A day of European football between Champions League and women's World Cup qualifiers

The European football calendar converges, on Wednesday, October 14, on two competitions that measure the state of health of the Italian game at different levels. On one side the men’s Champions League, closing the second round of the maxi-group league phase; on the other the women’s National Team, engaged in the return leg of the first playoff round for qualification to the 2027 World Cup.

In the Champions League, Serie A is represented by Como and Roma, called to take the field after the defeats suffered by Inter and Napoli the previous evening. The day’s schedule includes Feyenoord-Como, Manchester City-PSG and Roma-Real Madrid: three matches that well illustrate the shape of the new single-group format, in which each team faces opponents of different origin and standing in the same round. For Italian football, represented by two teams out of the four entered in the competition, the day carries a specific weight greater than the single match: after the previous evening’s missteps, the round for Como and Roma becomes a testing ground for the overall balance of the league in the European competition.

The presence of Real Madrid as Roma’s opponent places the clash among the round’s biggest draws, alongside the match between Manchester City and PSG, another fixture featuring two of the benchmark teams of continental football in recent years. The current Champions League format, which replaced the traditional groups with a single standings table across multiple rounds, makes every result immediately readable in terms of qualification prospects, heightening the weight of each single matchday compared with the old closed-group system.

In parallel, the Italian women’s national football team led by Soncin faced Belarus in the return leg of the first playoff round for the 2027 World Cup. Italy approached the fixture with a lead built up in the first leg, which ended 2-0 in the Azzurre’s favor. The return match was played in Florence, broadcast live on Rai 2 and streamed on RaiPlay, confirming the growing media attention given to the women’s National Team’s qualification path toward the world tournament.

The context of the 2027 World Cup playoffs marks a structural shift for international women’s football, which in recent cycles has seen both the number of teams taking part in the final phase and the television coverage of the qualifiers expand. The double confrontation with Belarus, structured as a home-and-away tie starting from a substantial lead, reflects a format widespread in European women’s qualifiers, designed to balance the growing number of national teams in contention with qualification timelines compatible with the international calendar.

The two storylines — the Champions League round and the women’s World Cup playoff — do not intertwine directly, but together they provide a snapshot of a day in which Italian football is simultaneously playing for European credibility at club level and for the national women’s team’s qualification path. In the first case the stakes are the standings of the new single-group format; in the second, access to a world final stage that the Italian women’s game has been pursuing since its last appearance.