Glasgow City already needed to summon their inner David to outwit Goliath-like Champions League quarter-final opponents, Wolfsburg, but now the odds are even further against the Scottish champions.
Uefa has announced the remaining eight Champions League teams will play a straight knockout tournament at the San Mamés stadium in Bilbao and the Anoeta stadium in San Sebastián. It is welcome news after the curtailment of the majority of European women’s leagues that there will be women’s football in August, and Glasgow City’s general manager and co-founder, Laura Montgomery, says Uefa “have done the best they can do to get the games played, which pretty much everyone is desperate for”.
However, it does present clubs with a variety of challenges.
The two-times European champions Wolfsburg, who clinched their fourth consecutive Frauen-Bundesliga title with a 2-0 over Freiburg on Wednesday, and Bayern Munich, who will play the reigning champions, Lyon, have benefited from being the only two remaining teams to have had their domestic league resume.
“I do have a giggle sometimes when I see us in the quarter-finals with these giants and all the money that sits around them,” Montgomery says. “That’s what it’s about though, there’s some romance in seeing us there. We’ve got a huge hill to climb in drawing Wolfsburg in the first place.”
Unlike Lyon, who are similarly disadvantaged, Glasgow are “still significantly far away from returning to training of any description”.
Montgomery adds: “Even if we can meet all the protocols to get back training we’re not going to have anyone to play against because no other team in Scotland is back or can afford to be back.”
With the manager, Scott Booth, keen to have the players for four to six weeks, Montgomery is working towards an early-July return to training. The biggest barrier to meeting the protocols required to return is the cost of testing. “We’re working with our facility provider because essentially you have to create a bio-hub for a return to training,” Montgomery says. “So we’re preparing as best we can but without a doubt the cost of the testing is our biggest challenge. It’s just astronomical. It’s astronomical for the top level of our men’s game, it’s been a prohibitive measure for some of those teams coming back, but we don’t have any other option; we have to find a way and as Glasgow City we usually do. For the integrity of our game here we simply have to do everything to get ourselves to Spain to play this quarter-final.”
Glasgow City, founded in 1998, have held their own as an independent club and sealed a 13th consecutive league title last November. Hibernian and now Celtic and Rangers have invested in their women’s teams to try to end the dominance of a club who have reached the top pioneering sustainability.
“Like anyone else we’ve not had a revenue for months,” says Montgomery. “We’re glad to have the [Champions League] game played in that respect because that is a part of our budget. We run as a sustainable business. I would never run us in a way where if we had a sudden loss of income for six months the club would go under, so we are run well but obviously there’s only so long that can continue.”
With lockdown kicking in one game into the season and sponsorships not in before then, Montgomery has been working towards “plugging the gap”. There has not been direct financial help offered, but Uefa is attempting to mitigate the damage done by playing this mini-tournament in Spain.
“As clubs we’ve all lost our home gates and match sponsorship opportunities, we’ve lost our advertising opportunities, we’ve lost third-party broadcasting rights,” Montgomery says.
Uefa is allowing clubs to honour existing domestic exclusivity broadcast deals, but clubs will lose the ability to sell rights beyond their own shores as the European governing body attempts to maximise reach.
Montgomery says Uefa may share 30% of money from pitchside advertising with the clubs. “They’re going to take care of our accommodation costs when we’re out there where previously we would have paid that. I’ve not worked it out yet because we’ve not paid for our flights because we don’t know exactly what day we’re playing.
“I’m guessing we’ll probably be behind on what we would have projected previously but it is dependent on a lot of things. How many of the fans that have bought a ticket will want their money back? If a lot of fans don’t that massively helps us; if a lot of fans do want a refund that’s got thousands of pounds attached.”
Less of a problem for Glasgow, because they had to deal with it in March, is the issue of players being out of contract or leaving. “The other clubs are now facing a problem that we faced months ago,” says Montgomery. “I’m going to be honest, we’ll probably, at best, have 18 first-team players because we just don’t have enough that were signed by that March date. It’s clearly affecting all the clubs.”
