In February 1958, Manchester United suffered one of the grimmest fates ever to befall a sports team. Eight of the club’s players were killed in an accident at Munich-Riem Airport in West Germany.

Old Trafford rears above the surrounding buildings like a monument to commercialism. Every match brings more than 76,000 fans to the home of Manchester United, the dominant team in world football's most popular league. Some 12,000 of them sit behind one goal in the East Stand – also home to the Manchester United Megastore, a 1,600 square metre jungle of red shirts, scarves, posters and merchandise operated by Nike, the club’s commercial partner. Images and advertisements for Nike products regularly adorn the stand’s tinted glass exterior.

A few moments’ walk from the Megastore doors is the corner of the stadium where the East and South Stands meet. On the curved wall is a clock, with the date permanently set to ‘Feb 6th 1958.’ That was the day, to quote the International Herald Tribune, when ‘time stopped for Manchester United.’ The loss of eight of the club’s playing staff was described by The Times newspaper the next day as ‘the blackest hand yet set upon football in these islands.’

It came in a year that had started off so brightly for Manchester United’s young stars, nicknamed the Busby Babes after their inspirational coach. When Matt Busby had been appointed manager of Manchester United in 1945, the club did not even have a home ground; Old Trafford had been reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. In little over a decade, he had overseen its reconstruction, while at the same time building perhaps the finest team ever to play soccer. United had an average age of just 21 when they captured the 1956 league title. They retained it in 1957, and paid back Aston Villa, the side who beat them in the 1957 FA Cup final, with a 4-0 thrashing in the opening match of the following campaign.

All the talk in English soccer was that the Busby Babes’ 1957/58 season could be the greatest of all time. It is easy to understand why. The team included names like Bobby Charlton, who would go on to play more than 100 games for England and be his country’s greatest-ever goal scorer, and Duncan Edwards, who had caught Busby’s eye at the age of 12, made his debut at 16 and won the first of his England caps just months after his 18th birthday. “In the character and spirit of Duncan Edwards, I saw the true revival of British football,” said the England coach Walter Winterbottom later. Edwards and Charlton had even managed to retain their places in the United team while on National Service. They were stationed together in Shropshire, 70 miles from Manchester, and travelled to Old Trafford at weekends to play key roles in the side’s league championship victories.

But for all United’s domestic success, Busby’s dream was to win the European Cup - the precursor to the modern-day Uefa Champions League – which had been launched in the 1955/56 season. The first competition had been captured by Real Madrid, a club already well on the way to establishing itself as Europe’s dominant force. Busby, a visionary, knew that United needed to enter the European Cup to have any hope of creating a similar legend. The 1955 English champions, Chelsea, had been barred from doing so by the Football League, which deemed it a meaningless distraction; a similar error of judgment to the one that saw England refuse to enter the three Fifa World Cups prior to World War II. Perhaps mindful of that mistake, the Football Association chairman, Stanley Rous, supported Busby as he defied the league and entered his team in the second season of the competition. They were knocked out by Real Madrid who would go on to retain the trophy, but United’s league title win of 1957 secured their place in the following season’s competition, and their dominance of English soccer guaranteed their position as one of the favourites to win it.

The early rounds of the competition did little to dispel that notion. Irish champions Shamrock Rovers and Dukla Prague of Czechoslovakia were dismissed as the Busby Babes marched to a quarter-final clash with Red Star Belgrade. The Yugoslavian champions were beaten 2-1 at Old Trafford, with goals from Charlton and wing-half Eddie Colman. The second leg was to be played three weeks later in Belgrade. If that had been United’s only priority, tragedy might have been averted. But as January turned to February, the team were chasing leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers in an effort to capture what would be their third consecutive league title – a feat no club had accomplished in more than 20 years – and the European campaign was taking its toll.

United had been using scheduled airline services to avoid the fatigue of long journeys by road, rail or sea. However, their return journey from Prague in the previous round had been beset by problems. Fog over England forced the aeroplane carrying the team to Manchester to divert to Amsterdam. There was a real fear United would be unable to return home in time to fulfill their next league fixture, an away game against Birmingham City – a mistake that would almost certainly have seen points docked from the side and a significant weight added to the argument that English clubs had no business getting mixed up in foreign soccer. Eventually the club secretary, Walter Crickmer, managed to book passage on a ferry that brought the team to Harwich, in the south-east of England, in the early hours of the morning. From there, the players travelled north for their clash with Birmingham, but their problems were only just beginning. Despite scoring three goals, the effects of the grueling journey were undeniable. United slumped to a 3-3 draw. To compound the problem, Wolverhampton Wanderers defeated Preston North End 2-1 just a few miles down the road. The victory moved Wolves eight points clear at the top of the table.

Determined to avoid similar problems in the quarter-final, United chartered a plane through British European Airways from Manchester to Belgrade for the second leg. It was an extravagant move, but one that Busby and his colleagues deemed necessary if the club was to continue challenging both at home and abroad.

No-one knew at the time that Manchester United’s clash with Arsenal on February 1st would be the last time that the majority of the Busby Babes would play a game on British soil. If ever a match could have stood up to such a billing, though, this was it. Arsenal had been the last team to win three league titles in a row, in the 1930s, and the Gunners were determined to stop United from matching the achievement. One of the most thrilling games in either club’s history ended in a 5-4 victory for Busby’s young stars. Charlton and Edwards both found the net in a victory that kept their dreams of a third consecutive league title alive.

Shortly afterwards, United undertook the first stage of the 2,000-mile round trip to eastern Europe, arriving in Belgrade in good time to prepare for their match with Red Star. It looked, in every way, to be the perfect smash-and-grab mission behind the Iron Curtain; Busby’s side took the lead through Dennis Viollet after just two minutes, before Charlton scored two goals just seconds apart at the half-hour mark. Red Star were shell-shocked. Though the Yugoslavs fought back in the second half, a 3-3 draw was enough to take the Busby Babes into the semi-finals. Before that, according to the plan, the team would return to England and reassert its dominance over the domestic league.