At first glance there may not appear to be much linking tonight’s Sky Bet Championship fixture between Brentford and Wolverhampton Wanderers at Griffin Park and the UEFA Champions League Last-16 tie between Arsenal and Barcelona taking place 13 miles away in North London. However the formation of Europe's premier club competition owes much to two former Bees who helped Wolves to become a dominant force in European football during the 1950s.

The years that followed the Second World War had been tough ones for Brentford. The 1946/47 season had seen Harry Curtis’ side drop out of the First Division after a five year stay and a series of mid-table finishes in the Second Division didn’t bode well for a quick return. By the start of the 1950s and with finances tight, manager Jackie Gibbons, was becoming ever-more reliant on youngsters to build his Brentford side around.

The 1950/51 season was no different as a 17-year-old Peter Broadbent was one of eight players with no previous Football League experience signed that summer. Having joined from Dover Athletic, midfielder Broadbent made his debut against Manchester City in October 1950. His stay in West London was a short one as after 16 appearances, and two goals, he became one of the most expensive 17-year-olds of the era when Wolves paid £10,000 for him in February 1951. A little over a year later and it was a similar story as 24-year-old Bill Slater also joined the Molineux club after just seven games for The Bees.

While relegation to Division Three South in 1954 and then Division Four in 1962 followed for Brentford, Slater and Broadbent became key players in one of English football’s most successful club sides. The duo helped Wolves to the Division One title in 1953/54, 1957/58 and 1958/59, finishing runners-up in 1954/55 and 1959/60, and the FA Cup title in 1960.

Sweeping almost all before them domestically in the mid-1950s and with the addition of Floodlights to Molineux in 1953, Stan Cullis’s side began to welcome high-profile continental sides to the Black Country for midweek friendlies. A South-African XI, Spartak Moscow and Racing Club of Argentina were all comprehensively beaten before Wolves hosted a Honvéd team that included many of the Hungarian National side which had beaten England 6-3 and 7-1 in the preceding year.  Wolves won the game 3–2, which led Cullis and the British press to proclaim them as "Champions of the World".

This boast irked French editor of L’Equipe Gabriel Hanot, who had long campaigned for a European-wide club tournament to determine who was the best on the continent, leading him to say: “Before we declare that Wolverhampton are invincible, let them go to Moscow and Budapest. And there are other internationally renowned clubs: Milan and Real Madrid to name but two. A club world championship, or at least a European one should be launched.” Hanot soon got his wish as the UEFA Congress of March 1955 approved the creation of a European Cup, which became the Champions League in 1992, to start the following season.

Wolves first entered the European Cup in 1958/59 but were knocked out 4-3 on aggregate by Schalke 04 in the First Round, Broadbent scoring twice in a 2-2 draw at home before a 2-1 loss in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. A year later Wolves made it all the way to the Quarter Finals, Broadbent again netting twice in the competition, before being thrashed 9-2 on aggregate by Barcelona. The Molineux side never again competed in the European Cup but did make the Cup Winners Cup Semi-Final in 1961 and the UEFA Cup Final in 1972.

As for Broadbent and Slater they both played in England’s 1958 World Cup campaign. By the time he left Wolves in 1965 Broadbent had scored 127 goals in 452 matches while Slater had played 310 times in Old Gold, scoring 24 goals, and was named the Football Writers’ Associations Footballer of the Year in 1960.

There have been some great matches under lights at Griffin Park in recent years and hopefully tonight will be another to add to the list. There's still time to join us this evening when we host Wolves as

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