Real Madrid 2002

Coach: Vicente del Bosque

Real Madrid won the Champions League in the club's centenary year, 2001-02, beating Bayer Leverkusen 2-1 in the final at Hampden Park in Glasgow, sealed by one of the most celebrated goals in the competition's history: Zinedine Zidane's left-footed volley, controlling Roberto Carlos's looping cross on the run before striking it cleanly and emphatically into the top corner from the edge of the penalty area. Zidane had arrived the previous summer as the world's most expensive player, the first major signing of club president Florentino Pérez's Galácticos policy, and this goal — still replayed regularly as one of the greatest in football history — instantly justified the enormous outlay. Raúl, Luís Figo and a defence built around Iker Casillas, remarkably young at the time but already first-choice goalkeeper, completed a squad that represented the opening statement of Real Madrid's new era of assembling a global superstar at every position. Winning the trophy in the exact year of the club's hundredth anniversary added a symbolic, almost storybook quality to the achievement, and Zidane's volley remains, for many observers, the single greatest individual goal ever scored in a Champions League final.