Australia and New Zealand Will Host 2023 Women’s World Cup

New Zealand has also become a fixture in the World Cup, with four straight appearances. The Football Ferns are the dominant power in their FIFA confederation, and have players competing in some of the world’s best professional leagues. But New Zealand’s isolation, and regularly having its top players scattered around the globe, has been one of the biggest obstacles keeping it from rising into women’s soccer’s top tier.

FIFA evaluators had rated the Australia-New Zealand bid the highest, noting not only the infrastructure the countries already had in place but, importantly in any FIFA discussion, that it would “present the most commercially favorable proposition.”

Colombia’s bid would require significant infrastructure investment, those same evaluators warned, and “it is not clear if this level of investment will be available.”

Colombia, and South American soccer’s regional governing body, lodged a complaint about the technical assessment, saying it had “erroneous and discriminatory conclusions.”

Initially, the winners had expected to face a much bigger field. FIFA, flush with the success of last year’s Women’s World Cup in France, which was won by the United States, announced last August that a record 10 federations had expressed interest in hosting. One had done so accidentally, it turned out, and several others eventually decided not to submit formal bids.

Only three bids, in fact, advanced to the evaluation phase, and Japan’s announcement on Monday that it was withdrawing, after scoring higher than Colombia in the evaluations, made FIFA’s decision that much easier.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/sports/soccer/womens-world-cup-2023.html