A village football team featuring four brothers, a one-armed striker, a bespectacled midfielder, two players over the age of 40 and a 15-year-old on the bench enjoy a fantastic run to a cup final, win it against the odds and earn a dream European tie against the competition holders. It reads like the premise for a particularly fanciful Roy of the Rovers cartoon-strip, but this outlandish story needs neither animators nor writers as it’s one that has been played out already, for real, by the tiny Luxembourg club of Jeunesse Hautcharage. Sometimes real life can truly be stranger than fiction.

The village of Hautcharage lies in the south west of the country and its population in the early 1970s numbered between 300 and 800 (depending on whether you go with the figures of German magazine Kicker or the Swiss magazine Sport of Zurich). Its local team, Jeunesse, played in the regional third division of the Luxembourg League and followed a strictly amateur policy in an era when the definition was fairly elastic. The players received neither payment nor bonuses; they washed and mended their own kits; and they usually arranged their own transport to away matches.

The four Welscher brothers who formed the core of the team represented something of a familial oddity, although it was Guy Thill – their striker born with only one arm – who provoked most curiosity. Hautcharage’s hotchpotch collection of misfits played in a local park, in front of attendances typically numbering a few dozen.

Having done extremely well just to reach the semi-final stage of the Luxembourg Cup in the 1970-71 season, Jeunesse Hautcharage faced a tough draw against newly crowned national champions Union Luxembourg. Union had been unbeaten domestically all season but were brushed aside by the third division no-hopers in a surprisingly one-sided match. Hautcharage became the first team from the third tier to reach the cup final, where Jeunesse Esch, another of the big guns of the Luxembourg game, would await them. Even the country’s grand duke, no great fan of the sport usually, was intrigued enough to attend this giants v minnows encounter.

Jeunesse Esch took the lead against the run of play in the first-half, but Hautcharage dominated the game throughout despite the loss of their best player, Rumelingen, to injury after just eight minutes. The centre-forward Klein scored a deserved equaliser for the outsiders after 73 minutes and, with the score still level at the final whistle, the match went to extra time.

Jeunesse Esch had five full Luxembourg internationals in their team but the Hautcharage players proved stronger and fitter. The favourites wilted and with their 41-year-old forward Kisch to the fore, Hautcharage scored three further goals to deservedly win what was the most unlikely Cup success in the grand duchy’s history.

The tiny village team had another reason for celebration as their promotion that same season to the second division allowed them entry into the following season’s Cup Winners’ Cup – Uefa did not permit teams from lower than the second tier of national Leagues to enter European competition. A glamorous draw against the holders, Chelsea, threw up all sorts of quandaries for the amateurs though. A trip to London was a benign draw geographically, yet the costs to transport and accommodate a party of at least 15 people anywhere were daunting for a club with barely any income.

Hautcharage seemed set to reluctantly withdraw from the competition until financial salvation arrived late in the day thanks to a brewery from the nearby town of Bascharage who offered to cover the expenses of the trip to London. Swept up in the wave of positivity surrounding the occasion, Hautcharage’s mayor offered the club a grant of £1,200 to pay for the installation of a temporary floodlight system for the home leg. A couple of the Hautcharage players were electricians by trade and performed the installation work themselves.

Reaction in England to these most unlikely of European interlopers ranged from respect to ridicule. Chelsea manager Dave Sexton adopted a diplomatic tone and told the Evening Standard that the club would send spies to compile a full dossier on their opponents – a comment that provoked some hilarity in Luxembourg.

By contrast, Tottenham Hotspur legend Danny Blanchflower was particularly mean-spirited when writing about Hautcharage. Over several dismissive articles he ridiculed the idea of four brothers playing in the same team – as if this was the most unlikely thing about the Luxembourg amateurs. Blanchflower’s argument that European competition was fundamentally weakened by the inclusion of such teams missed the whole point about the intended universality of the European club football ideal.

There was never any chance that Hautcharage would even come close to surprising a full-time, top division professional club from one of Europe’s major leagues and this tie was only ever about how wide the margin of victory might be. The Luxembourgers retained parity in their home leg for just two minutes before Peter Osgood was allowed time and space to bring down a cross and shoot past an exposed Lucien Fusilier in the Hautcharage goal.

With Chelsea scoring six by half time and Osgood completing his hat-trick, most of the second-half urgency was supplied by the brass band that played enthusiastically throughout to motivate the amateurs. The 8-0 final score was described by Nigel Clarke of the Mirror as “more of a massacre than a match”. Sexton continued to be scrupulously polite when stating that he was “pleased to have got eight goals away from home”.

The second leg at Stamford Bridge was an even more torrid affair for poor Hautcharage. Most of the Chelsea team seemed happy to play at training-ground pace with, unfortunately for the visitors, star striker Osgood the exception. Osgood had a particular motivation to do well – in 1962 Milan’s Brazilian striker José Altafini scored eight times in a European game, also against opposition from Luxembourg, and Osgood wanted to beat this record.

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Covering his bases, he had a side-bet of £5 with Chelsea goalkeeper Peter Bonetti that he would score at least a double hat-trick. Osgood started well, scoring twice within the opening six minutes, but by the final whistle he had netted just five of Chelsea’s goals in their 13-0 win. As if picking the ball out of the net 13 times was not enough for the Hautcharage keeper, poor Lucien Fusilier also needed three stitches in his head after coming off worst in a collision with Chelsea’s goal-chasing centre-forward.

The following morning the Mirror published the headline: “Chelsea goal kings of Europe” without the slightest hint of irony. Osgood had at least added a welcome note of positivity to European football’s biggest mismatch. Before the second-leg he had commented: “This match is basically just a canter for us, although we were impressed in Luxembourg by the ways the players stuck to their jobs and accepted the 8-0 thrashing with real dignity.” The 21-0 aggregate scoreline remains the joint largest in the history of European club competition and will surely never be surpassed. Yet it doesn’t do justice to the brave efforts of a Hautcharage team who were playing so far above their natural level.

A 1997 merger with local rivals Union Sportive Bascharage means you’ll not spot this tiny Luxembourg club on any league table today, and yet the unlikely name of Jeunesse Hautcharage will deservedly endure as one of European football’s finest examples of the against-all-odds story.

• This article appeared first on Beyond The Last Man

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• This article was amended on 1 December 2016. An earlier version referred to Luxembourg as a principality and its monarch as an archduke; it is a grand duchy, with a grand duke.