Chelsea and Arsenal each go into Sunday’s match – kicking off at 4.30 live on Sky Sports – with a manager under some pressure
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Nine months ago, Arsenal headed to Stamford Bridge with Renée Slegers under significant pressure. They had drawn five league games in the first half of the season, with points dropped to teams such as Tottenham and Aston Villa. Three days before the meeting with their biggest rivals, they had been knocked out of the League Cup by Manchester United.
It felt as though losing to Chelsea could be the final straw for a fanbase that had previous when it comes to ousting managers over defeats to Chelsea – in 2024, Jonas Eidevall resigned after a 2-1 loss to Chelsea at the Emirates – but instead, Slegers’ team went to Stamford Bridge and won 2-0.
It turned out to be a transformative result, as Arsenal then won 10 matches on the bounce, collecting the Fifa Champions Cup and knocking Chelsea out of the Champions League at the quarter-final stage.
Yet fast forward to this season and Slegers’ back feels once again pressed up against a wall. Arsenal have dropped four points in their opening three games, with draws against Crystal Palace and Manchester United hugely costly. Manchester City only dropped 11 points in the entirety of last season on their way to the title.
Weak starts to the season have become a feature of this Arsenal side, who have not won their opening three matches of a WSL season since 2022-23. On Tuesday night, they required a 93rd-minute penalty from Mariona Caldentey to beat the semi-professional Danish side HB Køge.
“I don’t think we need to over-dramatise performances,” said Slegers in her press conference on Friday. She bristled slightly at the description of the season so far as “worrying” – a rare showing of discomfort from a woman who tends to be very neutral – and insisted that wasn’t a word they would use internally. Instead they discuss “focus areas”.
Those areas will predominantly be about the creation and execution of goalscoring opportunities. Arsenal looked lethargic this week in the Champions League, despite Slegers making eight changes heading into the game. They had territorial dominance in the games against Manchester United and Crystal Palace without ever looking threatening. It felt revealing when HB Køge manager Kristian Mørch said after their loss that they had tried to replicate what Arsenal had struggled with in their first three WSL games.
“We saw that they don’t like crossing from out wide, they want to play in the half-space and have central combinations,” he said. “We also see that when teams get some time on the ball, they don’t press that intensely.”
It mimicked Slegers’ own analysis of the game and she admitted she felt like teams had figured Arsenal out: “I think teams want to force us into wide areas, force us back, congest spaces, which they did well.”
Yet despite all of this, it feels entirely feasible that Arsenal come away from their trip to Chelsea with a result, as they did last year. The only time they lost to them in four meetings last season came in the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final, a tie they won on aggregate anyway.
Lots of what Chelsea do plays into Arsenal’s hands: they push higher up, they leave more space, they can struggle to control midfield. Keira Walsh’s 20th-minute substitution through injury in their own Champions League game against Austria Wien, which they also won 1-0, will only exacerbate those issues.
Recent meetings between the two sides have represented a tactical cat-and-mouse game, with one side taking the initiative before the other reels them back into parity or submission.
The reality is that Chelsea manager, Sonia Bompastor, also finds herself under pressure. The failure to get a significant victory over Arsenal last season rankled with fans, with the derby between the two teams being women’s football’s biggest. Her side have already dropped points this season, drawing 1-1 with Aston Villa on the opening day.
Despite Chelsea’s performances looking more comprehensive than Arsenal’s – for example, they beat Manchester United 5-0 when Arsenal could only draw 1-1 with them the following week – there is still a doubt about whether Bompastor can challenge for the WSL or Champions League title, which is the expectation.
It means that the game could have huge ramifications for both managers’ futures, with a victory for either assuaging some of the doubts about their leadership.
Neither side has a particularly easy week following the game. For Slegers, there is the looming date with league champions Manchester City next Sunday, while Sonia Bompastor will return to Lyon to face the side with whom she won the Champions League trophy as both a player and a manager.
It is striking that at the end of the 2024-25 season, Slegers and Bompastor were seen as two of the best in the world. Bompastor had just completed an invincible domestic treble with Chelsea and Slegers saw off Barcelona in the Champions League final.
Bompastor called Slegers one of the “best coaches in the world” in her pre-match press conference.
“We are two coaches who are calm and who really respect each other,” she continued.
Yet neither of their fanbases can truly say the same thing. Whoever loses on Sunday will be facing significant questions. Football is fickle in that way.