The UEFA Women's Champions League is back and US Women's National Team fans have an

increasing number of reasons to watch.

Welcome to this week's edition of The Late Sub.

I am your host, Claire Watkins.

It is Thursday, October 9th.

And we're going to be talking Champions League.

We're going to be talking about an increasing number of Americans participating in it,

why that has been important for Emma Hayes as US manager to encourage players to do so.

What we saw from the first slate of games with a focus on these US players who are frankly

crushing it, they're starting and they're playing really well,

even if some of the full team performances left a little bit more to be desired,

a lot to dig into.

So let's go ahead and jump

right in. So the 2025-26 UEFA women's champions league league phase kicked off this week. And we saw

some pretty interesting stuff. Not going to get too exhausted with it. We're going to have a pretty US Women's National Team focus. But it was a really interesting slate of games. And I kind of like this new format where you're seeing a variety of different things rather than your traditional group stage. We saw Chelsea. Twente, which is rough start for Chelsea, Barcelona, thumped Byron Munich. Also rough for Bayern Munich. We saw Leon beat Arsenal 2 to 1. That was a very interesting match. We'll go into that in a little bit more depth. Man United got a 1-0 shutout win against Valeranga. Good start. PSG lost to Volsberg by a lot. That really shouldn't surprise anybody paying attention to their trajectory. But it's just an interesting time to be watching the UWCL in the States.

Games are now available on Paramount Plus, growing number of U.S.

Women's National Team players, whether they're like mainstays or prospects alike, taking

part in kind of the increasingly competitive league stage.

We got like a variety of players on a couple of different teams for Leone.

There's Corbyn Schrader, formerly Albert, Lindsay Heaps, and Lily Johannes. We got like a variety of players on a couple of different teams for Leone. There's Corbin Schrader, formerly Albert, Lindsay Heaps and Lily Johannes. We got Emily Fox, who's a true blue starter for Arsenal. Kind of also, Jenna Nyswanger. If we count that, she did catch up with Emma Hayes for a second at the Champions League game. I guess that's nice for her. Chelsea, there's Katerina Macario, Naomi Germa, and Alyssa Thompson.

And then you got Falunelis Joyce for Manchester United. So why is the Champions League

so important to the US women's national team and to its players? Some of this is obvious,

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