Football League Super Cup

The six clubs invited to participate, and the European competitions they would have qualified for, were:

• Everton (Football League champions, European Cup)
• Manchester United (FA Cup winners, European Cup Winners' Cup)
• Norwich City (League Cup winners, UEFA Cup)
• Liverpool (UEFA Cup)
• Tottenham Hotspur (UEFA Cup)
• Southampton (UEFA Cup)

To create a sufficient number of games, the teams played each other home and away in two groups of three teams, with three points awarded for a win and one point for a draw, with the top two teams in each group advancing to the semi-finals. Both the semi-finals and the final were to be held over two legs, home and away, which was perhaps another factor which may have contributed to the competition's failure to attract much interest from the clubs participating, as the tournament did not offer the prospect of a day out at Wembley for the finalists.

Merseyside rivals Liverpool and Everton won through to the final, but with both these clubs being involved in a battle for the league championship and both of them also reaching the FA Cup final (as well as Liverpool being involved in the semi-finals of the Football League Cup), fixture congestion became a problem, with Liverpool's semi-final second leg having to be delayed until the final week of the season, two days before the FA Cup final. The English football season had to come to an end immediately following the FA Cup final due to the preparations for the imminent FIFA World Cup in Mexico (which many Everton and Liverpool players were to be involved in), which meant that there was no opportunity for the delayed Super Cup final to be played after the FA Cup final and that the Super Cup tournament could not be concluded before the 1985–86 season ended. The absence of any conclusion of the Super Cup before the season's end made the competition look even more farcical than before in the eyes of supporters and probably put paid to any possibility of a second Super Cup tournament being organised in the 1986–87 season, although the perceived failure of the inaugural competition and its unpopularity with the clubs made such an eventuality unlikely in any case (had the 1986–87 Super Cup been staged, it would have been contested by Liverpool, Everton, West Ham United, Manchester United, Sheffield Wednesday and Oxford United).

Ultimately the 1985–86 Super Cup final had to be held over until the following season and was finally played in September 1986, by which point the competition had finally attracted some sponsorship. Everton, however, fielded a virtual reserve team in the two-legged final (although they were in the middle of a genuine injury crisis) and Liverpool won the trophy 7–2 on aggregate. The games are only especially remembered for Ian Rush's impressive haul of five goals for Liverpool over the two games (although these goals are sometimes excluded from his official record-breaking Merseyside derby tally, probably due to them having been scored in a minor competition against what was largely an Everton reserve side) and for Kevin Sheedy's spectacular goal for Everton at Anfield, scored from a long-range free-kick at the Kop end (a feat he would repeat later in the season in a league derby match). Having lost the League and Cup double to Liverpool the previous May, Everton did not seem overly concerned at losing this lesser trophy to their local rivals, nor by the heavy defeat suffered by their makeshift side. In any case, later that season they managed to pip Liverpool to the League Championship.

The Super Cup was not seen as a success, as it was felt to be a very poor substitute for games against the best sides in Europe in prestigious UEFA competitions, with attendances at the matches generally being poor and with the clubs taking part apparently regarding the tournament as a little more than a pointless addition to the match calendar and a source of fixture congestion. Consequently, the Super Cup was abolished after only one season and it has not been held since. The competition is now largely forgotten, even on Merseyside, and the extent to which it is even remembered, is as a misguided, if well-intentioned, attempt by the Football League to offer some consolation to English clubs deprived of European football after the Heysel tragedy, a very difficult time for English football.

The Full Members' Cup, another Football League cup competition also launched in 1985 for similar reasons (to create additional competition, revenue and opportunity for silverware for English clubs, as well as a final at Wembley Stadium), fared marginally better and ran until 1992, often better remembered as the "ZDS Cup" due to that competition being sponsored by Zenith Data Systems. A similar competition to the Super Cup, the Mercantile Credit Centenary Trophy was played in the early weeks of 1988–89 to celebrate the league's 100th birthday between the top eight Football League teams from the previous season. The competition, played over three rounds on a knock-out basis, was won by Arsenal.

• The story of the Super Cup