Every UEFA Europa League Winner: A Complete History of the Competition

The list of UEFA Europa League winners covers every club that has lifted Europe's second-tier club trophy since the competition began as the UEFA Cup in 1971–72. More than fifty editions later, the roll of honour stretches across a dozen countries and tells a story about how power in European football has shifted over time.

Where the winners list begins

Any complete list has to start with a boundary decision, and UEFA made it long ago. The Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, played between 1955 and 1971, is treated as a separate competition: its winners, including Barcelona and Leeds United, do not appear in the official record. The recognised list begins with the 1971–72 UEFA Cup, won by Tottenham Hotspur over Wolverhampton Wanderers in the competition's only all-English final.

From there, the same trophy has passed through three names on paper but one continuous history in practice. The UEFA Cup ran from 1972 to 2009, the rebranded UEFA Europa League from 2010 onwards, and UEFA counts every winner in a single sequence. Years below refer to the year the final was played.

Every winner by decade

The 1970s

• 1972 — Tottenham Hotspur (England)
• 1973 — Liverpool (England)
• 1974 — Feyenoord (Netherlands)
• 1975 — Borussia Mönchengladbach (West Germany)
• 1976 — Liverpool (England)
• 1977 — Juventus (Italy)
• 1978 — PSV Eindhoven (Netherlands)
• 1979 — Borussia Mönchengladbach (West Germany)

The 1980s

• 1980 — Eintracht Frankfurt (West Germany)
• 1981 — Ipswich Town (England)
• 1982 — IFK Göteborg (Sweden)
• 1983 — Anderlecht (Belgium)
• 1984 — Tottenham Hotspur (England)
• 1985 — Real Madrid (Spain)
• 1986 — Real Madrid (Spain)
• 1987 — IFK Göteborg (Sweden)
• 1988 — Bayer Leverkusen (West Germany)
• 1989 — Napoli (Italy)

The 1990s

• 1990 — Juventus (Italy)
• 1991 — Inter Milan (Italy)
• 1992 — Ajax (Netherlands)
• 1993 — Juventus (Italy)
• 1994 — Inter Milan (Italy)
• 1995 — Parma (Italy)
• 1996 — Bayern Munich (Germany)
• 1997 — Schalke 04 (Germany)
• 1998 — Inter Milan (Italy)
• 1999 — Parma (Italy)

The 2000s

• 2000 — Galatasaray (Turkey)
• 2001 — Liverpool (England)
• 2002 — Feyenoord (Netherlands)
• 2003 — Porto (Portugal)
• 2004 — Valencia (Spain)
• 2005 — CSKA Moscow (Russia)
• 2006 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2007 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2008 — Zenit St Petersburg (Russia)
• 2009 — Shakhtar Donetsk (Ukraine)

The 2010s

• 2010 — Atlético Madrid (Spain)
• 2011 — Porto (Portugal)
• 2012 — Atlético Madrid (Spain)
• 2013 — Chelsea (England)
• 2014 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2015 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2016 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2017 — Manchester United (England)
• 2018 — Atlético Madrid (Spain)
• 2019 — Chelsea (England)

The 2020s so far

• 2020 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2021 — Villarreal (Spain)
• 2022 — Eintracht Frankfurt (Germany)
• 2023 — Sevilla (Spain)
• 2024 — Atalanta (Italy)
• 2025 — Tottenham Hotspur (England)

That carries the official record through the 2024–25 season, fifty-four editions in all.

What the roll of honour reveals

Read in order, the list maps the shifting weight of European football. The 1970s belonged to England, West Germany, and the Netherlands, when the UEFA Cup rewarded deep, physical squads built for two-legged ties. The late 1980s and 1990s were emphatically Italian: between 1989 and 1999, Serie A clubs won eight of eleven editions, a run that included three all-Italian finals and reflected the era when Italy's league was the strongest in the world. The 2000s opened the map, sending the trophy to Turkey, Russia, Portugal, and Ukraine for the first time, before Spain took command of the modern era.

Counting by nation, using UEFA's official records, Spanish clubs lead the all-time table with fourteen titles, while England and Italy have ten each. Germany follows with seven across its pre- and post-reunification clubs. The Netherlands holds four, all won by 2002 — a reminder that Dutch football's strongest continental decades came early in the competition's life.

There is a format story buried in the list, too. Every final from 1972 to 1997 was played over two legs, home and away, so the early winners earned their titles across one hundred and eighty minutes rather than ninety. The single final at a neutral venue only arrived in 1998, which means more than half of the names on this list won the trophy under conditions today's finalists never face.

Sevilla, the outlier on every list

One club distorts every summary of this competition. Sevilla have won it a record seven times — 2006, 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020, and 2023 — and no other club has more than three. Their three consecutive titles from 2014 to 2016 remain the only such streak in the competition's history, and for years the club's identity became inseparable from the tournament itself. The only other club to retain the trophy is Real Madrid, with back-to-back UEFA Cups in 1985 and 1986.

Behind Sevilla, a cluster of clubs sit on three titles each: Liverpool, Juventus, Inter Milan, Atlético Madrid, and Tottenham Hotspur, whose 2025 triumph added a Europa League to their two UEFA Cups. Borussia Mönchengladbach, Real Madrid, IFK Göteborg, Parma, Feyenoord, Eintracht Frankfurt, Porto, and Chelsea have each won it twice.

Surprises and firsts

Part of the competition's appeal is how often the list refuses to follow seeding. Ipswich Town's 1981 title came from a town of barely more than a hundred thousand people. IFK Göteborg won it twice in six years while operating as a part-time club by the standards of their continental rivals — still the only Swedish side to win a major UEFA club competition. Galatasaray's victory in 2000 made them the first Turkish winners of a European trophy, and the 2005, 2008, and 2009 editions gave Russia and Ukraine their first continental silverware through CSKA Moscow, Zenit St Petersburg, and Shakhtar Donetsk.

The modern era has produced its own surprises. Villarreal, from a town of around fifty thousand, beat Manchester United in a marathon penalty shootout in 2021 for the club's first major trophy. Atalanta's 2024 win ended Bayer Leverkusen's season-long unbeaten run in the final and was the Bergamo club's first European title. A year later, Tottenham ended a long wait for silverware by beating Manchester United in Bilbao — their first European trophy since the 1984 UEFA Cup.

How the stakes have changed

The winners list also reflects a competition whose value has grown. Since the 2014–15 season, the Europa League winner has earned automatic qualification for the following season's Champions League, turning the final into a direct gateway to Europe's top table. That rule visibly changed how seriously elite clubs treat the knockout rounds, and several recent winners — Sevilla in 2020, Villarreal in 2021, Atalanta in 2024 — used the title as their route into the Champions League.

It is also why the roll of honour gets consulted so often: the list doubles as a record of which clubs converted a difficult European campaign into a place among the elite. Data platforms such as RubiScore keep this historical record alongside live coverage of the current competition, linking each season's fixtures, results, and statistics back to the full list of past winners, so the context behind every final is one lookup away.

Reading the list as one story

Fifty-four editions in, the Europa League winners list is less a trivia answer than a condensed history of European club football: English and German strength in the 1970s, Italian dominance in the 1990s, the eastward expansion of the 2000s, and Spanish — above all Sevillian — command of the modern game. Every May, one more line is added, and the season-by-season data behind each campaign, from group stage to final, is published on rubiscore.com as the next chapter gets written.