Foot & Soccer Soccer Match Reports, Football News 
March 14 – 2025 is a busy 12 months for European ladies’s soccer. Along with EURO 2025 in Switzerland, the race to host the next Girls’s EURO, in 2029, is a high-profile affair, with Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Denmark/Sweden competing. This week they every submitted their preliminary bid to UEFA, forward of ultimate submission in August. The UEFA Government Committee will resolve on the hosts in December.
Normal Secretary of the German Soccer Affiliation (DFB), Heike Ullrich, spoke completely to Insideworldfootball on the progress of the 2029 bid thus far, and her hopes for the way forward for ladies’s soccer throughout Europe.
IWF: Heike, thanks for becoming a member of us. Thrilling information this week with the preliminary submission of the bid file. Why is internet hosting the UEFA Girls’s EURO 2029 a precedence for the DFB?
HU: It’s thrilling information certainly! Girls’s soccer is deeply embedded in Germany’s footballing DNA. Over the previous 50 years, we’ve seen some nice gamers and groups come from this nation, and we’re very happy with our personal efforts to develop the sport. On the similar time, we all know that there’s a lot extra potential, in Germany and throughout Europe.
With UEFA’s ladies’s soccer technique, Unstoppable, we now have an extremely sturdy roadmap for the longer term. It is rather formidable, with the aim of creating ladies’s soccer absolutely self-sustainable by 2030. To realize this, we’d like a Girls’s EURO 2029 that generates file revenues, elevates the sporting product, and will increase visibility and alternatives for girls in soccer throughout Europe. We really feel we’re greatest positioned to organise a match that delivers throughout all three areas.
German Bid E book was submitted this week to UEFA
IWF: One of many early guarantees that the bid has made is that the match would be the first UEFA Girls’s EURO to promote over 1 million tickets. This compares to roughly 575,000 in England for EURO 2022. What offers you confidence in attaining this massive determine?
HU: It’s an formidable goal, but in addition a really lifelike one. To start with, we now have the help of a incredible vary of stadiums, among the many absolute best on the earth, with the biggest capacities within the historical past of the match. Our listing of proposed stadiums for the Girls’s EURO 2029 is on the identical degree as what can be provided for a UEFA males’s EURO. And that’s the way it ought to be.
Secondly, Germany has super help for girls’s soccer. In keeping with our analysis, greater than 18 million folks have a powerful curiosity within the ladies’s sport. We’ve got roughly 150,000 energetic feminine gamers, and greater than 1.4 million feminine membership members. This supplies a fantastic basis to drive file attendances.
We additionally need this Girls’s EURO to be about unity throughout Europe, not simply in Germany. Our location is useful in attracting many visiting followers, with over 200 million folks inside a two-hour journey radius of Germany. Our host cities, from Berlin to Wolfsburg, all have the infrastructure and tradition to welcome folks from all around the world and create a fantastic pageant environment. We’re very assured of attracting file guests and giving them the expertise of a lifetime.
IWF: Germany has a really sturdy custom in ladies’s soccer. How do you assess the present standing of German ladies’s soccer compared to others?
HU: We predict we’re in a fantastic place. Throughout Europe, we now have seen a giant improve in curiosity in ladies’s soccer, from grassroots to elite degree, and in Germany that is no totally different. An enormous a part of this, for us, is our league, the Google Pixel Frauen-Bundesliga.
We’ve actually invested on this and have seen the outcomes, with attendance figures rising over 250% because the 2021-22 season. The upcoming 2025-26 season will see the league develop from 12 to 14 groups, and additional growth is deliberate to boost the league’s profile. Our grassroots system stays one in every of Europe’s strongest, with hundreds of younger ladies enjoying soccer and having clear pathways to nurture expertise.
The DFB’s ladies’s soccer technique – FF27 – prioritises growing visibility and management alternatives on and off the sphere. We’ve got clear targets to double the media attain of girls’s soccer and obtain at the least 30% feminine illustration in management roles throughout the DFB.
On a world degree, we’re well-aware that competitors is stronger than ever. We welcome this, as a result of that is how European ladies’s soccer as a complete will get stronger. Persevering with this development, amongst massive and small nations, is a key pillar of our plans to host the Girls’s EURO2029.
The DFB launched their bid to the German public at Bundesliga matches final weekend
IWF: Throughout Europe, what are the principle alternatives and challenges you see for girls’s soccer in Europe?
HU: It is a essential time for the event of girls’s soccer. We’ve made important progress within the final decade, however now’s the time to make sure this progress just isn’t misplaced and is simply the start. UEFA’s aim to make ladies’s soccer a sustainable ecosystem is completely proper, and this requires numerous effort.
Basically, ladies’s soccer must proceed to draw and improve revenues. We predict that the Girls’s EURO 2029 should be essentially the most commercially profitable version but, with new information for sponsorship, broadcast revenues, and matchday engagement.
We should additionally proceed advancing the on-field product. Which means getting much more ladies enjoying soccer from an early age, strengthening participant pathways to maintain them within the sport, and offering help to make sure they will have lengthy careers. We additionally must elevate ladies’s soccer off the pitch, in addition to on it. We should work exhausting to get truthful protection of the ladies’s sport, and proceed to push feminine involvement in soccer, whether or not or not it’s coaches and referees or managers and CEOs.
Importantly, this may solely work if we work collectively, throughout Europe. As UEFA Nationwide Associations, we should study from one another, irrespective of the scale of our nations, and deal with growing our general potential. That is the philosophy behind our bid to host the Girls’s EURO 2029, and explains our slogan, Collectively WE Rise.
Bernd Neuendorf (DFB-President), Heike Ullrich
IWF: In the course of the bid marketing campaign will in fact be the UEFA Girls’s EURO 2025. What are you most wanting ahead to at this occasion and the way do you fee Germany’s probabilities?
HU: UEFA Girls’s EURO 2025 is shaping as much as be a incredible match. Switzerland is doing a superb job making ready for it. The extent of competitors in ladies’s soccer has by no means been increased, and that may make for an extremely thrilling spectacle. We will’t wait.
As for Germany’s probabilities, we’re very happy with our present staff and at all times hope for the most effective. There are such a lot of groups able to profitable the match, which is strictly what makes it such a compelling occasion.
Whatever the final result, I’ve little question the Girls’s EURO 2025 will likely be one other milestone for girls’s soccer in Europe, and we’re excited to be part of that journey — each as a competing nation and as a candidate to host the following version in 2029.
Contact the author of this story at moc.l1741937758labto1741937758ofdlr1741937758owedi1741937758sni@n1741937758osloh1741937758cin.l1741937758uap1741937758
