Super Cup

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A Super Cup is a competition, usually but not exclusively in football, which often forms the curtain-raiser to a season. Most Super Cups are one-off fixtures between the League Champions and major Cup Winners of the previous season. Sometimes these are two-legged affairs, with a match played at each side's stadium, but increasingly they are one-off fixtures at a neutral venue. The name Super Cup suggests that the match ultimately decides the best team in the nation, but the League Champions are still considered Champions, regardless of who wins the Super Cup. Super Cups are not considered as important, more as prestige matches.

In football, most nations have a super cup:

• Albanian Supercup
• Algerian Super Cup
• Armenian Supercup
• Austrian Supercup
• Belgian Supercup
• Bulgarian Supercup
• Croatian Supercup
• Egyptian Super Cup
• LTV Super Cup
• Estonian SuperCup
• Trophée Des Champions
• FA Community Shield (formerly the Charity Shield)
• German Supercup (In 1997, this was superseded by a league cup called DFB Ligapokal.)
• Greek Super Cup
• Hungarian Super Cup
• Iranian Super Cup
• Football Association of Ireland Super Cup
• Supercoppa Italiana
• Japanese Super Cup
• Lebanese Super Cup
• Libyan SuperCup
• Lithuanian Supercup
• Malaysia Charity Shield
• Johan Cruijff-schaal
• Polish SuperCup
• SuperCup Cândido de Oliveira
• Romanian Super Cup
• Russian Super Cup
• San Marino Federal Trophy
• Singapore Charity Shield
• Korean Super Cup (defunct)
• Supercopa de España
• Supercupen
• Thailand Super Cup
• Turkish Super Cup
• Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kupası
• Ukrainian Super Cup
• USSR Super Cup
• Vietnamese Super Cup

Most of the continental football federations also have their own super cups:

• UEFA: European Super Cup
• AFC: Asian Super Cup (defunct),
• CAF: CAF Super Cup
• CONMEBOL: Recopa Sudamericana / Recopa Sul-Americana
  • (From 1988 to 1997 there was a competition called the Supercopa Sudamericana / Supercopa Sul-Americana. However, this took a different form to most Super Cups, featuring past winners of the Copa Libertadores.)
• The FIFA Club World Cup is effectively a global super cup, featuring the champions of each confederation.

Related

• The FIFA Confederations Cup can be considered a super cup of sorts, albeit contested between the national team winners of their respective confederation championships, the last FIFA World Cup champion and the host country of that year's tournament.

Other sports

• Spain also has a football-style Super Cup available for basketball.
• FIBA Europe SuperCup Women, contested between the winners of EuroLeague Women and EuroCup Women.
• IIHF Super Cup, a defunct ice hockey competition.
• The Super Powers Cup was an annual international rugby union competition contested by national teams from Canada, Japan, Russia and United States. In 2005, its name was changed to the Super Cup.
• The ADAC Supercup, commonly known as Supercup; a German sportscar racing series held between 1985 to 1989.
• Porsche Supercup, an international one make racing series for Porsche 911 Carreras