Women’s Champions League playoffs to test WSL teams’ depth and new format’s value | OneFootball

The next phase of the new Women’s Champions League format gets under way on Wednesday and Thursday, when the four playoff first legs take place. Arsenal and Manchester United are among eight teams vying to join Barcelona, Lyon, Chelsea and Bayern Munich, who automatically qualified for the quarter-finals as the top four in the league phase.

As in the men’s competition, a switch from a group stage to the league format has been made. However, with the UWCL group stage having been introduced only for the 2021-22 season, there was scepticism about a change coming so soon, with the group stage viewed as a big step forward and in its relative infancy.

There are few surprises in the playoffs, given three of the four ties taking place this week and next bring together teams who met during the league phase, with four teams seeded and four teams unseeded for the draw, but the new format has yielded plenty of positives.

Statistically, its success is clear, with Uefa data showing a 27% rise in the number of matches decided by a single goal and a 16% increase in the number featuring goals from both teams compared with the same stage last season. The win rate for the team who scored first is down from 88% to 61% and the lowest-ranked teams in the league phase took an average of 1.1 points a game compared with 0.6 last season.

OH Leuven’s midfielder Julie Biesmans spoke of the significance of the format for lower-ranked sides. “For teams like us the new format is really interesting, because you play against different opponents, and mostly, when there is a group stage, you already kind of know who is going to finish first or second,” she said. “This [format] gave us a bigger chance to actually go through, and that’s what happened, even if we didn’t think about it, we didn’t dream about it.”

The league phase went to the wire, with seven of the nine games in the final round having some form of jeopardy. The audience has grown, with cumulative live viewership reaching 13.5 million, a figure reached only during the final between Arsenal and Barcelona last season.

Statistics don’t always present the truest picture but they help shape it, and come the end of the competition we will be able to reflect on the season of change and draw conclusions about how successful the switch to the format deemed best for the men’s game has been.

On Wednesday, Arsenal play at Leuven, the competition’s lowest-ranked remaining side, with Renée Slegers’s team hoping to replicate the performance that yielded a 3-0 win away to the Belgian side in December. Arsenal are coming out of an intense period, with wins against Chelsea and Manchester City sandwiching their Champions Cup victory. They have weathered the impact of high-intensity games in quick succession and, in theory, beating Leuven should be straightforward. However, Leuven’s record in the league phase demonstrates their potential threat, with Arno Van den Abbeel’s team beating Twente and securing draws against Paris FC, Roma and Paris Saint-Germain.

Later on Wednesday, Real Madrid host Paris FC, the Spanish side having had to rely on a Caroline Weir goal in the eighth minute of added time to cancel out Lorena Azzaro’s first-half penalty when the teams met in November.

On Thursday Wolfsburg play Juventus in the only new tie. The Italian side sit third in Serie A, a point behind Inter but six behind the leaders, Roma, but have strung together five back-to-back wins in all competitions since their loss to Inter on 18 January. Wolfsburg have had their 2026 interrupted by postponements owing to poor pitch conditions and have played only one game, a 2-1 win over Köln, since beating Hamburg on 21 December.

Manchester United travel to the Spanish capital for a second meeting with Atlético Madrid on the same night, Fridolina Rolfö’s goal having been the difference in a tight encounter in Madrid in October. Marc Skinner’s side were forced to work hard to earn their 2-0 win over Leicester on Saturday and Thursday kickstarts a fierce run of fixtures, with London City Lionesses their opposition between the two legs against Atlético, after which they face back-to-back games against Chelsea, in the fifth round of the FA Cup and League Cup final, to test the strength and depth of their squad.

The playoffs add games that many teams – the Women’s Super League clubs in particular – could probably do without but will they add more exciting data points and present some interesting games before the tastier quarter-finals? We will see.

Header image: [Photograph: Omar Havana/AP]