FIFA's postponed meeting to decide the location of the 2023 Women's World Cup has a new date and location. The international governing body of soccer informed the bidding member associations that the host site of the tournament would take place in an online meeting on June 25, according to a statement on FIFA's website.
FIFA has called bidding for this upcoming iteration of the tournament "competitive bidding process in the history of the FIFA Women's World Cup." The finalists for the host site are Australia and New Zealand (joint submission), Brazil, Colombia and Japan. Each country's respective football federation submitted a bid book to the governing body that ranged from 57 to 188 pages long.
"FIFA remains committed to implementing the most comprehensive, objective and transparent bidding process in the history of the FIFA Women's World Cup. This is part of our overall commitment to women's football that, among other things, will see FIFA invest USD 1 billion in women's football during the current cycle," said FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samoura in a statement.
The 2023 tournament will be the first in Women's World Cup history to feature 32 teams, a fact that FIFA proudly noted in its release about this. Unlike in the men's tournament, where questions of corruption were raised over how Russia and Qatar were awarded their respective roles as World Cup hosts, the women's tournament has not had said issues--though the concerns hovering over their sport are a bit more systematically discriminatory.
