UEFA on their choice of venues for Women’s Euro 2022

UEFA have talked about how they choose venues for the Euros in the summer, after receiving criticism from some of the stadia. Sara Bjork Gunarsdottir, the Iceland midfielder, described it as “Embarressing” and “disrespectful” that his side will play their first two matches of group stage at Manchester City’s Academy stadium, which has only 4,700 seats.

The Nordic nations’ first game had a stunt by one of betting company questioning why matches can be played at Etihad Stadium.

However, UEFA thins the process of selecting the tournament’s ground is “as close to” great as it could have been at the time they were picked.

Kayleigh Grieve, who works in the women’s football marketing and sponsorship at UEFA, talked about the reasons behind the stadia.

“Those associations that are bidding to host the tournament will make the proposals to us of which stadiums [will be used], based on a criteria we have in our bidding structure of who comes forward,”

she said.

“So, it’s not UEFA that goes in and solicits the stadiums we want, but we look at that together.

“We are in an interesting space. Clearly, the bidding for this tournament happened a number of years ago and the women's game has been evolving rapidly from there.

"So where do you put the pin in terms of what stadiums that you use is a very challenging thing for any federation taking this on now.

“From the [Football Association’s] perspective, this was their role to do this but from the process we went through with them, it was clear that it would be better to have a full, slightly smaller stadium or a medium sized stadium than having really low numbers in huge stadiums. The atmosphere just is very different.”

Grieve insists the “appetite for games growing”,  but reveals “that's not the norm now, so we can't pretend to ourselves that that's going to be the norm and every game will be sold out”.

She also talked about the lack of “huge travelling fans” in the football.

“We know we have to generate the majority still of ticket sales from the local communities in the stadiums that we will go forward with for the tournament,” Grieve added.

“We have to get those stadiums and, more so, the cities to be invested and want this to come to their city. They need to be willing to invest in that experience for fans and in the marketing behind the games as well.

“These are all the factors that we're considering. Is it perfect? We don't know, but I think it's as close to it as we could possibly put a finger on at that moment in time when we had to make these decisions to get an idea of how we do create atmosphere at these games.”

The tournament’s headline stadium is Wembley, which has 90,000 seats, hosting the final on July 31. Manchester United’s stadium was the host to the opening match between England and Austria, which had a record-breaking attendance.

“What you can see in the strategy for this edition of the Women's Euro is certainly the showcase games, the opening and the closing, [we] went big and we’ve been proven right on that one because the ticket sales are all sold out there,” Grieve said.

“The England games clearly are in the slightly bigger stadiums in the group stages, at least, and have sold out along that route as well. Then we have some varying degrees of stadiums beyond that. There’s a variety in there.”

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