United States midfielder Lindsey Horan, left, and Sophia Smith, heart, have fun with ahead Trinity Rodman, proper, who scored within the second half of a FIFA Girls’s World Cup send-off soccer match towards Wales in San Jose, Calif., Sunday, July 9, 2023. (AP Picture/Josie Lepe) AP
The FIFA Girls’s World Cup begins Thursday in Australia and New Zealand. The event will nonetheless showcase among the finest gamers on the earth, however it is going to be slightly completely different this 12 months.
In an try to reply the rising international demand for girls’s soccer and the requires equality from gamers and followers, FIFA is making a couple of adjustments to the World Cup and implementing parts which can be already frequent within the males’s event.
What’s completely different this 12 months? Listed here are three adjustments it is best to learn about:
FIFA expanded the variety of groups
In 2019, FIFA introduced that the 2023 World Cup would develop from 24 groups to 32. The final time the event expanded was in 2015 when it went from 16 to 24 groups, in keeping with Yahoo Sports activities.
By the growth, eight groups can be making their World Cup debuts: Haiti, Republic of Eire, Morocco, Panama, Philippines, Portugal, Vietnam and Zambia, in keeping with FIFA. Each Vietnam and Portugal are in the identical group because the U.S.
The boys’s World Cup has included 32 groups since 1998 and can develop to 48 groups in 2026 when the U.S., Canada and Mexico co-host the event.
FIFA elevated prize cash quantity
Not solely is the scale of the World Cup rising, so is the prize cash. The whole prize cash will enhance from $30 million to $110 million, ESPN reported.
For the primary time, among the prize cash will go on to the gamers. Sometimes, the cash goes to the taking part international locations.
However this time, every participant on a World Cup roster will obtain $30,000, and that quantity will enhance as groups advance by means of every spherical. Every participant on the profitable crew can be awarded $270,000.
“The worldwide wage of girls’s skilled footballers is roughly $14,000 yearly so the quantities allotted beneath this unprecedented new distribution mannequin can have an actual and significant influence on the lives and careers of those gamers,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino mentioned, in keeping with CBS Sports activities.
All the taking part international locations will obtain at the very least $1.56 million to “reinvest again into soccer of their international locations” and “assist to propel the ladies’s sport even additional” as Infantino mentioned. The profitable crew will earn $4.29 million.
The rise to $110 million remains to be a stark distinction to the $440 million that was cut up between the mens’ groups in 2022. Infantino is focusing on equal prize cash for the 2026 males’s and 2027 ladies’s World Cups, ESPN reported.
FIFA carried out crew base camps
This 12 months, every nation can have their very own base camp for the primary time. The bottom camps can be a crew’s “dwelling away from dwelling,” together with coaching websites and resorts, in keeping with FIFA.
The U.S. can be based mostly in Auckland and can play all of its group stage matches in New Zealand. In January, the U.S. traveled to Auckland to play New Zealand and to familiarize gamers with the world they’d be staying in and the amenities they’d be utilizing throughout the World Cup.
Along with the bottom camps, groups will keep in venue particular resorts and apply on venue particular coaching websites the day earlier than matches for every of the ten venues.