The 2024/25 Champions League quarterfinals are officially set, with UEFA drawing the remaining eight teams into the field early Friday morning.

The annual season-long competition pits Europe's top leagues against each other. This season, 72 clubs across 50 different leagues qualified for the contest. From the UK to Ukraine, all teams have been vying for the continent's top-dog status amidst a cutthroat atmosphere and a growing sense of parity in the sport.

Two qualifying rounds narrowed the initial teams down to the 16 contending in the tournament's official group stage. Each played six group-stage matches from October through December to determine the eight clubs that advanced to Friday's final draw.

A screen shows the 2024/25 UEFA Champions League quarterfinal pairings at Friday's draw.
Four previous champions made the 2024/25 Champions League quarterfinals. (Kristian Skeie - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

The road to Champions League glory in Lisbon

All remaining clubs are now eyeing the May 24th final in Lisbon, Portugal, and Friday's draw mapped each team's path to that championship match. The 2024/25 quarterfinals will feature four former champions and four seeking a first-ever trophy, with both familiar fights and rarely tested toss-ups on deck.

Both the March quarterfinals and April semifinals employ a two-leg format, offering teams who suffer narrow first losses a shot at second-match redemption.

Friday's draw determined that WSL contenders Arsenal will kick off the tournament's quarterfinals against Real Madrid on March 18th, with Germany's Bayern Munich taking on France's 2024 UWCL runners-up Olympique Lyonnais shortly afterwards.

The following day, Bayern's Frauen-Bundesliga foes Wolfsburg will face Spain's 2024 UWCL champs FC Barcelona. Closing out the initial tilts is a WSL standoff between Manchester City and the UK league's undefeated titans Chelsea FC.

Lyon's Michele Kang, president of the winningest Champions League team in history, speaks to the media after Friday's UEFA draw.
Backed by club president Michele Kang, Lyon will seek its record ninth UWCL title this year. (Kristian Skeie - UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

Increased global parity to test UWCL dynasties

With eight of the tournament's 23 titles under their belts, Lyon is the winningest team in UWCL history. Meanwhile, current back-to-back champions Barcelona claimed three of the last four trophies.

Despite the recent two-team domination, capturing this season's title will be a challenge. Hoping to spoil Lyon's and Barcelona's dynastic runs is four first-time title-hunters, plus two-time winners Wolfsburg and early champion Arsenal — who won the trophy in 2007, when the tournament was called the UEFA Women's Cup.

All in all, the European crown has never been tougher to claim, with leagues across the continent increasingly stocking up on standout — and potentially game-changing — players from beyond their borders.

Some of the NWSL's brightest stars made headlines this week, as the league's free agency transfer window continues to turn heads both at home and abroad.

Brazil forward Kerolin is officially departing North Carolina after spending all three of her NWSL seasons with the Courage, the club confirmed on Wednesday. The 2023 NWSL MVP will reportedly head to the WSL's Manchester City in a deal extending through 2028.

Sources are also linking two-time NWSL Defender of the Year Naomi Girma to the first $1 million transfer offer in women's soccer history, courtesy of French side Lyon and UK titans Chelsea and Arsenal. The 24-year-old USWNT star's current contract with the San Diego Wave runs through 2026, making a transfer fee a necessary part of any earlier deal.

The current record for a women's soccer transfer fee is $860,000, which Bay FC shelled out to receive Zambian forward Rachael Kundananji from Spain's Madrid CFF in February 2024.

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More NWSL teams make moves to lock down contracts

NWSL preseason has already started for select clubs, with teams putting the final touches on solidifying both their rosters and front offices.

Angel City hired former Portland Thorns FC and Washington Spirit head coach Mark Parsons as the club's new sporting director on Wednesday. The franchise is still searching for a permanent head coach after parting with boss Becki Tweed in December.

The 2022 expansion team also signed veteran forward Christen Press to a new one-year contract, per a Friday morning press release.

Meanwhile, with Girma's possible departure dominating the rumor mill, the Wave announced the addition of 17-year-old UNC defender and 2024 College Cup champion Trinity Armstrong to the club's ranks on Thursday.

Though Girma's fate is yet to be confirmed, San Diego's decision to pick up a talented young center back — on a three-year contract, no less — supports the theory that the USWNT standout is on the move.

Spanning 72 teams from 50 European leagues, the deepest Champions League tournament in UEFA history starts tomorrow with clubs from the UK to Georgia eyeing Lisbon's late-May final.

Four teams gained automatic entry to October's 16-team group stage — defending UEFA champs FC Barcelona and runners-up Lyon, plus top German finishers FC Bayern and WSL title-holders Chelsea — with this month's qualifiers determining the remaining 12.

Lyon's Lindsey Horan kicks the ball in last season's UWCL final
Lindsey Horan and 2023-24 runners-up Lyon take aim at a ninth UWCL title this season. (Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images)

The road to the Champions League group stage

There are two qualifying rounds played concurrently between two sets of teams: The champions path matches up winners from each non-automatically qualified league, while the league path does the same with second- and third-place finishers.

Each path opens with a series of four-team, single-elimination mini-tournaments, in which 59 clubs will enter Wednesday's semifinals with just 15 moving on from Saturday's finals.

Those 15 will join runners-up from top leagues France, Germany, Spain, England, Italy, and Sweden for Round 2 later this month, all vying for a spot in group stage play.

Paris FC's Thea Greboval and Arsenal's Alessia Russo battle for the ball
Last year, Paris FC snapped Arsenal's 16-season UWCL quarterfinal streak. (David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

Top European clubs battle for Champions League glory

Set to square off against Denmark's FC Nordsjælland tomorrow, Portuguese powerhouse SL Benfica has made the group stage every year since the 2021-22 season.

WSL favorites Arsenal saw their 16-season UWCL quarterfinal streak snapped by Paris FC last year, so they'll be hungry for redemption when they face Scotland’s Rangers FC tomorrow. If victorious, they'll be set to face the winner of tomorrow's match between 2024 Women's Cup runners-up Atlético de Madrid and Norway's Rosenborg on Saturday.

Also brewing tomorrow is a battle of the underdogs between Finnish side KuPS Kuopio and Scottish third-place finishers Celtic.

How to watch UEFA Champions League matches

Champions League action kicks off tomorrow at 5 AM ET, with live streaming coverage exclusively on DAZN.

Barcelona was crowned champion of the Champions League on Saturday with a 2-0 win over Lyon in Bilbao.

Alexia "La Reina" Putellas, who recently re-signed with Barcelona, came off the bench to score the team's second goal. Fellow Ballon d’Or winner Aitana Bonmatí provided the team’s first. After the game, defender Lucy Bronze said Putellas was nicknamed "the queen" for a reason.

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"Alexia is the captain of the team and she's the queen of Barcelona for a reason,"  defender Lucy Bronze told DAZN. "She's got the quality to do that in the last minute of the Champions League final when we were up against it at the end and it just sealed the win for us. It was amazing."

The victory marked Barcelona's first win over Lyon in a UWCL final, having previously gone up against the French side at both the 2019 and 2022 Champions League finals. It's also Barcelona's second Champions League title in a row.

"It's hard to win it once, but to do it back-to-back, Lyon showed how difficult it is and this team has finally done that," Bronze said. "I think we go down in history as one of the best teams in Europe."

This season, the team also secured a quadruple for the first time in club history, having already won Liga F, the Copa de la Reina, and the Spanish Supercopa. The win ensures that coach Jonatan Giráldez — who has officially departed the team to join the NWSL's Washington Spirit — leaves Europe a champion.

"It was an incredible game. I am really happy, it's one of the best days of my life for sure," Giráldez told broadcaster DAZN after the game. "We did an amazing job. I am very proud of all of them."

Following the win, Putellas said her team "can't ask for anything else."

"Our objective was to win four out of four," the Spain international told reporters. "We have achieved everything we wanted. Every minute of sacrifice has been worth the effort — and I'd say that not after the game, but before, just entering in the stadium, with all the support we had here, it was worth it."

2024 Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year Aitana Bonmatí said that the crowd support made it "feel like Camp Nou."

"I am on cloud nine right now," she said. "It is an historic day which we will remember forever."

The UEFA Women's Champions League final kicks off in Bilbao on Saturday, with a couple of familiar foes set to face off for the trophy.

Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, making its 11th final appearance since 2010, will go head to head with a Barcelona side making its fourth final appearance in a row.

This will be the third time these two teams meet in the UWCL title game, having previously appeared in the 2019 and 2022 finals. Lyon won both of those prior games against Barcelona, alongside a total of eight Champions League trophies. That’s double that of any other club, with Eintracht Frankfurt coming in a distant second with four. 

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Should Barcelona win, this would be the team's third title — breaking a tie for the third in the UWCL total titles race. 

But as these teams return to the UWCL final, it also marks the end of an era for both clubs. The game will be the last for both club managers, as Barcelona’s Jonatan Giráldez and Lyon’s Sonia Bompastor depart for new jobs after the season's end.

Giráldez is set to leave for the NWSL's Washington Spirit, while Bompastor will take over for incoming USWNT coach Emma Hayes at Chelsea. Both coaches have earned one UWCL trophy during their tenures, while Bompastor also brought two Champions League trophies to Lyon as a player. She was the first coach to win a UWCL trophy as both a coach and player.

This season, Barcelona is looking for its first quadruple, having won a fifth Liga F title alongside the Copa de La Reina, and the Spanish Supercopa. 

"We hope he can go out with the four trophies because we know how competitive and ambitious he is," Barcelona midfielder Patri Guijarro told ESPN. "It has been a winning era with him in charge and for him to go out with all four trophies would be historic and incredible."

But Lyon's Damaris Egurrola is excited about her team's chances of overcoming Barcelona once again — and to do it in front of family and friends.

"Lyon have something special," she told Forbes ahead of the weekend's final. "We have a great team and we have the players with enough talent to win any match."

The game will be a homecoming for Egurrola, who began her professional career with Athletic Bilbao.

"I’ve been thinking of this day and night," she said. "I’ve been dreaming of playing this match. Having the opportunity to play in San Mames is amazing. This is where it all started for me."

The UEFA Women's Champions League final kicks off Saturday, May 25th at 12 PM ET and is free to stream on DAZN.

U.S. women’s national team star and captain Lindsey Horan was sent off on Thursday in Lyon’s Champions League matchup against Brann, which ended in a 2-2 draw.

After colliding with Brann’s Karoline Haugland, Horan got into it with Haugland and the referee. Initially, the referee had shown a yellow card to Horan, but it was subsequently upgraded to a red card. The removal of Horan forced Lyon down to 10 players and Brann equalized in stoppage time to secure a point.

Lyon held a 2-0 lead at one point in the match and were up 2-1 at the time of Horan’s red card. The draw ended Lyon’s stellar start to the season, in which they won 15 consecutive games.

Following the match, Lyon manager Sonia Bompastor said the referee had misunderstood the situation, and who Horan was yelling at.

“[Horan] is fouled from behind, she is a player who suffers a lot of fouls, she has already had injuries due to these tackles from behind, she was scared,” Bompastor told reporters. “She said ‘my f—ing knee’ in English. The referee understood that she was talking to her, she thought Lindsay had insulted her.”

The game marked Horan’s first start for Lyon in just over three weeks. She had missed some time due to an ankle sprain, according to the club.

Olympique Lyonnais and U.S. women’s national team midfielder Lindsey Horan wants to see more of her U.S. teammates playing in international leagues.

Horan is one of just three current USWNT players outside of the NWSL, with Catarina Macario and Mia Fishel playing under new USWNT head coach Emma Hayes at Chelsea. Horan has played for Lyon since 2022 after joining the club on loan from the Portland Thorns. She also spent time with Paris Saint-Germain from 2012 to 2016.

The 29-year-old midfielder was the lone player on the USWNT’s World Cup roster who played for a European club, with the other 22 playing in the NWSL.

Macario used to play alongside Horan at Lyon before joining Chelsea in the offseason. Fishel, meanwhile, joined Chelsea from Liga MX’s Tigres. Several USWNT stars, including Alex Morgan, have played for European clubs in the past, and several players have expressed interest in moving abroad in the future, Horan told Pro Soccer Wire.

“I’ve heard of [American] players wanting to [move to Europe],” Horan said. “Obviously, it’s comfortable in the NWSL and I won’t take anything away from the league, but for me, [playing abroad] has always been a growing point in my career. When I went to PSG, it was massive for me and then coming back to Lyon was even a bigger jump. I get to play with some of the best international players in the world.”

For Horan, the opportunity to play in the UEFA Women’s Champions League is unlike anything available in the NWSL — though Gotham FC’s Esther González recently said that every NWSL game is at the level of the Champions League.

“It’s not a knock on the NWSL, but you’re just not going and playing in the Champions League,” Horan said. “That’s something that I missed out on when I was at Portland because it’s just insane.”

Players moving to European leagues could become more common under the newly-minted USWNT coach, as Hayes has spent 12 years with Chelsea.

“There is still a huge amount of talent in this U.S. team,” Hayes wrote in a column for The Telegraph during the World Cup. “But with so many of the squad playing solely in the NWSL, it doesn’t offer enough diversity to their squad in terms of playing against different styles.”

Horan would like to see more USWNT players expand their playing horizons.

“It’s just a different kind of exposure that you get, a different level that you get,” Horan said. “I really hope that there’s more, especially younger players, that want to go overseas.”

Lindsey Horan is excited about the investment Michele Kang could bring to Olympique Lyonnais.

Kang, who already owns the NWSL’s Washington Spirit, is set to become the majority owner of the Lyon women’s team. In an interview with Pro Soccer Wire, Horan said that she’s met Kang “many times” and called her “amazing.”

“And I think her aspirations and the things that she’s doing in the world are insane,” the Lyon midfielder said. “She’s not just saying things to say them, or to hope that it could happen, she’s going and making them happen. What she’ll do with Lyon is going to be absolutely incredible.”

As she prepares to take control of the club, Kang has been vocal about her goals, which include building the women’s team its own training center. Kang also is exploring the possibility of repurposing a local rugby venue as the team’s home stadium.

Not many women’s teams have their own training facilities or their own stadiums. The NWSL’s Kansas City Current opened their own training complex in 2022, and they are in the process of building the first women’s soccer-specific stadium.

“Our team isn’t just attached to the men’s team,” Horan told Pro Soccer Wire. “Our team is in itself its own. To see some of these teams around the world now having their own training facilities, having their own stadiums — that’s what they deserve.

“We women work just as hard and we’re professionals just as much as the men. So at least we should have our own training facility. We should have all access to the things that we need, that I’m pretty sure most men’s clubs get, and to have our own stadium would be incredible as well.”

Lyon is set to kick off the UEFA Champions League group stage at 3 p.m. ET Tuesday. The six-match group stage runs through the end of January, with 16 teams divided into four groups. Lyon is in Group B with Austria’s St. Pölten, Norway’s SK Brann and the Czech Republic’s SK Slavia Prague.

Lindsey Horan is the lone U.S. women’s national team player to receive a nomination for the 2023 Best FIFA Women’s Player award.

The 29-year-old co-captain scored two goals for the USWNT at the 2023 World Cup, tied with the team’s lone Ballon d’Or nominee Sophia Smith. No other U.S. player scored a goal at the tournament in Australia and New Zealand. Horan also starts in midfield for French club Lyon in Division 1 Féminine.

Alexia Putellas, who won the 2021 and 2022 Best Player awards, is notably absent from the 2023 list after spending the last year recovering from an ACL tear. Beth Mead and Alex Morgan, the runners-up for the 2022 award, also failed to make the cut. Mead has been out since December 2022 with an ACL tear.

World Cup champion Spain counted four nominees, including Aitana Bonmati, who won the Golden Ball at the World Cup, as well as Jenni Hermoso, Mapi Leon and Salma Paralluelo.

England tied Spain with four nominees, with Rachel Daly leading the way. Alex Greenwood, Lauren James and Keira Walsh also are nominated.

Australia star Sam Kerr received a nod, and she is joined by two fellow Matildas in Caitlin Foord and Mary Fowler. Colombia’s Linda Caicedo, France’s Kadidiatou Diani, Sweden’s Amanda Illestedt and Japan’s Hinata Miyazawa, the World Cup Golden Boot winner, round out the nominees.

Nominees for the Best Coach award include England’s Sarina Wiegman, who won the award last year, Australia’s Tony Guastavsson and Sweden’s Peter Gerhardsson. Two club coaches also received nominations: Chelsea’s Emma Hayes and FC Barcelona’s Jonatan Giráldez.

England’s Mary Earps is once again nominated for Best Goalkeeper and is looking to win the award in back-to-back years. She’s joined by Mackenzie Arnold (Australia), Ann-Katrin Berger (Germany), Christiane Endler (Chile), Zecira Musovic (Sweden), Catalina Coll (Spain) and Sandra Paños (Spain).

Washington Spirit owner Michele Kang has big goals for women’s soccer.

After acquiring a majority stake in the Spirit in 2022, Kang is set to take control of the Olympique Lyonnais women’s team within the next month. And she expects to add at least one more team to the fold by the end of the year, with the eventual goal to own at least one team on each continent, she told ESPN.

“Women’s soccer around the world needs investment,” Kang told ESPN. “It’s not just the U.S. For us to take women’s soccer to the next level — Europe, Asia, South America, Latin America — they all need to come up. I wanted to accelerate that trend.”

By focusing on women’s soccer teams as independent businesses, rather then sharing identities and operations with men’s teams, Kang believes she can change the game.

Take performance training. Kang wants her clubs to train “women as women,” tailoring programs to their physiology rather than copy-and-pasting approaches from men’s sports. Women’s soccer has seen an alarming number of injuries in the last year, particularly ACL tears, yet research specific to women athletes is rare.

Dawn Scott, who joined the Spirit last November as senior director of performance, has held similar positions with the U.S. and England women’s national teams. She raised the alarm over the lack of research soon after joining the Spirit, and she is leading a group of 14 employees with the Spirit to bring a fresh approach to the team.

Kang sees in Scott’s performance staff the potential for ideas and tools that could be shared across all the teams in her new women’s soccer organization.

“We’re going to create some sort of an innovation lab,” Kang said. “It’s going to be dedicated, the staff and everything else, toward the Spirit. To some extent, because we started (with) the Spirit, this is going to be where we start developing most of the things. All the methodology, training methodology, all that stuff will be shared. Staff will go back and forth and will train the trainers.

“Other teams will have their own team (of staff) and we will localize. We’re not just going to say one size fits all, but here is some basic science, basic technology, things that have worked. Let’s customize it to make it work. There are some differences in European-style football vs. American, so we’re going to customize the fundamental science, technology, research. It will be all shared and then we’ll figure out how to spread those methodologies so that everyone can benefit from what we are investing in.”

Kang also has plans to build training facilities. For Lyon, that means creating a facility dedicated to the women’s team to take the place of the current facility shared with the men’s team. For the Spirit, that will mean building a permanent training facility by 2025 or 2026, a luxury for a team that has spent years bouncing between venues.

“The idea is that the same design will be transported to Lyon for the women’s team,” Kang told ESPN. “Whatever team, we will clearly have to customize a little bit, but the idea is that level of training center, performance center is going to be made available for every team under our umbrella, so if you walk into Spirit or Lyon, the training center will look the same inside and they’ll have access to the best technology, best equipment, best medical care, nutrition.”

While Parsons told ESPN he is “100% all-in” on focusing on the Spirit, and that nothing will change with the new club being under shared ownership, he came on as coach with the knowledge of what Kang hoped to build.

“What Michele has also done is made clear that this isn’t just two clubs — there will be more clubs,” Parsons said. “I knew that before I joined — not which clubs and which countries, but this is the model, this is the vision.”

While certain best practices will be shared, each team will have its own identity.

“I want to make sure that each team is champion in its own country,” Kang said. “We’re not sacrificing one team for the benefit of another. We’re going to give everything and anything that each team needs to be successful. They’ll maintain their own identity, fandom — those are all very local, not central, or global.”