It would be easy to assume there will be a relative lull in the international football calendar a year on from a FIFA World Cup.
However, with memories of South Africa’s momentous tournament now fading, football fans can be safe in the knowledge that they have a smorgasbord of competitions to feast upon before the major domestic leagues return in August.
The UEFA European Under-21 Championships will run for two weeks from June 11 while the Copa America, which will see national teams from North, Central and South America travel to Argentina, will kick-off the following month on July 1.
Sandwiched in between these significant football tournaments is another competition that would perhaps have been swamped by other events in the crowded calendar and overlooked by many fans in years gone by, but is now a burgeoning success story in its own right.
More than 600,000 tickets have been sold for this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup in Germany, which will take place from June 26 to July 17. The action will be broadcast to around 200 territories worldwide and the available slots on the national sponsor inventory sold out a full 18 months before the start of the tournament.
Many major men’s football tournaments - let alone other sports - would be envious of such impressive figures, but the commercial success of this year’s Women’s World Cup has come as a result of FIFA nurturing the quadrennial competition since its inception two decades ago.
China hosted the inaugural FIFA Women’s World Championship, as it was then known, back in 1991. The 12-team tournament was seen by many to be an experiment by then-FIFA president João Havelange, and the United States won the title to little fanfare outside of the event’s host country.
Four years’ later in Sweden, the first edition of the Women’s World Cup in Europe drew a modest overall attendance of 112,000, and some observers questioned the long-term viability of the venture.
However, 1999 was the game-changer. The United States, home of the richest domestic women’s league in the game, hosted the tournament, and in the first weekend of the event the overall attendance surpassed the crowd figure for the entire 1995 edition.
By the time Brandi Chastain had scored the winning penalty in the final’s shootout against China in front of a world record crowd for a women’s sporting event on July 10, the outlook of women’s football had been irrevocably enhanced.
When the ball hit the net, Chastain whipped off her jersey in a moment that has become part of North American sporting folklore, and with an estimated US TV audience of 40 million joining the celebrations of 90,000 spectators in Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, it was clear that the FIFA Women’s World Cup was here to stay.
The United States also staged the next edition of the event in 2003 after the SARS outbreak forced the tournament to be shifted from the original host country of China just four months before the big kick-off. However, when China was given its opportunity to hold the competition in 2007, nearly one million spectators filed through the turnstiles.
Now, in 2011, the tournament is coming back to Europe for the first time in 16 years. “The FIFA Women’s World Cup is a key component in our event portfolio,” says Thierry Weil, the former adidas executive who is now director of marketing at FIFA.
“It is our fastest growing event, with this year’s event in Germany set to break numerous records. We firmly believe that this edition of the tournament will set new milestones for future Women’s World Cups.”
Germany staged the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup in the wake of last year’s World Cup in South Africa, and Weil believes the competition acted as a useful dress rehearsal, both for organisers and commercial partners keen to engage a slightly different core audience in relation to the usual football fan demographic.
“During the U-20 Women’s World Cup in Germany, which can almost be seen as a warm-up event for this year’s tournament, it was fantastic to see so many families attending the matches,” he says.
“We certainly see higher levels of female and family attendance at our women’s events than in our men’s events. This is not only very positive for FIFA but also for our family of sponsors who are then able to establish touching points with a wide demographic of fans.”
For the full feature, please see the latest issue of SportBusiness International out June 1.
