Arsenal Women are champions of Europe (again).

Eighteen years after becoming the first English side to win the Champions League, they are now the first team to go all the way through the qualifying rounds to lift the trophy.

In a rollercoaster season that began with high-profile player departures, on-pitch frustrations and managerial changes, Renee Slegers leading Arsenal to the European summit feels nearly impossible. They beat perennial Champions League winners Barcelona 1-0 after despatching record-holders Olympique Lyonnais in the semi-finals.

But, hey, this is the year of the underdog, isn’t it?

When Arsenal’s Champions League campaign began in September, with a 6-0 qualification win over Rangers, Slegers was still part of then-head coach Jonas Eidevall’s backroom staff. She was an academy player at Arsenal when they last won the Champions League, and Eidevall brought her back to work as an individual development coach.

Slegers’ focus was on the micro, on getting more out of each player in their own right, but that soon turned to the macro of forming a competitive squad that could win on the big stage.

She has succeeded where others had previously failed and became the first Dutch coach to win the Women’s Champions League. But all those efforts that came before have helped Arsenal to this moment.

Slegers took over Arsenal in October and led the team to Champions League victory (Maja Hitij / Getty Images)

Gunning for Europe’s elite

Football can work in funny ways. Arsenal and Barcelona’s men’s teams faced each other in the 2006 Champions League final, but Barcelona have been a reference point for Arsenal’s women for some time.

After Arsenal’s five-year absence from the Champions League between 2014 and 2019, Barcelona were one of the sides they sought out for a pre-season friendly in summer 2019. Arsenal had qualified for next year’s edition by winning the 2018-19 Women’s Super League, while Barcelona had just finished as runners-up in the 2018-19 Champions League to Lyon. Arsenal also lined up pre-season friendlies with fellow European heavyweights Wolfsburg and Bayern Munich.

“It’s been done on purpose,” then-head coach Joe Montemurro said that summer. “We want to play against the best teams, and we can only know where we’re at by playing them.”

Arsenal lost against all three opponents by an aggregate score of 9-2 — they were defeated 5-2 by Barca — but their aspirations for growth both on and off the pitch were clear. Big European ties proved a big pull for fans at the Emirates: that friendly with Bayern on July 28, 2019, was the first women’s game played at the stadium in six years, with 28,000 supporters watching before the men played Lyon.

In 2019, Arsenal lined up friendlies against European giants to help raise their level (Alex Pantling / Getty Images)

Fast forward to the 2021-22 season, and after a year out of Europe because of a curtailed Covid-19 season, manager Eidevall was tasked with making Arsenal a bigger force in Europe. Again, it was Barcelona who represented another key checkpoint as Arsenal’s first opponents in that year’s group stage.

Coincidentally, current Arsenal midfielder Mariona Caldentey opened the scoring for Barcelona in a 4-1 away win, followed by a 4-0 win in the return fixture. The gulf was so apparent that it sparked something in Eidevall and his players that would accelerate their growth on the continent.

Eidevall’s quest for ‘space control’ and Slegers’ entertaining football

The Swedish coach’s main takeaway after his first experience of a Barcelona humbling was: “You can never defend one by one. You will always leave spaces, so it’s all about how you move as a unit. That the whole unit sees the same trigger, so everyone is moving at the same time. That’s almost the final level of defending, and we’re not there yet.”

He was right, Arsenal weren’t there yet. What was even more sobering was that for all Barcelona’s attacking talent, their extreme dominance came from exactly what Eidevall was speaking about. They smothered Arsenal at the Emirates in that 4-1 in the winter of 2021.

Yet, three years later, it was Arsenal who were the ones swarming Barcelona as they tried to play in the final at Lisbon. In a game where Slegers knew momentum would shift, she was brave in instructing her players to press high and unsettle their opponents.

The football Arsenal have played under Slegers since she replaced Eidevall in October has been much more fluid and free flowing, but the principles that came from their early Barcelona thrashings have been key.

Arsenal’s Alessia Russo is challenged by Irene Paredes (Maja Hitij / Getty Images)

Between those losses to Barcelona and a 1-1 quarter-final draw against Wolfsburg in his debut season in 2021-22, Eidevall said: “Space control and decision-making is very important when you play against teams (like this).”

He was happy that by the time the German side came to north London in March, Arsenal had gained more consistent control of matches. By the end of the season, he had identified a new method to improve that further: playing internal matches against Arsenal’s academy boys in the summer of 2022.

“That will decrease the time and space we have so that we have to improve our positioning and decision-making,” Eidevall said at the time.

The results of this could be seen in their early WSL dominance in the 2022-23 season (they won their first six games), but things were different in the Champions League. Caught out with a goal starting from a throw-in against Ajax in qualifying, it was a reminder that the work done that summer needed to be adhered to at all times.

By the time Arsenal faced Juventus — who were managed Montemurro — in the group stages, Eidevall felt “more comfortable” in Arsenal’s shape when defending and how they controlled games in Europe.

But these themes were lost as Eidevall’s time in north London came to an end, and it was not just the connections Slegers had built with players that allowed them to flourish after her appointment.

“Having the ball is very important but I don’t like us having the ball and not doing anything with it,” she told Ian Wright in January. “We want to have purpose with everything we do. It’s so important to entertain as well. Our football should be entertaining and winning.”

Slegers’ words proved true, manifesting in 14 games in which Arsenal scored at least four goals following her taking interim charge. It was a breath of fresh air after Arsenal’s play under Eidevall became too predictable.

The comeback queens

If wounded animals are the most dangerous, then that has certainly been the case with Arsenal in recent years.

This season, they became the first team to reach the final after losing the first leg of both the quarter- and semi-finals. Much of the resolve that made that possible has been built over years of hardship, with the injury crisis of the 2022-23 season the springboard.

They suffered four anterior cruciate ligament injuries that season, and still managed to come within minutes of a penalty shootout to reach a Champions League final. They lost to a 119th-minute goal of a sold-out semi-final against Wolfsburg, which could have broken some teams mentally. Instead, their whole path to that stage has been critical for their growth.

The real switch was flicked just before that year’s quarter-finals comeback win over Bayern Munich.

They had just won the League Cup final 3-1 against Chelsea after conceding in the first two minutes. It was their first trophy in four years and proved that the group was good enough to win together even amid an injury crisis.

Down 1-0 on aggregate to Bayern at the end of the month, captain Kim Little went off with a hamstring injury early in the second leg. Williamson stepped up into midfield, where she hadn’t played for a couple of years, and soon was involved in one of the best Arsenal goals ever scored at Emirates Stadium.

It was pure instinct after organised defending. Something had clicked.

“We were so clear in what we needed to do in that moment,” Williamson said after the game. “You owe it to somebody like Kim when they leave the pitch to put in a performance that we knew we had to. If you compare it to when (Vivianne Miedema) went down (with an ACL injury) against Lyon and we went so flat. I’ll be honest, it took the life out of the game for me (against Lyon). Tonight, we sort of used it to inject a bit as well.”

That night infused Arsenal’s DNA with something new. Even when all logic would say they should be down and out, they could always connect with a feral counter-strike. It was this that brought them back from 2-0 down in the first leg of their semi-final against Wolfsburg, but further ACL injuries to Williamson and Laura Wienroither left them too spread in extra time of the second leg.

The knack of coming back has stayed with Arsenal. Slegers is a different personality from Eidevall. Brought back to Arsenal by the Swede in 2023, she was a calmer presence. Her remit involved getting to know the players on a deeper level to help improve them. Those connections had already been built by the time Eidevall left in October 2024, so her moving into the head coach’s role only amplified her qualities.

Slegers’ emphasis on relationship building helped her find success quickly (Alex Pantling / Getty Images)

Williamson has spoken about how the 36-year-old coach has helped channel her emotions better, while Daphne van Domselaar has highlighted the trust that her calmness breeds in difficult situations. The standout moment for that came at half-time against Real Madrid earlier this year. Arsenal were 2-0 down on aggregate with 45 minutes left to play of the second leg. Instead of feeding into the chaos of the night, Slegers took the calm route, telling her players, “We’re so close, just tweak this and you’ll be fine. Believe in yourselves”.

Within a minute of the restart, Arsenal had scored, and 13 minutes later, they were 3-2 up on aggregate. In almost an identical situation to the Bayern game two years before, Williamson said before beating Madrid: “We’re very lucky because that stage isn’t foreign to us. Anybody who was involved in that game will take confidence from that, knowing that we know how to do it.”

In turning around these games, and the semi-final against Lyon, this group built even more European ‘football heritage’. Forced to react to unfortunate circumstances, they found something within themselves that they may not have been able to do had they taken a different path.

Even if they didn’t go behind against Barcelona in this year’s final, they were still made to suffer and dealt with serious periods of pressure. However, they had a serial cup final scorer in Stina Blackstenius off the bench to make the difference.

Level-raising recruitment

It was fitting that the ball fell to Caldentey deep in added time as Arsenal saw out their Champions League final win over Barcelona in Lisbon.

Their recruitment in the last two seasons has been aggressive, and she is the best example of that. Signed from Barcelona last summer, she joined having won 25 trophies in 10 years. That experience and know-how were on full display when she waited for two former Barca team-mates to engage her before shifting the ball from them to win a foul that almost guaranteed that she would be the one waving a Catalan flag after the full-time whistle.

Caldentey, signed from Barcelona last year, is a shining example of Arsenal’s recruitment (David Ramos / Getty Images)

Before Caldentey’s arrival, Alessia Russo, Laia Codina, Amanda Ilestedt, Cloe Lacasse and Kyra Cooney-Cross signed in the summer of 2023. Arsenal were building a squad with the aim of qualifying for the Champions League. But Arsenal failed to progress through qualifying in September 2023.

Even so, they signed American Emily Fox in January 2024 and followed that up with the arrivals of Van Domselaar and Caldentey in the summer. Upon signing, Van Domselaar told The Athletic that Arsenal’s 2022-23 run to the semi-finals was one reason for signing, as winning the Champions League was “her biggest dream ever”. 

The 25-year-old, as well as Russo and Caldentey, have had transformative effects on this Arsenal team this year.

Van Domselaar has been a level above Manuela Zinsberger in goal, making vital saves and complementing Arsenal’s in-possession style equally well. Her saves after quiet halves at home to Real Madrid ensured the game did not go to extra time. She made more passes than any Lyon player in the second leg of the semi-final win.

As for Russo, the Football Writers’ Association Player of the Year, her form transformed after the change in management early this season. She ended last season with a goal tally just four less than this year’s (16 compared to 20), but was nowhere near as effective. That came partly due to the juggling of minutes between herself, Blackstenius and Miedema.

That contrast was summed up in two moments earlier this season. On the opening day against Manchester City, she had a free run at goal but was too indecisive and side-footed a tame effort straight at Ayaka Yamashita in goal. A couple of months later, she had scored an instinctive left-footed half volley 64 seconds into the north London derby. She was the embodiment of Arsenal’s progress under Slegers, with the emphasis on “being calm, clear and ruthless.”

Caldentey, the WSL Player of the Year, has been the real gamechanger for Arsenal. Her experience counted in the final, but her quality and ability to capitalise on sliding doors moments got them there.

For January loan signing Chloe Kelly, who endured a tough season at Manchester City, she returned to Arsenal on loan to “be happy again” and almost immediately reignited her career. Ineligible to play Arsenal’s first two games after she signed, had to wait to don the red and white she did in her youth, but it was worth it.

Much of this squad has been together for the six years between the WSL title win and Saturday’s Champions League triumph, but these additions are what have brought Arsenal closer to Europe’s elite.

Possessing the ability to attract this level of player before winning the Champions League, Arsenal will hope this gives them more power to compete with Chelsea for domestic honours.

After a tough go at Manchester City, Chloe Kelly found success again with her childhood club, Arsenal. (David Ramos / Getty Images)

For the fans, Arsenal’s win in Lisbon serves as a release for so much built-up tension after years of waiting for a major trophy. For the players, it will be proof that the time they have spent growing together has not been wasted, even if there have been moments of frustration. For the club, it could truly be the stepping stone that is needed to properly revive their status as England’s most decorated women’s club.

The winner of this year’s Champions League was set to receive at least €1million (£840,000, $1.3m) overall for progressing through each stage and up to €320,000 more in performance-based bonuses. Arsenal had already been making groundbreaking strides in how they built the club off the pitch, but this success could take them to another level on it.

In the meantime, players, fans and staff can bask in the glory of still being the only English club to win the Women’s Champions League.

(Top photo: David Ramos / Getty Images)