The league phase of a new Women’s Champions League campaign begins on Tuesday, and for once the field looks genuinely open. Barcelona arrive as holders and winners of four titles in six years, a side that has reached six European finals in a row, but they do so with a noticeably different squad after a summer of significant change.
Four of the players who started Barcelona’s victory in last season’s final have left the club. Ona Batlle joined Arsenal, Salma Paralluelo signed for OL Lyonnes – the team she scored twice against in the 4-0 win that clinched the title in May – and Alexia Putellas and Mapi León both moved to London City Lionesses. Barcelona are still the team to beat and retain an excellent squad, among them Aitana Bonmatí, the winner of the last three Ballons d’Or, who is doubtful for Wednesday’s opener against Paris FC with injury. Ewa Pajor, the competition’s top scorer last season with 11 goals, two of them in the final, and the captain Patri Guijarro also remain. Yet the air of invincibility that accompanied them in Oslo has been altered.
Hoping to take advantage are OL Lyonnes, the record eight-time winners who have not lifted the trophy since 2022. They had a comparatively good transfer window, bringing in Paralluelo, who scored her first goal for the club on Friday in an 8-1 demolition of Le Havre, and the Scotland midfielder Caroline Weir, who arrived after four years at Real Madrid. Success would be a defining achievement for the owner Michele Kang, who also owns Washington Spirit and London City Lionesses, and for the head coach Jonatan Giráldez, who could win the competition with a second club after back-to-back successes with Barcelona in 2023 and 2024.
Bayern Munich should be in contention, along with a trio of English sides – Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City – all of whom have the squads and resources to mount significant challenges. Arsenal, winners in 2025 and in 2007 when the competition was known as the Women’s Cup, remain the only English club to have won major European silverware, a record that sits oddly with the modern spending and international standing of the WSL. They strengthened the depth of their squad this summer, not least with the arrivals of Georgia Stanway from Bayern and Batlle from Barcelona, and an ability to introduce top-level internationals from the bench in almost every position should make them a real force.
Manchester City, the English domestic champions, reached the quarter-finals in 2025 but missed out last season and have something of a point to prove. They were absent from Europe in 2023-24, failed to get past the qualifying rounds in 2021-22 and 2022-23 – knocked out by Real Madrid on both occasions – and were also eliminated relatively early by Atlético Madrid in 2018-19 and 2019-20. They have not reached the semi-finals since 2017-18, a barren run that seemed unlikely at the time. They were delighted to retain Khadija Shaw, the WSL’s top scorer, and their campaign begins with a tricky away test at Bayern. Chelsea, finalists only once when they were beaten by Barcelona in 2021, would love to return to the top stage in May, when the final is being held at Poland’s national stadium in Warsaw.
Elsewhere, Real Madrid boosted their attacking ranks with the signing of Felicia Schröder, the breakthrough player of last season’s inaugural Women’s Europa Cup, from the Swedish champions Häcken, and open their campaign at home against Paris Saint-Germain. Wolfsburg are absent from the league phase, their run of 14 successive years – which at one point included 11 quarter-finals in a row – ended in shock fashion when they lost to Inter on penalties in qualifying. Inter are one of three Italian sides in the league phase, the first time so many from Serie A have made it this far, and they and Austria Wien are debutants at this stage.
The 18-team league phase runs until 16 December. The top four progress directly to the quarter-finals in March, while the teams ranked between fifth and 12th will contest a knockout-phase playoff in February.