The Ladies’s World Cup will enhance to 48 groups in 2031 when the US is predicted to host the match, FIFA confirmed Friday.
FIFA has needed to increase the ladies’s match from 32 groups to match the boys’s World Cup which has 48 groups for the primary time subsequent 12 months, when the U.S. will co-host with Canada and Mexico.
The choice follows one month after FIFA president Gianni Infantino stated it had only one candidate bidding for every of the 2031 and 2035 girls’s tournaments — the U.S. adopted by the UK. FIFA is predicted to verify these two hosts subsequent 12 months.
Brazil will host a 32-team Ladies’s World Cup in 2027.
FIFA stated the larger, 104-game match with 48 groups “will considerably broaden illustration, providing extra nations and gamers entry to elite competitors and accelerating funding in girls’s soccer worldwide.”
The Ladies’s World Cup had simply 16 groups as lately because the 2011 version in Germany, 24 groups at every of the subsequent two tournaments in Canada and France, then 32 groups for the primary time in 2023 co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand.
The 2023 version defied issues the match had grown too quick, would have too many overmatched groups and too many lop-sided outcomes.
In 2019, the defending champion U.S. group beat Thailand 13-0 of their opening group-stage recreation.
In 2023, the most important win was the Netherlands beating Thailand 7-0, and the match “set a brand new customary for international competitiveness,” Infantino stated Friday in an announcement, as a result of “groups from all confederations gained at the least one recreation and groups from 5 confederations reached the knockout stage.”
Reporting by The Related Press.
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