Alex Scott says Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United’s Champions League displays are perfect WSL advert

London — For the second season running, three English clubs have muscled their way into the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-finals, and former Lionesses captain Alex Scott believes the feat is the clearest endorsement yet of the rising power of the Women’s Super League.

Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United are all still in the hunt for European silverware, echoing last term when Manchester City also reached the last eight. Speaking exclusively to FourFourTwo while fronting ESPN’s live coverage on Disney+, Scott said the sustained presence of English sides at the sharp end of the competition is shifting the global perception of where the world’s best players now want to be.

“I think it’s great,” Scott said. “It goes to show the strength of the WSL. What it does is it makes other players from other countries think, ‘I want to play there.’”

The 140-time England international recalled a time when the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States was the destination of choice. “Yes, we had a league here and I was playing for Arsenal Women, but you could see that in America they were getting the crowds, they were professional, just everything about it. The best players were there and you always wanted to be competing against the best. And now, the WSL has that appeal.”

That magnetism, Scott argues, is translating into knock-out ties against Europe’s traditional heavyweights. Arsenal, managed by Renee Slegers, stunned Barcelona last year to lift the trophy for the first time since Scott’s own 2007 triumph, and they remain the only English side ever to have won the competition. This season the Gunners hold a 3-1 advantage over domestic rivals Chelsea after the first leg of their quarter-final at Emirates Stadium, while Manchester United pushed Bayern Munich to the brink in a 3-2 thriller at Old Trafford.

Scott pinpointed another marker of progress: the routine use of Premier League venues. Arsenal have made the Emirates their regular home, and fixtures at Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford are no longer marketed as novelty occasions.

“I don’t think it is seen as an opportunity anymore,” she said. “If you go back to when I was playing and someone mentioned that you’d be playing at a main stadium, we’d think, ‘Oh my goodness, this is amazing.’ Whereas now all these players are used to playing at the main stadiums, and the fact that, for Arsenal, it’s not, ‘We’re playing at the men’s stadium’ anymore — it’s, ‘This is our stadium,’ which I absolutely love.”

With the return legs of the quarter-finals scheduled for 1 & 2 April and streamed live on Disney+, Scott believes the visibility provided by major grounds and broadcast exposure is accelerating a virtuous cycle: better facilities attract better talent, which raises standards, which in turn fuels European success.

“You want it to continue to be competitive,” she added, referencing the eras of Lyon and Barcelona dominance. “You don’t want that to be the case. You want it to continue to be competitive.”

For a league that only a decade ago battled for recognition, the WSL now finds itself the subject of a very different conversation — not whether its clubs can compete on the continent, but how far they can go.

Alex Scott, ESPN presenter for the UEFA Women’s Champions League on Disney+, will be on air for every minute of the remaining drama. All matches are available live on Disney+.