In this article, I will try to give both a first historical sketch of the ESC as well as an analytical interpretation, placing it more deeply within the conceptual framework of Europeanization in sport. In order to do so, I will first briefly retrieve some basic aspects of the ESC in the next section. This seems necessary as an introduction since there exists virtually no scholarship about the ESC. In the following, I will then describe the development of the ESC during the 1970s and give a short review of its further development in the 1980s