Women’s Champions League: Rangers face Arsenal, Celtic draw Kups

Rangers have been drawn against Arsenal in the first step in qualification for the group stage of next season’s Women’s Champions League.

The winners of that one-off tie will face either Atletico Madrid or Rosenborg BK of Norway in order to progress to the next stage.

SWPL champions Celtic take on Finnish side KuPS in their ‘champions path’ semi-final and will play the winners of the FC Gintra v Agarista tie to determine who moves on to the next round.

The s⁠emi-finals will be played on 4 September and the final three days later, with all the games being staged at one venue per group.

Arsenal will enjoy home advantage at Meadow Park, while Celtic’s games will be staged at Gintra’s home ground in Lithuania.

Manchester City, runners-up in the WSL last season, will enter qualification in round two while English champions Chelsea go straight into the group stage.

Arsenal – who finished third in last season’s Women’s Super league (WSL) – are one of the clubs Rangers manager Jo Potter played for during her career.

It will be Rangers’ second experience of European football, having played in the qualifying rounds in the 2022-23 season when they were edged out in the play-off stage against Benfica.

Round one is split into two paths, the ‘champions path’ – which has 11 groups and is the section Celtic are in – and the ‘league path’, which has four and is where Arsenal and Rangers feature.

Round one has two stages, making it effectively a mini-tournament, before some of the biggest names in the women’s game enter in round two.

Arsenal’s previous experience of Scottish opposition in the Women’s Champions League was a 6-2 win on aggregate against Glasgow City in 2013 while in other previous Anglo-Scottish ties, Glasgow City lost 4-0 over two legs against Chelsea in 2015.