A showcase for women’s football, Euro 2022 has clearly fulfilled its role in this area, with exceptional attendance in English stadiums.
The Women’s Euro ends on Sunday July 31 with the final between England and Germany. Beyond the simple competition between national teams, the event was, in the country of football, a great showcase for its female version. Still extremely confidential in Europe a few years ago, women’s football took on another dimension. And Euro 2022 will have marked the spirits by its popular dimension.
Indeed, the attendance record has been beaten, and even crushed, reports The Team. This also happened during the match between France and Belgium on July 14, won 2-1 by Les Bleues. That evening, 8,173 people had gathered inside the New York Stadium in Rotherham. A respectable figure, but which above all increased the total number of spectators at this Euro to more than 248,075 people. That’s nearly 8,000 more than the previous record, dating from the 2017 edition in the Netherlands.
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The Euro of all superlatives
But above all, this bar was exceeded well before the end of the competition. Fifteen games remained to be played. UEFA talks about “a tournament of superlatives”. It also had the highest attendance for a meeting: 68,871 spectators for England-Austria. But also the most important for a group match in which the host country did not participate: 22,596 spectators for Switzerland – Netherlands in the group stage. The quarter-finals and semi-finals – with or without England – also broke records. This is particularly the case of France – Germany which drew 27,455 people to the stadium.
In this, this Euro is a success, even if the organization does not escape certain reproaches. Several observers have criticized the choice of stadiums, which are often far from major cities and therefore difficult to access for foreign supporters. Apart from Old Trafford (Manchester) and Wembley in London, these were generally not historic sites of British football, yet so rich in the field. The figures were therefore excellent, but the atmosphere was not always there. A lesson for the 2025 edition, the host country of which must be designated in December 2022. France is one of the contenders, as well as Poland and several Scandinavian countries which are proposing a common candidacy.
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