Real Madrid became the first club to successfully defend the UEFA Cup, a feat that would only be repeated by Sevilla in two different occasions during the 21st century, both in the UEFA Cup (2006 and 2007) and its successor UEFA Europa League (2014 and 2015). In the former Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, the unofficial predecessor of the UEFA Cup, it was only achieved by a representative team of the city of Barcelona (1958 and 1960) and by Valencia (1963 and 1964), both also fellow Spanish squads.
It was the first season in which English clubs were serving an indefinite ban from European football competitions due to the Heysel Stadium disaster, which would last for five seasons before being lifted for the 1990–91 season.
Association team allocation
A total of 64 teams from 31 UEFA member associations participated in the 1985–86 UEFA Cup, all entering from the first round over six knock-out rounds. The association ranking based on the UEFA country coefficients is used to determine the number of participating teams for each association:
Associations 1–3 each have four teams qualify.
Associations 4–8 each have three teams qualify.
Associations 9–21 each have two teams qualify.
Associations 22–32 each have one team qualify.
Following the English ban, their four births were redistributed among associations 9–12, each gaining a third birth.
Association ranking
For the 1985–86 UEFA Cup, the associations are allocated places according to their 1984 UEFA country coefficients, which takes into account their performance in European competitions from 1979–80 to 1983–84.
England: Due to the Heysel Stadium disaster, all English football clubs were placed under an indefinite ban by Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) from all European competitions, which would be lifted in 1990–91. As a result, each of their four allocated UEFA Cup births for 1985–86 were transferred as a third birth for associations 9–12, namely the Soviet Union, France, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. Two-time UEFA Cup winners Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, as well as Southampton and Norwich City had qualified for the tournament prior to the ban.
Wales: There was no national league in Wales before 1992 and the only competition organised by the Football Association of Wales was the Welsh Cup so Wales had just a single participant in European competitions, the winner (or best placed Welsh team as several English teams also competed) of the Welsh Cup which competed in the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup. Its virtual ranking is only an original research, because the UEFA country ranking was only used to allocate the UEFA Cup spots at time, so Wales was not included.
Teams
The labels in parentheses show how each team qualified for competition:
TH: Title holders
CW: Cup winners
CR: Cup runners-up
LC: League Cup winners
2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc.: League position
P-W: End-of-season European competition play-offs winners
Bulgaria: The top two teams of the 1984-85 A Group season, Levski Sofia and CSKA Sofia, were disbanded by the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and refounded, after a number of violent incidents on the pitch during the 1985 Bulgarian Cup final. Trakia Plovdiv, which would have qualified for the UEFA Cup along CSKA Sofia, was awarded with the title and competed at the European Cup. Therefore, the UEFA Cup places went to Lokomotiv Sofia and Pirin Blagoevgrad, which had initially finished the season in 4th and 5th place. The decision regarding league placements was eventually reversed in 1990.
Schedule
The schedule of the competition was as follows. Matches were scheduled for Wednesdays, though some matches exceptionally took place on Tuesdays or Thursdays. In a departure from previous editions, both semi-finals were played in different days, and the two-legged final was held on consecutive weeks, with the second leg being played on a Tuesday.
Following the referee's controversial decision to award Waregem a penalty in the 44th minute as the foul looked to be outside of the penalty area, Milan fans pelted the pitch with missiles some of which hit several Waregem players. Following the match, as a result of the incident, AC Milan received a two-match European competition stadium ban, enforced at the start of their 1987–88 UEFA Cup campaign. Waregem won 3–2 on aggregate.
