UEFA today announced their new plans for the UEFA Women’s Champions League, the premier women’s club competiton in the world, going forward from the 2025/26 season.
After a meeting in Hamburg on Saturday, UEFA, the European governing body of soccer, said that “the UEFA Executive Committee approved a new format for the UEFA Women’s Champions League, consisting of an 18-team league phase with three home and three away matches followed by knockout rounds, and the creation of a second European competition for women’s clubs, with the changes becoming effective as of the 2025/26 season.”
The increase in the number of teams competing in the group stage from 2025 will be minimal, up to 18 clubs from the current 16. However, the composition of those teams will now weighted slightly more towards Europe’s strongest – and predominantly western – leagues.
This season, there was discontent that many of the biggest clubs in the women’s game missed out on a place in the group stage. Italian champions Juventus failed to come through the qualifying stage as did last season’s finalists, VfL Wolfsburg, and semi-finalists, Arsenal.
Of the 16 teams in the current group phase, 11 are domestic champions ensuring there is representation from 12 of the 55 nations in Europe. The two extra places in the new league system will go to non-champion teams as UEFA is guaranteeing a place for the runners-up of the top two ranked leagues (currently France and Germany) as well as maintaining five places for non-champions of other league who come through the qualification rounds.
Instead of playing three teams home and away during the autumn, teams will now face six different opponents once, either home and away, skewing the fairness of the competition. The 18 teams will be ranked in three seeding pots based on UEFA’s latest club-coefficient ranking and drawn to play two clubs from each pot during the league stage.
It is difficult to see any advantage to the new system. Teams will still have to play three matches at home and three matches away as in the current group phase so there is no more revenue to be generated. The league phase is still not decisive in itself as the teams will only progress to a knockout phase, beginning as now, with the quarter-final stage.
Those teams finishing in the top four of the new league stage will progress directly to the last eight. Those placed fifth to twelfth will play-off home and away to join them in the quarter-finals meaning they will have to go through an extra round to progress in the competition. The teams finishing 13th to 18th will be eliminated.
UEFA argue that “top teams will go head-to-head more often and earlier and all teams will have more competitive matches and a wide variety of opponents.” This remains to be seen.
Currently, the four teams in pot 1 of the group stage are all champions of their domestic leagues. Under the new format the pot 1 rankings would be based entirely on the coefficients, a weighted score based on the team’s past performance, which would inevitably, over time, favor the strongest teams, reducing the chances of new clubs breaking into the elite.
For those teams failing to come through the qualifying rounds of the UEFA Women’s Champions League, there is at least the potential parachute of going into a new second tier competition, mirroring the UEFA Europa League in the men’s game.
Runners-up in England last season, Manchester United were this season left with no European football after losing a tough qualifying tie against Paris Saint-Germain. Now they could drop into a new European competition which will be a straight knockout tournament featuring 64 teams. The winner of the competition will have the added incentive of jumping to a single play-off for a chance to make the league stage of the following season’s UEFA Women’s Champions League.
In a statement, UEFA declared that “a key goal of all stakeholders was to build a second competition that would allow more clubs to compete in Europe and provide further incentive for investment at domestic level.”
“UEFA has placed huge importance on developing women’s football in recent years, making enormous strides thanks to a dedicated strategy, solid investment and a passion to ensure the game is open to everybody,” said UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin.
“The new UEFA Women’s Champions League format and the introduction of a second competition are further demonstration of this commitment and both will be exciting, competitive competitions that allow more players and clubs across the continent to dream of European glory.”
UEFA will hope this new format will be attractive to broadcasters as they will need to secure a new deal to televise the competition from 2025. The current television contract for the competition with DAZN Group expires at the end of the 2024/25 season.
As part of their original four-year deal, DAZN had hoped to build up a sufficient subscriber base to enable them to put the majority of games this season behind a paywall. This has not proved to have been workable and DAZN recently conceded they would need to continue to make all matches available to stream for free on YouTube at some cost to themselves.