United Women to learn European opponents

Marc Skinner’s Reds qualified for European club football’s premier competition by finishing the previous Women’s Super League campaign inside the top three, for the second time in the team’s seven-year history.

United now have continental football to look forward to in the upcoming season and will find out our first opponents once the second qualifying-round draw starts at approximately 13:00 BST.

The first qualifying round is set to be plotted out an hour earlier at UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, although this has no bearing on United at this stage, as it only involves clubs from the ‘champions path’.

We are in the ‘league path’ and the 15 teams that make up the second qualifying-round in this half of the competition – eight seeded and seven unseeded, determined by the club coefficient rankings – are already known. They are as follows…

POT ONE: SEEDED

1 Roma (Italy)
2 Sparta Prague (Czech Republic)
3 Brann (Norway)
4 UNITED (ENGLAND)
5 Valur (Iceland)
6 FC Minsk (Belarus)
7 Glasgow City (Scotland)
8 Hammarby (Sweden)

POT TWO: UNSEEDED

9 Internazionale (Italy)
10 Metalist Kharkiv (Ukraine)
11 Sporting Braga (Portugal)
12 PSV Eindhoven (Netherlands)
13 Austria Vienna (Austria)
14 Nordsjaelland (Denmark)
15 Aktobe (Kazakhstan)

This stage will be played in the form of multiple-team mini-tournaments, with the clubs set to be drawn into groups. There will be three sections of four and one group of three.

Within the four-team groups, participants will be separated into two semi-final ties, to be played over single legs and hosted by a pot-one team.

This means should United be drawn into one of the four-team groups, we will have a last-four clash at home to one of the unseeded sides from pot two.

However, the Reds could also go into the three-team group. This will include two clubs from pot one, with the highest-ranked side in the coefficient standings advancing straight to the final.

The other outfit from the top pot will host a semi-final against an unseeded side from the second pot, for the right to face the team with the bye in the final.

As the fourth seed of eight from pot one, United are eligible to go straight to the final if we are drawn into the three-team group – for this to happen, we would need to be joined by either Valur, FC Minsk, Glasgow City or Hammarb, as they have a lower coefficient than us.

The semi-finals are set to be played on Wednesday 27 August, although losing this fixture would not end our European journey for 2025/26 after one match.

Teams that lose the last-four clashes in the four-team groups will go into a third-place play-off with their group’s other semi-final loser, while the club defeated in the semi-final of the three-team group will automatically finish third in their pool.

All third-placed sides will go into the new Women’s Europa Cup, a knockout competition freshly created by UEFA for the upcoming campaign.