This was the first of two UEFA Cup conquests for Göteborg, which were the only major European titles achieved by Swedish teams. It was also the first Swedish team to play and win in a UEFA Cup final, while Hamburg went on to win the European Cup a year later. For the second and last time in UEFA Cup or UEFA Europa League history, both finalists won their national championship in the same season.
Association team allocation
A total of 64 teams from 32 UEFA member associations participate in the 1981–82 UEFA Cup. 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.
Association ranking
For the 1981–82 UEFA Cup, the associations are allocated places according to their 1980 UEFA country coefficients, which takes into account their performance in European competitions from 1975–76 to 1979–80.
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 the 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
Greece:AEK Athens finished second in the 1980–81 Alpha Ethniki, but couldn't qualify for the UEFA Cup due to a one year ban imposed in 1979, due to incidents in the locker room and the referees' room after a return game against Argeș Pitești in the first round of the 1979–80 European Cup. The ban was only due to be enacted on the first season where AEK would've qualified for European competition, having failed to do so the previous year after losing a play-off game that would've enable AEK to serve its penalty a year earlier. Therefore, the UEFA Cup place went to the 5th placed team, Panathinaikos.
Schedule
The schedule of the competition was as follows. Matches were scheduled for Wednesdays, though some matches exceptionally took place on Tuesdays, and two first round matches were held on Thursdays.
