Next Gen Greats: Five U23 standouts in the 2023/24 UEFA Women’s Champions League – scout report

This evening, Bilbao will play host to the 2023/24 UEFA Women’s Champions League Final, as Barcelona attempt to win a second straight European Cup, and Lyon try to regain the title they won two years ago, in 2021/22.

These two sides, Barcelona and Lyon, have been unrivalled in Europe over the last decade, with Lyon claiming six of the last eight UEFA Women’s Champions League titles and Barcelona winning the other two during that time period.

So, this sets the stage for a prestigious final tonight.

However, the 2023/24 UEFA Women’s Champions League has been the platform for many stories to play out, such as the progress of Norwegian side Brann Kvinner and Swedish outfit BK Häcken to the quarter-finals amid the failure of any German side to progress beyond the group stage.

Plenty of bright young talent has talent to the field, too, during the course of this year’s UEFA Women’s Champions League tournament — and these are the stories we’re going to focus on as we prepare for this season’s edition of the continent’s elite women’s football competition to come to an end.

We’ve chosen five U23 players who stood out immensely for their quality performances during the 2023/24 UEFA Women’s Champions League campaign all over the pitch, with one goalkeeper, one central defender, one central midfielder and two attackers included in our UWCL-focused scout report.

We’ll provide some in-depth analysis of the five chosen players’ key qualities and traits, as well as how each of them compliments their respective team’s tactics.

Regina van Eijk, 22 years old, Ajax

The first player we’re going to analyse is Ajax goalkeeper Regina van Eijk. The Amsterdam-based club progressed as far as the quarter-finals in this season’s UEFA Women’s Champions League competition, ultimately falling to the sword of Emma Hayes’ Chelsea in that stage.

Their achievements were largely attributed to the tremendous work of head coach Suzanne Bakker, who’s set to embark on a new challenge next season.

However, stopper Van Eijk (173cm/5’8”) also deserves plenty of credit for her contributions to the Dutch team’s success.

Here, we can see that based on facing 13.02 non-penalty xG, Van Eijk managed to prevent 1.02 goals, not a bad number that ranks her quite nicely among her peers of all ages in the competition this term—an impressive feat for a 22-year-old relatively new to the world of top-class first-team football.

In addition, Van Eijk had a 69.23% save rate for the 2023/24 UWCL campaign, again ranking well amongst her peers in this metric. She faced 39 shots during the UWCL this term—a relatively high number in the competition.