Arunava about Football A look at football & the world through my eyes!
Related Articles
The Colombian cities of Cali, Medellín, and the capital Bogotá will be the focus of the football world later this year when they host the newly expanded FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup between August 31 and September 22, 2024.
In line with FIFA’s strategic objective to give the national teams of FIFA’s 211 Member Associations more opportunities to compete on the global stage, the 2024 tournament will be the first to feature 24 teams, a significant increase on the 16 nations that contested previous editions.
The qualified teams will play in four stadiums – Metropolitano de Techo Stadium and Nemesio Camacho El Campín Stadium, both in Bogotá, Medellín’s Atanasio Girardot Stadium, and the Pascual Guerrero Stadium in Cali – across the three host cities as Colombia welcomes a FIFA tournament for the third time. They will become only the second CONMEBOL host nation of the women’s U-20 global competition after Chile in 2008.
All three cities were previously involved when Colombia staged its first FIFA tournament, the men’s version of the U-20 competition, in 2011, with three of the four stadiums (excluding Metropolitano de Techo Stadium) staging games. Cali and Medellín were also hosts when the FIFA Futsal World Cup™ came to the South American country in 2016.
Hosting the tournament, which launched the international careers of the likes of Marta, Alex Morgan, Asisat Oshoala, Alex Popp, Megan Rapinoe, and Christine Sinclair, will give further impetus to the vibrant growth of women’s football in Colombia.
Colombia’s senior national team reached the quarterfinals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 and have participated in three of the last four senior global tournaments. They have shone too at U-20 level finishing runners-up at the South American U-20 Women’s Football Championship and reaching the last eight of the most-recent FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup in 2022, while the South American nation’s U-17 side were runners-up at their age-category tournament in India that same year.
Those successes have fuelled the healthy appetite of Colombian TV viewers for the women’s game. Colombia’s opening encounter at the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 was watched by over nine million people in the country, more than three times the total that had watched a FIFA Women’s World Cup game before.
In a bid to maintain the momentum in the women’s game, and to ensure sustained on-pitch success across all its national teams, the Colombian Football Association (FCF) has launched Colombia Fútbol con Futuro (Football with a Future).
A long-term project that has received USD 2.3 million in support from the FIFA Forward programme, it will revamp and reinforce coaching methodology, boost the number of top-level coaches and players’ access to them via training camps, and innovate and modernise the tools available to coaching staff, medical teams, and players across Colombia’s football ecosystem.
