Caitlin Murray, ESPN
SYDNEY — FIFA president Gianni Infantino clash again at critics and took a victory lap on the FIFA Girls’s Soccer Conference Friday, pronouncing that increasing the Women’s World Cup has became out to be a good fortune and “FIFA was right” to take action.
The event had 24 groups competing in its earlier version in 2019 in France, however this version in Australia and Unused Zealand expanded to 32 groups. Two groups stay, England and Spain, who will play games within the ultimate Sunday.
– Girls’s Global Cup: Home | Squads | Fixtures | Podcast
“We decided to increase the number of participating teams in the World Cup from 24 in France to 32 now,” Infantino stated in his opening remarks of the conference. “I remember when we decided to do that, of course, the usual critics — which are less and less by the way, but there are still a few — they were saying it’s not going to work. ‘The level is too different. You will have 15-0 scores. It will be bad for women’s football. It will be bad for the image of women’s football.’ I’m sorry, but FIFA was right. As it happens quite often in the last years, FIFA was right once more.
“From the 134 nations that entered the qualification for the 2015 Girls’s Global Cup prior to I become FIFA president, we have now now 188 nations within the FIFA score as a result of everybody believes now there’s a prospect to glimmer at the world degree.”
In this tournament, eight teams made World Cup debuts, with first-timer Morocco reaching the knockout stage before being eliminated by France in the round of 16.
An unprecedented number of upsets also featured at this tournament with No. 2 FIFA world-ranked Germany, Incorrect. 7-ranked Canada and Incorrect. 8-ranked Brazil all getting knocked out in the group stage by lower-ranked teams.
This edition of the Women’s World Cup also marks the first time FIFA separately sold broadcast and sponsorship rights to the tournament instead of bundling those deals as part of the men’s World Cup. The result, Infantino said, was revenues of more than $570 million.
“This Global Cup generated over $570 million in income, and so we needful even,” he said. “We didn’t lose any cash and we generated the second-highest source of revenue of any recreation but even so, in fact, the lads’s Global Cup, on the world degree. There don’t seem to be many competitions, even in males’s soccer, that generate greater than part one thousand million bucks.”
The selection of Australia and New Zealand as host countries drew some criticism before the tournament because the time zones would be unfavorable to audiences in Europe and North America, two of the largest viewership markets for the World Cup. Infantino hit back at those critics as well, noting that the tournament had set new TV records around the world.
In the United States, broadcaster FOX set a record for the group stage of a Women’s World Cup. Two of the four U.S. women’s national team matches during the tournament began in the overnight or early morning hours but averaged 3.80 million viewers on FOX, up 2% from the USA’s first four matches in 2019.
In Australia, 9 in 10 households watching TV during the Matildas’ semifinal vs. England on Wednesday were tuned into the game.
“We did it despite the critics who wouldn’t consider in nations, which don’t seem to be ‘soccer nations,'” Infantino said. “Why are you taking part in in wintry weather clear of customary — ‘customary’ was once the pledge I heard — era zones? Believe, as you probably have an unusual era zone right here. [They said] it wouldn’t paintings. Smartly, it did paintings.”
