Neutral Venues, Jeopardy and Chaos – Welcome to the Women's Champions League First-Qualifying Round
Last week's UEFA Men's Champions League draw provided European football's governing body with the opportunity to show off their shiny (and complicated) new toy – a brand new league phase as part of a major shakeup to the most popular club competition in world football. In an explainer on their website, UEFA trotted out all the marketing spiel you'd expect: clubs testing themselves against a wider range of opponents, more drama, more jeopardy. The irony here is that all of these buzzwords could be applied equally to UEFA's very own sister competition, with the qualifying rounds of the Women's Champions League getting underway this week.
As is the general way of things in women's football, competitions tend to be smaller in scale than their men's football equivalents; the WSL boasts 12 teams to the Premier League's 20, the Women's World Cup has just expanded to 32 teams while the men's competition will increase to 48, and the Women's Champions League group stage features just 16 teams, less than half of the number that make up the brand-new league-phase on the men's side. As a result, the qualifying section boasts a number of giants of the women's game year-on-year, ensuring, a streamlined, jeopardy-laden, and at times bonkers process before the real thing even begins in earnest.
As mentioned, the partial cause of this is a simple numbers issue, four teams qualify automatically – going straight into pot one, leaving 68 teams battling it out for just 12 available group-stage spots. This doesn’t tell the full story however, as qualifying is split into two sections: the champions path and the league path. Seven spots are taken up by those competing in the champions path, leaving just five spots available to those in the league path. The champions of associations one through to four (France, Spain, Germany, England) all qualify automatically, but league path qualifying is ultimately oversubscribed with second and third-placed teams from the big four leagues (from France, Spain, Germany and England alone, eight teams will compete for five spots), ensuring that big name scalps in qualifying are practically guaranteed.
Meanwhile in the champions path, seven teams from outside the top four associations will progress to the group stage. I am not here to debate the merits of the champions path to league path ratio, but the chaos and jeopardy produced by this format cannot be denied. Teams to have fallen at the qualifying hurdle in recent seasons have included: Manchester City x2, Arsenal, Manchester United, Levante x2, Real Sociedad, Wolfsburg, Eintracht Frankfurt, Paris FC x2, Ajax, and Juventus. At the time of writing, Atletico Madrid and Frankfurt have already been knocked out at the first-qualifying round semi-final stage.
It is not just the high concentration of strong teams and lack of spots in the competition proper that make the qualifying path a treacherous one. Another problem for teams navigating this stage can be found in its logistics. For teams following the traditional women's football calendar in Europe, the scheduling of the first qualifying round means that competitive matches essentially subsume latter pre-season. Even though Arsenal's 24/25 WSL campaign does not get underway until September 22, they will not play a single pre-season friendly in the month of September because of their participation in the early stages of this season's UWCL. Instead; they have built their pre-season around these qualifiers, going on tour to the US in mid-August to play friendlies against high-quality opposition in order to get themselves up to speed before returning to the UK at the end of the month. It is widely accepted that the club were under-prepared for competitive football when they crashed out at this stage of the competition last season – they had returned to training just three days before facing Linkoping in Sweden on a plastic pitch, a game they won before crashing out to Paris FC on penalties three days later.
Further pitfalls arise in how the games are played. Cramming in a mini-tournament with the purpose of eliminating 12 teams from 16 in the league path tells us that expedience was at the top of the list of UEFA's priorities when drawing up this phase of the competition. Because of this truncated process, games are played a centralised venue, with one of the competing clubs assigned as a host. This also acts as a way to minimise travel costs for competing clubs involved, with each travelling club guaranteed to play two matches at the same venue (the losing semi-finalists compete in third-place match for coefficient ranking points). The end result of this is a much more precarious state of affairs for competing clubs in comparison to what teams will face in the second qualifying round, where the traditional home/away two-legged ties come into play. When Paris FC eliminated Arsenal last season, the match was played on a plastic pitch in Sweden. In 2021, the gunners had to travel to Moscow to navigate matches against Okzhetpes and PSV. One top of this, all matches are played over a single leg. One mistake or bad decision could end your European campaign before it's begun.
You can almost see David's eyes increasingly light up at the prospect of playing the proverbial Goliath as the words "lack of pre-season", "neutral venue" and "single leg knockout match" are uttered. In some ways, the first qualifying round gives a good idea of what you would get if the Champions League decided to merge with the FA Cup. In some cases, it is not even an underdog that will cause an upset at this stage, as the teams from the big five leagues can meet as early this first-qualifying round. While a seeding system is in place, the inclusion of two-seeded teams per-mini tournament ensures that the two best ranked sides involved in the first qualifying round could meet at such an early stage. For example, Arsenal and Atletico Madrid – the two best ranked teams in the first qualifying round per their coefficient score, were drawn together in the same mini-tournament and would have locked horns in today's final were it not for the Madrid side's shock elimination at the hands of Rosenborg on penalties in Wednesday's semi-final.
In many ways, the first qualifying round is a more daunting assignment for some teams than the second qualifying round or even the group stage – where seeding advantage counts for more and the immediate jeopardy of being knocked out in an isolated 90 or 120 minutes isn't present. To some, the oddity that is this stage of the competition is a source of frustration. There is an argument that creating an environment where some of the biggest prospective names in a competition face a significant challenge to even qualify is a form of self-sabotage, but equally, this makes the qualifiers thrilling in of themselves; arguably more so than the group stage itself. Next season will see the Women's Champions League restructured and expanded to 18 teams, and this will have knock-on effects on its qualifying mechanisms. The runners up from the top two ranked teams will now qualify automatically, effectively freeing up two more spots to be claimed by teams in the champions path (for example, PSG and Real Madrid would qualify automatically under the new rules).
While it is certainly unconventional, the opening stage of the Women's League brings without a mouth-watering level of jeopardy that the latter stages of the competition arguably lack. For that reason alone, it makes for compelling viewing.