The European Championship in England has already become, before completing the quarterfinals, the largest women's football event in the history of Europe. Only with the fifteen matches in the group stage, the 240,045 tickets sold during the entire 2017 European Championship hosted by the Netherlands have already been exceeded and the figure will not stop rising, as UEFA has already sold more than half a million tickets to date. end of the tournament.
The nine host cities of the competition are fully decked out and the sponsors have also turned to advertising on marquees from all corners of the country in which you can see the faces of soccer players such as Alexia (injured), the Swedish Asllani or the English Lucy Bronze , new signing of Barcelona. In the cradle of football, support for the tournament is total and, as is the case in countries like Spain, the stadiums are filling up with a very familiar and diverse public. Far from some of the bad habits of men's football, in women's football the values traditionally associated with football, such as respect and sportsmanship, are still imposed on fans.
Yesterday, Spain's match against the hosts showed a Brighton
UEFA estimates that more than 96,000 foreign visitors will end up passing through England for the European Championship until the final on the 31st. Although the Spanish fans have been more discreet and have not traveled en masse to their matches, as they have For example, the fans of the Netherlands or Sweden, two of the largest in the tournament, the Spanish have been more interested than ever from their homes in the selection. Each match of the red broadcast on TVE has had more audience than the previous one, reaching its peak in the decisive match against Denmark, which was seen by more than 1.6 million viewers, 18.5% of the share. To contextualize the figures, in the last European Championship (2017), the game that more people gathered in front of the screens was the Spain-Austria quarterfinal, which was seen by barely half a million viewers.
With audiences in the millions across the continent and tickets sold out for many of the matches for weeks, this European Championship confirms that the growth of women's football is a reality. The visibility that the players are gaining in recent years, and the growing appeal of these tournaments is also attracting new investors who, in turn, are helping to sustain this unstoppable growth of women's football. And not only that, thousands of girls from all over the world are growing up in a new reality in which they have role models to be inspired by. The future is promising.
