 'quarter-final' groups introduced by UEFA to replace the round of eight and semi-finals. Here they were up against FK Crvena Zvezda, RSC Anderlecht and Panathinaikos FC, and not surprisingly, it was the Yugolsav holders who posed the biggest threat. But forced out of Belgrade by the Balkan civil war, their grip on the cup ended with a 3-1 'home' defeat by Vujadin Boskov's side in Sofia.

Meanwhile, Barcelona owed their place in the mini-league system to an away-goals win over 1. FC Kaiserslautern in the second round. Yet the only blemish on their record thereafter was a 1-0 reverse in Prague, keeping them ahead of AC Sparta Praha, SL Benfica and FC Dynamo Kyiv. Then all they had to do was scratch that 40-year itch.