Women’s Champions League draw: Chelsea face Manchester City, Arsenal play Madrid | OneFootball

Chelsea will meet Manchester City in an all-English Women’s Champions League quarter-final, while Arsenal will take on Real Madrid.

The holders, Barcelona, will face Wolfsburg in a repeat of the 2023 final, and the winner of that tie will face Chelsea or City in the semi-finals, putting Barça, the favourites and Spanish league leaders, and Chelsea, the English league leaders, in the same half of the draw.

The Group C winners Arsenal, who secured England’s only women’s European title in 2007, will face opponents who were runners-up to Chelsea in Group B, and whichever side progress will meet Bayern Munich or Lyon.

The draw means Chelsea and City are set to meet in at least four consecutive matches in March. They will first go head-to-head in 15 March’s League Cup final, before the first leg of their European quarter-final on 18-19 March. They then meet in the Women’s Super League on Sunday 23 March, before the second leg of their quarter-final on 26-27 March, concluding a run of four fixtures in a maximum of 13 days.Before all that, they could theoretically meet in the quarter-finals of the Women’s FA Cup on the weekend of 8-9 March – if they win their fifth-round ties this Sunday and are drawn to face one another.

City knew that having finished second in their group behind Barcelona, the defending champions, they had a two-in-three chance of being pitted against an English side. Unable to face Barcelona again, they could only meet one of the other three group winners: Arsenal, Chelsea and Lyon.

Lyon have won a record eight Women’s Champions League titles but Barcelona have dominated the competition since 2021, lifting the trophy in three of the past four seasons

Barcelona knocked Chelsea out in the semi-finals of the past two campaigns, dashing Emma Hayes’s dreams of lifting the trophy before she left Chelsea for the United States. Her successor, Sonia Bompastor, was a beaten finalist with Lyon last term but won the title with the French club as a manager in 2022

The final will be held in Lisbon on Saturday 24 May at the approximately 50,000-seat Estádio José Alvalade.

The quarter-finals will be played over two legs on 18-19 March and 26-27 March, with the group winners at home for the second legs. The two-leg semi-finals are scheduled to be held on the weekends of 19-20 April and 26-27 April.

Header image: [Photograph: Andrew Couldridge/Action Images/Reuters]