This was the first final and win in the UEFA Cup by an Italian team since Juventus in 1977, starting a successful era for Italian teams who went on to win six UEFA Cup titles in a seven-year period. This was the fourth season in which all English clubs were banned from European football competitions
Association team allocation
A total of 64 teams from 30 UEFA member associations participated in the 1988–89 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.
Due to the ongoing English ban, their two births were allocated to associations 10–11, each gaining a third birth.
Association ranking
For the 1988–89 UEFA Cup, the associations are allocated places according to their 1987 UEFA country coefficients, which takes into account their performance in European competitions from 1982–83 to 1986–87.
Albania: For unknown reasons, Albania elected to withdraw their UEFA Cup slot. Labinoti, the third placed team in the 1987–88 Albanian National Championship, would have qualified for the UEFA Cup. As per the regulations, title holders not already qualified for European competition had the priority for a vacant place, and it was awarded to Bayer Leverkusen, who had finished eighth in the 1987–88 Bundesliga, giving West Germany a fifth entry.
England: Since the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, 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 the first two years of the ban had been tabulated, England fell down to ninth in the UEFA rankings, which reduced the number of re-allocated UEFA Cup births for 1988–89 to two. These were transferred as a third birth for associations 10 and 11, namely Yugoslavia and Sweden. Tottenham Hotspur would have qualified by league position, while Luton Town would have qualified as League Cup winners. Had England retained four European places, Nottingham Forest and Everton would have also qualified.
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
The schedule of the competition was as follows. Matches were scheduled for Wednesdays, except for the first leg of the quarter-finals, which was held on a Tuesday.
The match was briefly interrupted for an intervention by the fire brigade due to Partizan fans starting a large fire at the stadium's east stand by burning the high jump sponge mat. Furthermore, Roma captain Giuseppe Giannini got hit in the head with a coin thrown from the stands as Partizan fans pelted the pitch with missiles following one of the Roma goals. In addition to the SFr200,000 monetary fine, UEFA punished Partizan with a one-match stadium ban, enforced for their 1989–90 Cup Winners' Cupfirst round tie versus Celtic.[3]