Emily Keogh

Hello, I'm Emily Keogh and I'm joined today with the Director of Women's Football at UEFA, Nadine Kessler, to talk all things Champions League ahead of what's in the middle of a pretty impressive and exciting season, obviously off the back of the league phase.

I guess to start, what's your sort of interpretation of how it went and were you surprised by sort of the teams that we've got through now at this stage?

Yeah, you touched on a few things there that I want to come back to, but sort of you mentioned there about the sort of ending, everything had jeopardy at the end of the last game, right?

You know, teams, one goal can change the complexity of the entire table.

Is that sort of the mark of a successful league face?

Do you think that even on the last game that so much was defined by those really small margins?

Yeah, definitely.

I think it's the sort of thing that receptions from sort of fans over the past couple of years with the old format, potentially that it was getting a little bit predictable.

You kind of knew when the groups are drawn that who was going to go through, because obviously there's quite a big disparity with some teams, but obviously this introduced a whole new format.

Like you say, that everything mattered, every game mattered.

And it did to a degree, even the playing field, I guess, for those teams that don't have as much resource or history than other teams.

And I guess obviously one of those was Luven, as you mentioned before, I spent some time with them and I guess the,

The ability for a team that, you know, their first cracker at European football, they'd never even been in the playoffs and in the qualifiers before.

It's such a remarkable story to be sat here now that they're in the playoffs.

And I guess this is the beauty of this new format that even they didn't think that that might be possible at the start of the season.

Do you think that slightly the new format, we look at a team like PSG, who probably underperformed by a lot of expectations from fans and other people, sort of expected them to be quite high up in the table and obviously didn't get past the league phase.

I guess, do you think it's slightly more of a wake-up call with the new format that it's not as easy as it's been and that teams are really going to have to push and every game now does really count and it's a bit more of a, yeah, like a wake-up call that...

This is how it is.

Yeah, definitely.

And we touched a little bit then on audiences and sort of one of the, I guess, criticisms that we've seen this year, kind of from Arsenal especially, was moving their games to Meadow Park.