This season’s Champions League group stages will begin on Tuesday night. With it, the ongoing quest for an English team to win the competition for the first time since 2007 will restart, too.
Arsenal’s victory in Europe’s top club competition 17 years ago remains the only English success, and with every passing year the question looms larger: why do English teams struggle against Europe’s elite?
The Women’s Super League prides itself on being one of the foremost leagues in Europe, but the lack of Champions League success takes the shine off its supposed quality. Is that fair? Or is it just really hard to beat Barcelona?
One English team who have been consistently strong in Europe, though unable to win the Champions League, is Chelsea. They have reached at least the semi-final stage in five of the past seven years. On the last two of those occasions they lost against Barcelona, and they also lost to the Catalans in the 2021 final.
During that time, only Lyon have successfully stopped Barcelona winning the competition, beating them 3-1 in 2022 under current Chelsea manager Sonia Bompastor.
In both semi-finals, where were in 2022-23 and 2023-24, Chelsea lost 2-1 on aggregate, suggesting that the big gap in quality that was obvious in the 4-0 final loss in Gothenburg had been narrowed.
Manchester City men’s side have only won one Champions League title under Pep Guardiola but they are still rightly seen as one of the best teams in the world, if not the outright best. Success in cup competitions is not the only way of judging a side’s ability.
Yet Chelsea’s experience has shown the importance of getting reps in the latter stages of the competition. In their first Champions League semi-final in 2018, they were thrashed 5-1 on aggregate by Wolfsburg. The next year at the same stage, they lost 3-2 to eventual winners Lyon. It took Chelsea a number of meetings against Wolfsburg and Lyon to get the better of them, but they eventually knocked those teams out in the quarter-finals of 2020-21 and 2022-23 respectively.
The problem for English football is that Arsenal and Manchester City have not been able to be as consistent in the competition. Chelsea have had the advantage of qualifying automatically for the group stages as league winners, but Arsenal and City have both stuttered in the early stages.
That has limited their capacity to develop a squad that knows how to compete in the competition. City last participated in the UWCL in 2020-21, where they lost at the quarter-final stage to Barcelona. When they meet Barcelona again in their group stage opener this year, only four players remain from the squad that faced them last time (Chloe Kelly, Alex Greenwood, Laura Coombs and Jess Park).
Managers like Jonas Eidevall and Emma Hayes have criticised the WSL’s scheduling of matches and its impact on English teams competing in Europe. Chelsea’s weekend game against Manchester United was postponed after their group game against Real Madrid was scheduled to be played only 48 hours after.
Eidevall called the league “amateurish” in his press conference ahead of their weekend fixture against Everton, which they drew 0-0. “Out of the 16 teams (in the Champions League), 13 were scheduled to play on Friday and Saturday, but the three English teams on Sunday. It’s very important for the whole league that we are successful in Europe.”
The idea that the league should do more with scheduling is not a simple one. The WSL regularly has title challengers who are not participating in Europe — Manchester City last year, Manchester United the year before — and it is hard to imagine them accepting their rivals having their schedules massaged.
The issue is further complicated by the fact the WSL uniquely has a third cup competition with a group stage which limits the ability of lower placed teams to play on a Friday, for example.
The reality is the WSL is the most competitive league in Europe, regardless of Chelsea’s ability to repeatedly come through and win. Chelsea’s margins of victory over the past four years have been two points, one point, two points and goal difference.
Barcelona’s have been 25, 24, 10 and 15.
Lyon’s over the past three have been 11, six and 11.
English teams are forced to push until the end of the season in their league due to the relative strength of other sides, many of whom are not in Europe. This is not the case in other leagues which undoubtedly has an influence.
The hope will be that over time teams in England push each other to be strong enough to also win against the best in Europe. There is evidence that this has been happening over the years.
England are the only country to have had three different teams make the semi-finals of the Champions League since 2016-17 (Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal). That is a virtue in itself. The challenge now is to make that success consistent, and go one step further.
(Top photo: Chelsea lost in the semi-final to Barcelona last season; Naomi Baker/Getty Images)
