When UEFA reviewed the images of the celebrations of Greece winning the 2004 European Championship, perhaps the most stingy in history, it thought that things needed to be changed. The trophy that Theodoros Zagorakis, the captain, was holding up was lost among the confetti, the ribbons that adorned it and the arms that were raised in the background. That was how on July 4 at the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon the new cup began to take shape, which was inaugurated by Iker Casillas in Vienna in 2008 and which replaced the one that had been awarded since the first edition in 1960. Of the four editions with the new cup, two have been won by Spain, which is seeking its third in this cycle against England on Sunday.
Back in 2005, the commission landed in London, at the classic Asprey workshop, which has produced trophies for the Masters, the America’s Cup, the Ryder Cup and the Premier League, among many others. Karen Marsen, who worked on the redesign process, remembers it on a grey morning with fine rain in the studio in the Hammersmith district: “The brief was: we had to try to keep the silhouette,” she says. “It had quite a small base, so it wasn’t very stable. We made it taller, more elegant, we polished some elements that looked a bit rudimentary, to sharpen them and make the whole thing more modern. But it’s a fairly traditional shape, so it was really an update.”
The original was the brainchild of Henri Delaunay, who still lends his name to the piece, the first secretary of UEFA and inventor of the tournament, who, when he died in 1955, left his post and the mission of launching the championship and finding a trophy to his son, Pierre. That first cup was made by the Chobillon goldsmiths in Paris based on a design by Arthus-Bertrand. It weighed six kilos and measured 42 centimetres, with a small marble base on which the names of the champions were engraved. Now the base is wider and made of silver.
“They didn’t send us the original,” Marsden recalls. “They just gave us instructions, which is pretty normal for us. If they had said, ‘Can you make one like this? ’ Obviously then we would have said, ‘Can you lend us that? ’”
Then began a long period of drawings going from Asprey to UEFA and changes coming back from UEFA to Asprey. “You’re working with someone who has been tasked with sorting this out but who always needs approval from someone higher up, so they had meetings and it was change, change, change… Luckily we were already doing everything on a computer. They had a lot of discussions about what they wanted. I guess they wanted to keep enough of what was there before.”
The result was an eight-kilogram, 60-centimetre piece that they have only seen again on television. It is not always like this. That morning they had just received the Premier League trophy in the workshop, fresh from the Manchester City celebrations. This time it had not suffered too much: a small dent and one of the tips of the crown bent. There have been worse seasons, as Reece Barber, the manager, remembers: “I was watching the celebrations on TV, the cup was on a podium and Zinchenko knocked it over with his arm and I…”, he recalls, overwhelmed, about the celebrations for the 2019 title. “But they lifted it straight away and it was not as bad as I thought it would be.”
Asprey does not make replicas of the trophy ordered by the winners, although they did initially produce a smaller version, measuring 45 centimetres. The copies and repairs after the celebrations are handled by the artisans of the Iaco Group in their workshop in Vicenza, near Venice.
Since Casillas debuted the new Henri Delaunay in 2008, the names of the champions have been engraved on the back of the cup instead of the base. Spain appears there three times, Greece once and England none.
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