MANCHESTER: UEFA’s head of women’s football Nadine Kessler has refuted suggestions that the organization lacked ambition in choosing the locations for the 2022 European Championship in England, where attendance records are expected to be broken.
The record audience for a match in a women’s European Championship will be broken twice, once at Old Trafford for the first match between England and Austria and once at Wembley for the championship game.
On July 6 and July 31, two historic events, the remaining 29 games will be held in relatively smaller venues.
Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir of Iceland, a midfielder, called the choice of Manchester City’s 4,400-capacity Academy Stadium for three group games “embarrassing” and “disrespectful.”
Four games, including a quarterfinal, will be played at the Leigh Sports Village, which has a seating capacity of 7,800.
The total number of tickets sold is slowly approaching 500,000, which is more than twice the number of spectators who saw the previous women’s Euro in the Netherlands five years ago.
However, there are still more than 200,000 seats available, and Kessler acknowledged that in order to create the finest atmosphere inside the stadiums, venue selections have to be grounded in “reality.”
I often remark that even while we should strive for the highest aspiration, we also shouldn’t lose sight of reality, namely the past. If we exclude the Netherlands matches from the count, the average attendance at our most recent women’s Euro was 5,000
The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the football calendar caused a 12-month delay in the event, which was originally scheduled to take place in 2021.
The 2019 World Cup set a record for the most viewers ever, however, Covid-19 slowed some of the growth of the women’s game.
