Chelsea manager Emma Hayes says that winning the UEFA Women’s Champions League would be a fairytale ending to her tenure.
European club football’s top prize is the one piece of silverware that Hayes hasn’t won with Chelsea. She will leave the club to become the new head coach of the United States Women’s National Team in the summer, meaning that she has one final opportunity to become a European club champion.
When speaking to the media ahead of Chelsea’s opening UEFA Women’s Champions League group stage fixture of the season against Real Madrid, Hayes said that winning this year’s competition is something that dreams are made of.
“It would be a fairytale but I didn’t grow up liking fairytales too much, my sister did,” Hayes said. “I’m much more practical than that but I would like nothing more than to be in a winning position with this team.”
Chelsea have had seven previous attempts to win the competition. They got as far as the final in 2020/2021 but were defeated 4-0 by FC Barcelona in Gothenburg. Hayes went on to highlight the difficulty of the challenge to become champions of Europe.
She said “This competition has been hard every year that we’ve been in it, we don’t underestimate that. We have spoken before about our early years in this competition and how difficult it was to progress in the earlier rounds and obviously, we went out in the group stage a couple of years ago.
“Nobody in this dressing room underestimates the quality of the opponents that we face and in particular, a Madrid team that we drew with last year. We have to maintain the standards that we have set ourselves in this competition and we are very much looking forward to it.”
Chelsea’s latest European opponents Real Madrid are a club that are growing with every season. Domestically, they are just three points behind reigning European champions FC Barcelona in the finetwork Liga F.
Commenting on Real Madrid’s qualities, Hayes said “They’re a team that are extremely quick in transition in the front areas, they’ve got players that can get in-behind you with one or two passes, they’re very threatening. They’re also very patient in their defending, so we have got to be patient away from home.
“They’re a team that are growing in stature across Europe.”
Chelsea’s UEFA Women’s Champions League group stage fixture at Real Madrid kicks-off at 8pm on Wednesday evening.