Football fans are eager to get their hands on tickets for the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand as FIFA announces more than half a million seats have already sold.
Preparations for the women’s tournament are reaching their final stages, and FIFA is aiming for upwards of 1.5 million tickets to be sold overall.
FIFA announced the top 10 purchasers of Women’s World Cup 2023 tickets are fans from the United States of America, England, Qatar, Germany, China PR, Canada, the Republic of IReland and France.
“This highlights the fantastic pull of the female game and the passion it evokes among the global football fandom,” FIFA said.
And with the 2022 World Cup in Qatar now out of the way, FIFA’s marketing efforts for the women’s tournament are expected to ramp up even further.
More sales phases are scheduled before the tournament’s opening match and opening ceremony on 20 July 2023 at New Zealand’s Eden Park in Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau.
There are also still sales to all three Matildas groups games as well as the final, and most-sought-after game, which will conclude the tournament on 20 August 2023 at Stadium Australia in Sydney/Gadigal.
At least five nations will make their Women’s World Cup debuts in 2023– including Morocco, Zambia, the Philippines, Vietnam and the Republic of Ireland– with three more possibly joining after the final inter-continental play-off tournament in New Zealand in February.
All competing for the three remaining spots in the finals, that play-off tournament will feature 10 teams– Portugal, Cameroon, Thailand, Chile, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay Senegal, Chinese Taipei and Panama.
Support for women’s football is clearly building as cultural and financial shifts have occurred in the women’s game over the past four years.
With fans from 129 different countries represented, more tickets have been sold to this year’s inaugural tournament than were sold in the first six months of the previous World Cup in France in 2019.
Three of the five-most-attended women’s football matches of all time occurred just last year, with Barcelona’s UEFA Women’s Champions League semi-final against Wolfsburg setting a new record of 91,648 tickets sold.
This past weekend, a total of 46,811 tickets were sold at the Emirates Stadium in London where Sam Kerr’s Chelsea faced Caitlin Foord and Steph Catley’s Arsenal.