UEFA Women’s Champions League Final To Be Played In San Sebastian

Despite the fact that Europe’s top women’s soccer leagues, with the exception of the Frauen Bundesliga, have ended without coming to a conclusion on the field, the final stages of UEFA’s Women’s Champions League, postponed indefinitely the week before the quarter-finals were due to be played in March, will be played out in August in northern Spain.

Commenting on the decision to restart the European club season UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said “it is of the utmost importance for us to complete our men’s and women’s competitions whenever possible. Particularly with the Women’s Champions League, it was important to send a strong signal that it is possible to complete this season, in a time where women’s sports have suffered substantially”.

Instead of the two-leg home and away matches which has become a staple of the European club season, the quarter and semi-finals will be played as one-off games on neutral territory. Together with the final, which was due to be played at Viola Park in Vienna in May, the remaining seven matches of the competition to find Europe’s best club side will now take place in the Basque Country of in the cities of Bilbao and San Sebastián. It is unclear whether spectators will be allowed to attend the matches. UEFA said they “will be regularly assessing the situation across the continent and will liaise with local authorities to see when spectators could gradually return”.

Unlike in the men’s Champions League, the future host venues for the final will be not be pushed back a year to allow Vienna to host next year’s final. Gothenburg, Turin and Eindhoven will still stage the finals in 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively as originally planned. Over 12,000 tickets had been sold for this year’s final, they will now be refunded by the Austrian FA (ÖFB). President Leo Windtner said “it is of course a shame that the 2020 UEFA Women’s Champions League Final cannot be held in Vienna’s Viola Park as planned. The ÖFB organization team and the FK Austria Vienna did extensive preparatory work and the anticipation for this highlight in European club football was great. Women’s football is still high on the ÖFB’s agenda. We will continue to strive to bring a major football event to Austria in the coming years, which can be carried out under the current infrastructural conditions”.

The decision to base the final stages of the tournament in Spain seems designed to minimize travelling for the eight teams left in the competition who are all from Western Europe – two each from France, Germany and Spain and one each from England and Scotland. Of those, only FC Bayern and VfL Wolfsburg are currently playing competitive matches but with the Frauen Bundesliga set to finish at the end of this month, the Champions League is now set to be a pre-season tournament rather than the glorious denouement of the European season.

Following a video-conference earlier today, the UEFA Executive Committee decided that the four quarter-final ties will be played on 21 and 22 August, before semi-finals on 25 and 26 August and the final on Sunday 30 August at the 39,500-capacity Anoeta stadium in San Sebastián. A draw will be made on Friday 26 June to determine the order of the matches. Next season’s competition has been pushed back a month to accommodate the delayed finish to this year’s tournament.

In accordance with the temporary change to the Laws of the Game enacted to protect the well-being of overworked players, a maximum of five substitutions will be allowed for the remainder of this year’s competition reverting back to three next season. Teams will be allowed to register three new players into their Champions League squads for the remainder of the season provided they were already at the club before the last deadline on 18 March 2020. UEFA confirmed that “it will not be possible for clubs to register newly-transferred players”.

Reigning European champions Olympique Lyonnais have won the competition for the last four seasons, an unprecedented feat in women’s football. They have not lost any Champions League tie away from home in seven years. Should they retain their title in August, they will equal the all-time European club record of Real Madrid’s men’s team who won five European Cups in a row between 1956 and 1960.