The group was founded on 9 July 1980, a year after the Parliament's first direct elections, by nine cross-party MEPs including Altiero Spinelli.
The meeting was held at the "Au Crocodile" restaurant (10 rue de l'Outre, Strasbourg) giving the club its name.
Within a year it grew to one hundred and eighty, almost half the members of the Parliament.
[1] It was on the initiative of the club that Parliament established a new committee to deal with institutional reform of the then European Economic Community.
[1][2] Following the death of Spinelli in 1986, a group of MEPs established the "Altiero Spinelli action Committee for European Union", a federalist intergroup intended to take on the work started in 1980 by the Crocodile Club.