English football's top two women's clubs could be forced to sit out a significant chunk of next season's Women's Super League campaign as a result of scheduling clashes with the newly planned Women's Club World Cup.
According to reporting, the inaugural edition of the tournament is expected to be staged in the United States, with proposed dates running from 5-30 January. Those dates overlap directly with the WSL calendar, raising the prospect that Arsenal and Chelsea could be absent from domestic football for as long as a month if they progress deep into the competition.
Arsenal have already secured their place in the tournament by virtue of winning the 2025 Champions League. Chelsea are expected to join them, though their qualification hinges on results elsewhere - should Manchester City lift this season's Champions League trophy, Chelsea would be squeezed out due to FIFA's plan to limit participation to two clubs per nation.
FIFA has not yet finalized the qualification criteria for the competition, but it is understood that UEFA will be allocated six slots overall - five automatic qualifiers plus one spot decided through a six-team play-in event. The automatic places are expected to go to Champions League winners from 2023 through 2027, a group that currently includes two-time champions Barcelona and Arsenal, with this season's eventual winner also securing a berth. The remaining positions would be filled based on UEFA's Champions League coefficient rankings.
Chelsea currently sit third in that coefficient table for the ongoing four-year cycle, trailing only Barcelona and Lyon, and hold a commanding 17-point advantage over fourth-placed Bayern Munich - a gap considered insurmountable. Bayern and Wolfsburg are next in the queue, although Wolfsburg's failure to reach this season's Champions League means they won't add further points, potentially allowing Real Madrid or Paris Saint-Germain to leapfrog them.
For English football specifically, an extended run by Arsenal and Chelsea in the new tournament would force them to miss up to four rounds of WSL fixtures, along with the fourth round of the FA Cup. That would create significant fixture pile-ups later in the season as both clubs attempt to reschedule postponed matches.
The WSL said it had not yet been formally briefed on FIFA's plans for the tournament and therefore declined to comment directly. However, sources close to the league acknowledged that the disruption is likely to be considerable, affecting multiple rounds of matches across the competition.
Complicating matters further is the WSL's existing winter break, currently scheduled for 21 December to 10 January this season. While there is some flexibility to shift those dates, aligning the break with the Club World Cup window has been deemed impractical given how congested the calendar already is. Attempting to do so would also create a fixture backlog just as the Champions League knockout rounds begin in early February.
Fixture congestion has become an increasingly pressing issue across women's football, and the problem is expected to intensify further in 2028, when the Olympic football tournament in Los Angeles will take place in August - directly before the start of the European season. Unlike the men's Olympic competition, which restricts squads to under-23 players plus three overage exceptions, the women's tournament allows full senior international squads to compete, with the Games expanding to 16 nations for that edition.
The introduction of the Club World Cup into an already packed women's football calendar has added fuel to broader complaints about FIFA's scheduling practices. Earlier this year, the lobby group European Leagues extended an existing legal complaint to the European Commission, accusing football's governing body of an "abuse of power and dominant position" - a complaint that now also encompasses the women's game.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.