“We knew we wanted to use music, and everyone thought we should use Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions,’ but we really wanted something classical,” Thompson added.

Britten, who was working in film and television and writing commercial jingles, said he sent half a dozen snippets of classical pieces to the marketing executives to see what appealed to them. He was not surprised something operatic was chosen, he said, because the Three Tenors — Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti — were touring together and were popular at the time.

“But they also told me, ‘We don’t want just solos; we want something with a choir,’ ” Britten said. “So that’s what I did.”

The selection that TEAM asked Britten to work off was “Zadok the Priest,” one of four anthems written by Handel for the coronation of George II of Britain in 1727. Britten seized upon the rising string phase in the piece, infused it into his own composition and, in his words, “just got busy with it.”

For lyrics, he had been instructed to incorporate English, French and German — the official languages of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body — so he began by writing down a long list of superlatives and translating the words into the other languages to see which might work well together.

The chorus, which even casual fans may recognize because it is played continually on broadcasts of every Champions League game, is unforgettable: “The champions!” the choir sings, as if paying homage to some sort of heavenly body wearing shinguards.

There was a moment or two, however, in which “the champions” could have been something else. Britten said that other possibilities included “the greatest,” “the finest,” “the most exciting” and, in what he conceded was probably a stretch, “the most significant.”