Farewell to the Women's Champion's League group stage. You won't be missed
Next season the UWCL will move to the Swiss model format. Max Radwan believes this could give the competition a new lease of life.
This week, women’s football says goodbye to the Women’s Champions League group stage.
The final round of games on Tuesday and Wednesday night includes some heavyweight match ups with Barcelona vs Manchester City, Arsenal vs Bayern Munich, and Real Madrid vs Chelsea all taking place. But, if you scratch beneath the surface of this final set of glamour ties you find something fairly hollow.
This is the final time the women’s competition will use its current format before it moves to the Swiss model that has made its debut in the men’s Champions League this season.
From the 2025-26 campaign, the UWCL should have more drama when the expanded league format arrives. The reason for this is simple - all eight of the quarter-final places have already been wrapped up ahead of the final games this week. Six of those were confirmed ahead of the penultimate match week. The group stage has been severely lacking any jeopardy.
Instead, the source of intrigue has come in the shape of anticipating who will take up the seeded spots in the quarter-final and potentially avoid a trickier draw in the process. Not that thrilling it has to be said.
All three of the aforementioned ties represent direct shootouts for top spot in their respective groups. The potential spanner in the works is whether Barcelona, currently unseeded as runners up, can overturn a two-goal aggregate deficit to topple Manchester City and reclaim top spot in Group D.
There are multiple factors to blame as to why such a gulf exists between the top eight teams and the bottom eight teams in this season's group stage. For a start, the brutal nature of the competition's qualifying structure means that top sides who could have caused something of a shakeup are not involved. Had the likes of PSG, Eintracht Frankfurt, Ajax and Paris FC been added to the mix, we may have seen more jostling for the top two spots in the group.
While Uefa's weighting towards the Champions path commendably ensures that a breadth of league champions (as the competition's name suggests) across the continent are represented, it does have an undeniable knock-on effect of increasing the quality-gap between the best and worst teams in the league.
This is the paradox of modern European football in both the men's and women's games. Increase the geographical spread of nations and you risk diluting the quality of the 'product'. Shut the sides from 'inferior' leagues out, and that quality gap is only going to increase. It is this top-down approach that has seen the men's game eat itself alive, and we are seeing its knock-on effects in the women's game. Barring the enduring efforts of legacy powerhouses like Lyon, Wolfsburg and Arsenal, the latter stages of the Women's Champions League are now dominated by modern 'superclubs' in the men's game – the last four winners of the men's Champions League are all represented in this year's women's quarter-final lineup.
On top of this, Women's Champions League quarter-final lineups have become increasingly predictable, with last season's underdog story that saw the likes of Brann, BK Hacken, Benfica and Ajax (who all failed to qualify for the competition this time around) being the exception that proves the rule. In various combinations, six out of eight of this seasons quarter-finalists also made the last eight between 2020-21 and 2022-23. Only Real Madrid and Manchester City have gone more than two seasons since their last appearance at this stage of the competition. This is reflective of the fact that only a sparse and inflexible pool of teams of have a genuine shot at European glory.
This theme of familiarity doesn't end at the quarter-final stage. Barcelona, Chelsea, Lyon and PSG have taken up 75% of the available semi-final places since 2020-21. PSG's failure to qualify this time around will at least offer a modicum of variety.
What about the final? Well, Barcelona are heavy favourites to claim a third title in a row (and a fourth in five seasons), and you have to go back a decade by the time this season's final rolls around to find the last time in which a team not called Barcelona or Lyon won the competition.
A change of format in 2025-26 is welcome: the race for the four automatic quarter-final spots under the new format will be the de-facto replacement for the race for top spot in the groups within the current format (ie the only competitive aspect of this season's competition). Sides that have been dead and buried with multiple match days to spare under the group stage format will have something to fight for in a league phase where teams finishing as low as 12th in an 18-team table will advance to a knockout playoff round.
The number of teams involved is also significant. The allocation of teams qualifying via the 'league path' will increase as a result of the extra two spots in the competition becoming available; meaning that the quality will be increased, not diluted. Unlike the 36-team men's competition, which feels utterly bloated, an 18-team competition should be more streamlined.
None of this is to say that a change of format in 2025-26 will act as a silver bullet. After all, those aforementioned structural inequalities that have seen predictable quarter-final, semi-final and final lineups all remain in place, and the competition structure itself remains un-altered from the current format from the quarter-final onwards. The major difference, then, is that the evolution of Women's Champions League will see the competition move from a format that has exacerbated these inequalities to one that minimises them.
In the meantime, sit back, relax, and enjoy the final set of Women's Champions League group stage matches – even if most of them don't really matter.
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