Does shaking up the Women’s Champions League open the door to a Super League?

When you think of the Champions League, who comes to mind? Maybe Arsenal, Wolfsburg, Manchester United or Juventus? No disrespect, but it’s probably not Slavia Prague, Paris FC or St Polten, is it?

But it’s those three who will be in this season’s group stages because the bigger names were knocked out in qualifying.

So does the Women’s Champions League need a shake-up to make sure we’re seeing the best competition possible?

The Athletic’s women’s football reporter Charlotte Harpur and senior writer Michael Cox debated the topic on Full Time Europe, with Sophie Penney asking the questions.

Listen in full to the podcast or read the edited highlights below…

Sophie Penney: How did we get to a point where so many big teams didn’t make it through qualifying? Manchester United lost 4-2 on aggregate to Paris Saint-Germain and Marc Skinner said the format needed changing. “We want the best teams in the Champions League,” he said, “not just a spread of some average teams.”

Charlotte Harpur: We already knew this format needed tweaking, and Marc Skinner knew that going into the competition. Manchester United didn’t win and that’s what they needed to do to make the group stage. And what are the best teams? The best teams are the teams that win on the pitch.

He’s right to call for a change in the Champions League format but it doesn’t help when you lose a game. The way he did it, it just sounded like sour grapes.

Penney: Do you think there’s a kind of arrogance around the Women’s Super League, or do you think people are just thinking this because of the historical success of Manchester United’s men’s team?

Michael Cox: There probably is a little bit of arrogance about the WSL because it’s ahead of the other leagues from a commercial perspective and attendances are going up, but we haven’t yet seen English clubs really dominate Europe.

In terms of the quality and the strength of sides, that’s maybe something that English football needs to be aware of. You don’t have a god-given right to be in the Champions League.

There should be some tweaks and probably it would be good for the competition if fewer of the big guns were against each other in qualifying. But to come out with that when you have just lost a game was probably a little bit unwise.

Penney: Let’s pretend we’re in charge. How would we go about changing the Women’s Champions League?

Harpur: The obvious thing is just to expand it, do it like the men’s format. But do we have enough depth of quality in the women’s game to expand to 32 or even 36 teams? Of course, big teams, commercially speaking, gets more eyeballs on the product, which increases commercial deals, increases sponsorship deals and means higher attendances. But you have to do it incrementally.

GO DEEPER

The Women’s Champions League is set to change – but what are the options?

The crucial thing is competitive balance. If you get these big teams in, they’re going to get more money from the Champions League, which means you can invest in your coaching staff and your players so you become a stronger team domestically. But if only those teams are getting that Champions League revenue, you’re just going to destroy your domestic leagues because the gap is going to get even bigger and bigger and it’s going to be too predictable.

The other point is other markets: England. Spain, France, Germany. Look at France, for example: two big teams in Lyon and PSG, and Paris FC coming up. But the rest of the league is dwindling. UEFA has to decide its priorities. You’ve still got to grow the domestic markets of Austria or Romania or the Scandinavian countries or Bosnia. Otherwise, if you have too small a market of just those top four, you haven’t got a product.

Cox: It’s about trying to find the balance. You could say, ‘We’ll have a competition where there are 16 teams from 16 different countries’. And on the other end of the scale, you can say, ‘Let’s just have the best 16 teams in the competition’, in which case you probably only have five or six countries represented.

At the moment, it’s going to be 11 different nations represented in the 16, which in itself is great, but it does mean we end up with some uneven matches.

On the other hand, the men’s Champions League is a bit too far the other way because 16 of the 32 qualify automatically from the ‘big four’ leagues of England, Spain, Italy and Germany.

If we were having this discussion last week, I would have said to just expand it, but I hadn’t really considered the impact on the domestic leagues, and that is really important because a lot of these leagues are staggeringly unequal. So you’ve got to be really careful of just essentially giving more money to Arsenal and Manchester United, who can then strengthen their dominance over the rest.

So having read Charlotte’s article and the thoughts of people who warned against expansion, I’ve changed my mind. I would still tweak things — you can still change the qualification system.

Penney: Is the answer to change when qualification is? Because big clubs like Arsenal and Wolfsburg were missing players who were at the World Cup.

Harpur: Absolutely. The World Cup was played way too late this summer and there has to be more communication between the global governing body, FIFA, and the European governing body, UEFA. If you put the World Cup earlier, then you have that window for players to have their break and then go have some sort of a pre-season before they hit the qualification in the Champions League.

Penney: Anything else that needs to change?

Harpur: The coefficient is really interesting. And an algorithm that is very complicated! It’s based on the country’s club performance in Europe within the past five seasons. English clubs, for example, have been poor in Europe, so if you alter the coefficient system by weighing it in favour of the bigger domestic leagues such as France, Germany, Spain and England, then you get more of those teams in the group stages and into the competition for longer.

That needs to be looked at, given that it is so hard to win the Women’s Super League, but then difficult for a team that comes second or third, like Arsenal and Manchester United, to then reach the Champions League via qualifying.

Penney: What about a second-tier European competition, like the Europa League in the men’s game? Do you think that would work?

Cox: Potentially. If I was in charge and looking to introduce a second system, I’d probably try and format it completely differently and just have maybe a straight knockout or something like that because, for sides like Arsenal or Manchester United, the Europa League does feel almost like an inconvenience, which I know is a little bit harsh. And again, it’s their problem if they if they don’t beat the side to qualify for the Champions League. But at the moment, I’m just not sure there’s the depth and quality to justify that in the women’s game.

Harpur: There should definitely be a second-tier competition, not a carbon copy of the Europa League. There are several clubs that would benefit from playing in Europe — take Brighton or Aston Villa, for example. For the growth of the game, a second-tier competition is really, really important.

Cox: This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek idea, and I don’t think it would actually happen, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Arsenal and Wolfsburg could say, ‘Look, we played a game last year that attracted 60,000 people, why don’t we just set up our own mini-tournament and play it throughout the season?’

Obviously, this is not a 100 per cent serious suggestion, but this does feed into the idea that, if UEFA doesn’t organise a competition that satisfies the big guns, then you get a breakaway tournament. If there were no changes at all to the Champions League in the next 10 years, and every year we have an Arsenal or Wolfsburg being knocked out of the competition, then what happens? I think you have a Super League.

Penney: What do you think about the prospect of a Super League?

Harpur: Everyone mentions the Super League as it’s a taboo topic. Is it legally possible? Because there are questions regarding breaching of competition law. It has to have some sort of promotion and relegation. But then, if you have the best teams playing each other regularly, this enhances the visibility for the women’s game and makes a lot more money for the clubs involved. But then you just destroy your domestic leagues again.

Cox: I was probably the only journalist to write a broadly supportive article of a men’s Super League, because the men’s top flights are hideously uncompetitive, and I don’t really see the point in a league where, for example, Bayern Munich have won the league 11 years in a row. It makes more sense to group them with Juventus and PSG and the other ‘super clubs’. And, sadly, we’re in the same situation in the women’s game.

Take Barcelona: until May they had won 62 consecutive games in the Spanish league. I love watching Barcelona play but I’ve never watched a league game because I know there’s no jeopardy.

So I don’t like the fact that we might be in a situation where a Super League makes sense because I yearn for the days where you have competitive domestic leagues and then the teams come together for a few one-off games and that’s the Champions League.

But it just makes more sense, really, to have a Super League of 20 teams, the best ones in Europe. It can’t be a closed league — that would be my red line. But it would be a really good product and would take the women’s game to the next level.

Harpur: But then in 10 years, when you have such a disparity between teams, it’s like being on steroids and the difference is just so huge that there’s no point of return.

Cox: It is quite a grim prospect. But if you have a league where Barcelona wins every game, you end up with that situation anyway.

Harpur: If you were designing women’s football from scratch, you would want to maximise the jeopardy and the quality, and that would maybe be like a global setup between the best leagues. It’s very difficult to do that now, because you’ve got some teams that are linked to men’s clubs and others that are not. So you’re having to support the wide base of the pyramid, not everyone is starting from a level footing.

Penney: Well, we’ll see what UEFA change at the end of the 2024-25 season!

 (Top photo: Ibrahim Ezzat/NurPhoto via Getty Images)