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The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup – Australia & New Zealand is capturing the hearts and minds of football fans not only in the two co-host countries but across the globe. At the end of the Group Stage, records have been broken in areas as diverse as ticket sales, broadcast figures and digital media data. The tournament has also set new benchmarks for performances on the pitch, as well as creating new highs in hospitality and merchandise sales, as well as for the number of participating volunteers. The tournament is truly going Beyond Greatness to, with sixteen captivating days and sixteen thrilling matches of the ninth edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup remaining.
On the field, countries from all continents are writing their own piece of history. For the first time, teams from all six Confederations won a match at the tournament. New Zealand became the first team from Oceania to register a victory, while the Philippines, Zambia, Portugal, Jamaica, South Africa, and Morocco also got their first win. Africa’s representatives are breaking all kinds of records. Three teams have reached the Round of 16. Nigeria became the first African nation to complete their group unbeaten, while Morocco is the first African team to win two successive matches and keep clean sheets in successive matches. Fans from the co- host nations, as well as tens of thousands of travelling supporters have fully embraced the biggest women’s sports event on the planet, with an average of 25,476 fans attending the 48 first-round matches, a 29% increase from attendances at France 2019. By Friday 4 August, over 1,715,000 tickets had been sold, comfortably surpassing pre-tournament ticket sales targets.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the record crowd for a football match in the country– women’s or men’s – was broken twice in 12 days, first in the opening match and subsequently eclipsed when 42,958 fans watched Portugal take on the United States of America. In Australia, the tournament also set a record for a standalone women’s football match, when 75,784 fans attended Australia’s opener against Republic of Ireland.
At the previous FIFA Women’s World Cup in France, ten matches across the entire tournament attracted over 25,000 spectators. By comparison, this year’s Group Stage has already seen twenty-one matches surpass the 25,000 mark. Hospitality sales meanwhile are tracking 27% above France 2019, and 534% above Canada 2015.
As the tournament pauses for breath before the knock-out stage commences, broadcast figures from around the world have equally been overwhelmingly positive, with records broken across multiples countries on a near daily basis.
Some of the many highlights include the Matildas’ final group game against Canada reaching 4.71 million Australians to become channel Seven’s most watched programme this year. In Aotearoa New Zealand around 1.88 million, a third of the population, has been watching the tournament.
Colombia’s first group match tripled the highest television audience from the previous FIFA Women’s World Cup (2.84 million) and even eclipses all audiences from the 2022 FIFA World Cup – Qatar, except for the Final.
China produced the highest audience for a single match anywhere in the world with 53.9 million viewers watching their team take on England. In the United States, more fans watched their team play against Netherlands, than any other previous group stage match in history (6.43m).
The skyrocketing television audiences have been replicated on FIFA’s digital platforms. Traffic in the first 15 days has already surpassed the entirety of the 2019 tournament, welcoming 22 million unique users, with an average of 2.4 million users visiting FIFA Women’s World Cup channels daily.
FIFA committed to providing the thirty-two participating member associations with the same level of support as the men’s teams received at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. So far, 410 training sessions – 88 at the Venue Specific Training Sites and 322 at the Team Base Camp Training Sites – have been facilitated, another first for this tournament.
For those sessions, over 2,000 cones were provided to teams in Australia and 1,600 in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as 1,536 adidas footballs for training purposes, 1,280 Official Match Balls and 6,748 bibs for teams and match operations.
In the FIFA Fan Festivals, another ‘first’ was achieved, with sites created in each of the nine host cities. To date, over 400,000 fans watched the matches, with Sydney/Gadigal recording the single day record of 17,756 fans.
The tournament across multiple sites has been supported by 5,000 volunteers who have brought the greatest ever FIFA Women’s World Cup to life, doubling the number of volunteers in 2019. The overwhelming majority of volunteers are from the two co-host countries, while around 5% of volunteers travelled from sixty-eight different nations, representing all six FIFA Confederations.
