ThreeMatchBan
Away from local rivalries and county cup ties, some club names carry a long way. They ring out across a country, across Europe and, in a few cases, across the world. Domestic success, decades of continental football and some very clever marketing to new audiences in Asia and North America have turned many of them into global brands.
Every one of the thirty-three teams in this quiz has won at least five domestic league titles and has played in Europe's premier club competition, either the old European Cup or the Champions League that replaced it in 1992. Their shirts are below, with the badges covered. That leaves colour, cut, pattern and the occasional sponsor, which should be enough. It often is not.
What makes a European giant
Size is partly about trophies and partly about memory. The European Cup began in 1955–56, and Real Madrid won the first five finals in a row, which set a standard nobody has really matched since. In 1967 Celtic became the first British winners, beating Inter 2–1 in Lisbon with a side drawn almost entirely from around Glasgow; the club's crest and its evolution are covered in the Celtic badge history.
A club does not need a European trophy to be a giant, though. Some of the names here have dominated their own leagues for a century and rarely gone past the quarter-finals abroad. Others won a European Cup in a golden spell and have spent the decades since trying to get back. The five-title threshold keeps the list honest: one-season wonders do not qualify.
Geography plays its part. Several countries have one dominant club and a cluster of challengers, so the clubs that qualify include famous names from Portugal, the Netherlands, Scotland and beyond, alongside the obvious heavyweights of Spain, Italy, Germany and England.
Shirts that became symbols
Big clubs guard their colours carefully. Stripes stay stripes and the shade of red rarely wanders far. That consistency is what turned certain shirts into symbols, recognisable on a beach in Thailand or a market in Lagos without a badge in sight.
The exceptions are what make this quiz awkward. Away kits from the 1990s were a free-for-all, and even the most traditional clubs signed off designs they would rather forget: pastel shades, abstract prints and collars with laces. Some European giants also changed kit makers so often that their shirts from neighbouring seasons look like they belong to different clubs.
A sponsor can give the game away almost as quickly as a crest. Some electronics firms, brewers and car makers stayed on one club's shirt for so long in the 1980s and 1990s that their names worked as a second badge, and a sharp eye will spot them.
Every shirt in the set can still be tracked down in a vast online wardrobe here. Fair warning: browsing it after a few correct answers is an expensive habit.
How to play
Under each shirt is an answer box. Type the club's name and the box turns green as soon as it matches, while the score counter at the top adds a point. There is no sign-up and no deadline.
Use full names. Manchester United rather than Man Utd, and Bayern Munich in its usual English form. Short forms and nicknames will not be accepted, just as Queens Park Rangers would be fine but QPR would not.
When the giants are done, try the Champions League shirt quiz, which includes a few clubs who only passed through the group stage, or the UEFA Cup and Europa League finalists for the midweek nights. Country kits get the same treatment in the European Championship shirt quiz, from the 1980s classics to the strangest away designs. Think a friend would struggle once the badges are gone? Tweet it to them and find out.
Real Madrid, for the record, played the first of those five straight European Cup finals in all white, and the shirt has barely changed since.