2015 Women's World Cup Canada

[terpfan68]

Wait till next year. Or in this case wait till Olympic Qualifing and the London Olympics. Then the under 20 wc in 2014 as practice for the next world cup and then the big show in 2015.

The field for the next cup is to be increased to 24. This will mean (I believe) 20 more matches.

6 groups of 4 or 36 matches (12 more than this year) to round of 16 (4 best 3rd place teams will also qualify)

Round of 16 (8 more) to get to round of 8

So 20 more matches

This year's cup had

Host country 1

Europe 4.5

Asia 3

Africa 2

South America 2

Oceania 1

Concacaf 2.5 (USA last to qualify with playoff against Italy)

Which confederations will get the additional spots?

I propose the following:

Host country 1

Europe 4.5 (+3)

Asia 3 (+2)

Africa 2 (+1)

South America 2 (+1)

Oceania 1

Concacaf 2.5 (+1)

Anyone with any other suggestions?

[terpfan68]

I realize it is 3.75 years till the next Women's World Cup (2.75 years away for the Under 20 Cup) and so there probably isn't much interest or speculation about the event yet but does anyone know how the visit by the WWC committee to the potential host cities turned out? Here in Winnipeg there was one brief article in the Free Press that said that the committee was "impressed" with Winnipeg as a site for first round matches. Any info on the other cities?

[argh1]

The committee was in Moncton for TD Atlantic and is set to return later....maybe early Oct.

The T&T reported that the feed back was that FIFA and CSA said that they will help as they can getting ready for 2014 and 2015.

Pretty much anybody who put in a bid is in.

Ottawa and Halifax are the exceptions with getting stadiums built on time.

[alberta white]

The committee was in Moncton for TD Atlantic and is set to return later....maybe early Oct.

The T&T reported that the feed back was that FIFA and CSA said that they will help as they can getting ready for 2014 and 2015.

Pretty much anybody who put in a bid is in.

Ottawa and Halifax are the exceptions with getting stadiums built on time.

Most reports I've seen do not list Toronto on the Biding List. Any reason other than oversite?

In 2002 Tokyo presumed as the capital city it would host the final so never officially bid. Hence the final in Yokahama.

Sounds ridiculous I know, but i've yet to find another explination.

[hc1]

Most reports I've seen do not list Toronto on the Biding List. Any reason other than oversite?

I think that Toronto is hosting the PanAm games at approximately the same time. They will not be involved.

[alberta white]

I think that Toronto is hosting the PanAm games at approximately the same time. They will not be involved.

Of couse that makes sense. thanks for that.

[VPjr]

here's a piece from the Winnipeg Sun about the CSA and FIFA inspection of Winnipeg's facilities that are being proposed for use during 2015 WWC.

http://www.winnipegsun.com/2011/09/27/winnipeg-hopes-to-make-good-impression

I was told by someone who took part in the presentation put on by the MSA and city of Winnipeg that they new stadium that will be home of the Blue Bombers is quite stunning.

only disappointing thing to me is that it seems very likely that this entire tournament will be played on synthetic turf. I guess that is the Canadian reality though.

Edit:

Here is an article from Edmonton Sun about the site visit in that city

http://www.edmontonsun.com/2011/09/26/edmonton-bids-to-host-fifa-womens-world-cup

[alberta white]

...only disappointing thing to me is that it seems very likely that this entire tournament will be played on synthetic turf. I guess that is the Canadian reality though...

Rest assured FIFA will no doubt turn that into a USP and thus spin it as a positive thing.

[Blackdude]

Rest assured FIFA will no doubt turn that into a USP and thus spin it as a positive thing.

I remember 4 years ago when they were making ads that the 2007 U-20 the first ever final to be played on FieldTurf. And they ran throughout 2007.

[navycyr]

Quebec soccer Federation has posted on its web site Montreal has received a delegation of FIFA and CSA officials for inspection of facilities both for FIFA 2014 U-20 and 2015 world cups.

http://www.federation-soccer.qc.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=457:la-fifa-a-visite-les-installation-du-site-de-montreal-en-vue-des-coupes-du-monde-feminines-2014-et-2015&catid=97:nouvelles&Itemid=174

[terpfan68]

Does anyone know when the host cities will be announced for the women's world cup?

[baulderdash77]

On attendance, I hope that we pick venues that can support the kind of attendance that will look good on Canada. For the 2010 U20's we got 1,195k, 23k/game. Hopefully our venue selections allow us to get higher than that. We're really counting on Edmonton, Vancouver & Montreal to get us that attendance up since the other venues are all in the 20-25k range.

WWC Attendance by event"

1991 - 510k, 20k/game

1995 - 112k, 4k/game

1999 - 1,194k, 37k/game

2003 - 657k, 21k/game

2007 - 1,157k, 36k/game

2011 - 846k, 26k/game

[terpfan68]

Winnipeg's new stadium will seat 33 000 + when it opens next June and it can be expanded to more than 40 000 if needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Winnipeg_Blue_Bombers_Stadium

Attendance will really depend on which teams go to which cities. The U.S. team should be placed in a group which plays in a city such as Montreal or Vancouver which has a large facility and is close to the border. Canada should be placed in Edmonton to maximize attendance. I hope they localize group games so teams (and fans) won't have to travel across the country to follow their teams. With 8 second round games (instead of 4) there will be some choices that will have to be made. Some venues will probably host two matches at this level.

Does anyone know what the time line looks like? Have they even determined how the extra 8 spots will be divided among the confederations?

[amacpher]

On Wikipedia it shows Ottawa's Frank Clair Stadium as 1 of the 8 proposed venues. Is this even possible? I thought that stadium had a meeting with the wrecking ball scheduled in the not-too-distant future? Not to mention the stadium has been deemed unsafe.

[ray]

^ That would be the Frank Clair replacement. However, a group of citizens is fighting in court to stop the construction: Ottawa delay

Another concern seems to be Halifax : Halifax delay

It doesn't sound all that hopeful that partners/investors will be found in just 3 months.

Does the CSA have any realistic backup hosting options?

[Med_Hat_FC]

Considering that half stadiums that they are looking at using are CFL stadiums, there are very few back up options. If the CSA and the CFL can come to an agreement during the month that the tournament is scheduled to be, they might be able to use McMahon Stadium in Calgary and Mosaic Stadium in Regina. The only other city that has a large stadium that is not on this list is PEPS Le Stade in Quebec City. Other then these few options, the CSA needs to step up its efforts to work with Ottawa and Halifax to ensure that these stadiums are ready to go for 2014 (U-20 Women's WC)

[xabuep2]

On attendance, I hope that we pick venues that can support the kind of attendance that will look good on Canada. For the 2010 U20's we got 1,195k, 23k/game. Hopefully our venue selections allow us to get higher than that. We're really counting on Edmonton, Vancouver & Montreal to get us that attendance up since the other venues are all in the 20-25k range.

WWC Attendance by event"

1991 - 510k, 20k/game

1995 - 112k, 4k/game

1999 - 1,194k, 37k/game

2003 - 657k, 21k/game

2007 - 1,157k, 36k/game

2011 - 846k, 26k/game

People love soccer in Canada, just take a look to the attendance in the past FIFA u-20 WC played in your country. In venues like Burnaby and Victoria with such as small stadia , most of the matches were sold out ¡ . Edmonton should have team Canada to try to sell all of the tickets ; in the U-20 WC attendance was between 25k to 32k. At least you count with BC Place and Commonwealth .......

Winnipeg (33000 to 40000 capacity) will be a fantastic option too.

But there is a problem : Montreal. For the last 2007 u-20 WC the CSA offered to FIFA the Saputo stade, but FIFA prefered the Olympic Stadium, better and old stadium with 60.000 seats than a new small one for 13.000. Now for the 2015 Women WC stade Saputo will be bigger ( 20.000) , but in my personal opinion is too small for such as big City like Montreal.

just look at this results of 2007 FIFA WC :

Poland- Brazil jun 30/2007 Montreal 55.800 fans

Portugal- Gambia jul/08 2007 Montreal 28.402 fans

USA- Poland jul/03 2007 Montreal 35.801 fans

Poland-Korea jul 06 2007 Montreal 34.912 fans

Mexico- Congo jul/12 2007 Montreal 40.204 fans

Chile- Nigeria jul/15 2007 Montreal 46.252 fans

Where do you set all of these people of Montreal in Saputo stade for the 2015 Women WC ?

Do you think FIFA will prefer again the Big O ?

[Med_Hat_FC]

Where do you set all of these people of Montreal in Saputo stade for the 2015 Women WC ?

Do you think FIFA will prefer again the Big O ?

They will probably choose the Big O, just cause it does offer them the option of a larger venue for marquee matches, as well as an opening or closing ceremony.

[Soccer9]

Big O, I guess. But what an ugly place to watch a soccer game, especially if you have to pay big $$$ for one :-)

[benjj]

They should play at McGill stadium. I played there a bunch of times when I played in the CIS a few years back. It's a great atmosphere.

[munseahawk]

They should play at McGill stadium. I played there a bunch of times when I played in the CIS a few years back. It's a great atmosphere.

I like that idea but I think the field there is field turf with permanent pointy ball lines. If they can get a good temp grass pitch installed and get the Alouettes on board, then I say go for it.

[Trillium]

The question left un-asked, if the rights for TV in the Carribbean could go to Jack Warner for one dollar, were the rights in Canada given to for votes or support by Canadian officials ?

Bill Archer Blog

Jack Warner Still Making Fools of the Soccer Media

Posted on December 30, 2011 3:51 pm

As utterly astonishing as it may appear to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the entire Caribbean football scandal, Jack Warner continues to play the Western media like a cheap clarinet.

The latest example of the lamestream media’s lazy cluelessness in regards to this story is the SHOCKING REVELATION currently reverberating around the football media echo chamber that FIFA has been handing over the TV rights to Jack Warner since 1998 for the princely sum of one dollar.

This is of course on a par with sending out a news flash about Lindbergh landing.

Andrew Jennings has been writing about it for over a decade. Trinidadian journalist Lasana Liburd has discussed it several times. Even your humble servant has talked about it to the point that I honestly considered it common knowledge.

Not good enough for you? How about the fact that no less a source than The Economist published this same “breaking news” back in 2002? (Hat tip to the intrepid Mr. Liburd)

It’s not that this information hasn’t been out there; it’s that soccerv reporters simply haven’t been paying attention and, incredibly in view of the events of the past 12 months, still aren’t.

Still, that’s not what’s so very troubling about this “new story” now making the rounds. We all know that, posturing and self-importance aside, the media is primarily populated with a bunch of guys who really don’t pay attention to anything which doesn’t involve expense paid trips and media passes. We don’t expect much else.

The problem is that I’ve been on the receiving end of several lectures from one or another of the American “big time professional soccer writers” whose names you would all recognize, who are unhappy with my continual harping on the fact that Jack Warner has been stealing and lying and hijacking the sport in this hemisphere for nigh on 20 years and none of these Princes of the Pressbox has ever so much as mentioned it.

Their response is that I “don’t understand the realities of covering sports” in the US. They assure me that they are “closely following” events and are “fully aware” of what’s going on, and that “someday” they’re really going to let fly with a bigass old expose on it all, you betcha.

Right. And those cookies I set out by the fireplace on Christmas Eve were eaten by a jolly fat guy in a red suit.

The sad fact is that following this stuff is more work than they’re interested in doing.

Much more fun to call up an MLS FO, intimidate some poor media department intern by mentioning the prestigious publication that pays your salary and having your ass kissed by some team flunky while you put your feet up on your desk and open the latest package of cookie cutter quotes from the thumbsuckers at USSF Media Relations and press “send” on the expense report for your trip to a game you barely understood in the first place.

But then along comes a quote from a man who anyone with a brain knows is a sick, bitter, racist, anti-Semitic, kleptomaniac liar who began making himself a very wealthy man by raping the coffers of regional football when most of them were still begging Mary Jane Grabcrotch for a handjob out back of the gym at halftime of the big game with Central and they can’t wait to pass it along without even a modicum of intelligent reflection.

They’d all best remember this day the next time they feel the urge to spew a bunch of anti-blogger bull**** in a meeting with MLS officials if my ass is in one of the chairs because it won’t just be Loney who laughs in their faces like it was the last time.

To show how truly ludicrous this non-story is, I’m linking to the outrageous report offered up by Bloomberg News, an article which is so intensely stupid that it apparently required not one but TWO highly credentialed idiots to write it.

Very first para:

“Former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner said he got the World Cup television rights for Trinidad & Tobago for $1 after helping Sepp Blatter get elected president of the soccer ruling body.”

I’ll skip the fact that the first year listed is 1998, and Joao Havelage was the President of FIFA then, and move along to the second para, which is laugh-out-loud ridiculous:

“He used the revenue from selling on the rights to develop the sport in the Caribbean, where he’s from, according to the statement.”

In fact, according to Warner – as dutifully related by the media imbeciles he so easily manipulates – the rights were awarded to him personally but he handed them over to the CFU so they could raise some money for soccer balls and shoes for poor Caribbean children.

Isn’t that nice of him? What a saint this man is. Why are they all picking on him?

The truth, which everyone who has paid even a little attention has known for a long time, is unfortunately somewhat less prosaic:

Since Caribbean TV rights were not, individually, worth that much in a bunch of poor small population “countries” where football isn’t widely popular anyway (and one of the biggest, Cuba, steals the signal anyway) FIFA really didn’t care that much about them. ISL had no interest either.

The idea was that FIFA would sell the rights to all of the Caribbean to the CFU and let them mess with it. FIFA wouldn’t have to waste time and money trying to sign a bunch of grass shack broadcasters and, maybe, the CFU could raise themselves a few bucks.

In reality what happened was that Jack Warner formed a corporation called JWI and, as President of the CFU, awarded the rights contracts to them. For nothing.

JWI then proceeded to peddle them to the various Caribbean countries for whatever they could get. In most places it wasn’t much. In others, like Jamaica, it was a tidy piece of change.

And the best part was that JWI got to keep the money. All of it. Nothing whatsoever flowed back to the CFU for “development” or anything else. Every dime went into Jack Warner’s pocket

As the years went by and the World Cup became a bigger deal, the rights which Havelange – not Blatter – originally granted to the CFU became more valuable, but not so much that it was worth pissing Jack off over.

In that sense, a small portion of the narrative is correct: Blatter, or more appropriately speaking the FIFA Media Committee, kept giving the CFU TV rights because it was a small price to pay for Warner’s support.

So even as the dollars involved went up – reportedly, the 2014 rights were resold for around US$20 million, which is a lot of money to you and I but for FIFA, with their US$2.4 billion budget, it’s a rounding error or a month’s worth of single malt scotch – FIFA knew full well that Warner was stealing it all but didn’t say anything because Blatter liked those 35 votes.

In an incredible piece of theater last October, FIFA announced that they were shocked – SHOCKED – to discover that this has been going on and cancelled the contracts which Warner had already granted to JWI for the 2014 and 2018 World Cups.

And THAT is what Warner is so furious about. He’s said so on several occasions.

So to sum up:

Warner says Blatter gave him the TV rights personally and he gave them to the CFU s they could raise money for the children.

In reality, during the Havelange administration FIFA’s Media Committee granted the TV rights for the Caribbean to the CFU, which Warner then stole and used to raise money which he pocketed for himself.

(And I’d also note that while they’re only too happy to pass along Jack Warner’s absurd, outrageous and patently ridiculous “statements” not a single one of them has ever written one solitary word about how this same man has stolen the confederation’s bank accounts, locked it’s officials out of their offices, hidden all the records and confiscated CONCACAF’s $16 million “Center for Excellence”. Not. One. Word.)

The only real news here is that he hasn’t ever claimed – before yesterday – that the CFU was the beneficiary of the money. This was because not even he was willing to lie that much.

Now, however, he’s getting the world football media to do it for him.

[Joe MacCarthy]

2015 Women’s World Cup could be a memorable event for Canada

Andrew Bucholtz Eh Game 4 May, 2012

The best women's soccer players in the world will be coming to six cities across Canada in the summer of 2015. FIFA president Sepp Blatter was at Ottawa's Parliament Hill Friday to make the official announcement of which Canadian cities were selected as hosts for the 2015 Women's World Cup, and, as expected, Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Winnipeg and Moncton were chosen. (Toronto declined to bid for the event thanks to preparations for hosting the Pan-Am Games that same summer.) That should set the stage for a tremendous and historic event, one of the most high-profile women's sports competitions in the world, and one that should provide a chance to see the Canadian team excel.

The Women's World Cup isn't as well-known as the men's competition, and that's understandable considering both its recent beginnings (the tournament only started in 1991, compared to the men's tournament's debut in 1930) and the lower degree of interest many have in women's soccer. However, it's still an incredible tournament in its own right, and it's the largest single-sport women's event in the world. What's also notable is that the Women's World Cup is on the rise; it's come a long way from the initial domination of the Americans, Norwegians and Germans to a place where there are plenty of contenders around the world, as exemplified by the Japanese team's surprising victory over the U.S. in the 2011 tournament final.

That growing depth will be reflected in 2015. The tournament's expanding from 16 to 24 teams and from 32 to 52 matches, and that will allow Canada to be a part of women's soccer history. There are still definitely teams that are head-and-shoulders above the main pack, including the U.S. and Canada (as seen in Olympic qualifying this year), but the women's game is getting much better around the world, and that should make for at least some entertaining and competitive matches in all of the Canadian host cities.

Expect Canadian fans to turn out in force, too. This country's gotten behind big soccer events before, including the 2007 men's U-20 World Cup and the 2002 women's U-19 World Cup, which saw 47,000 pack Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium to watch the home team take on the U.S. in the final. Which stadium will host the 2015 final doesn't seem to have been determined yet, but Commonwealth and B.C. Place will presumably be in the running, and either would be an excellent choice. The other stadiums involved should be great sites for this tournament as well, including the new CFL stadiums in Winnipeg (to be completed this year) and Ottawa (to be completed for 2014), Montreal's Olympic Stadium and Moncton Stadium. There are strong soccer communities in each city involved, and we've seen plenty of support for the Canadian women's team over the last decade; it's not hard to imagine large numbers turning up for other matches, either, especially if enough is done on the promotion and marketing front to convince people of the quality of soccer that will be on display. Some of the world's best female athletes are coming to Canada in 2015, and it should be a great event for the country; Canada's also a perfect host for this tournament, given the interest in women's sports here (as we've seen with other events like the women's ice hockey world championships). It's a perfect fit of event and location, and it should produce a memorable experience.

It's also positive that the Canadian team seems to be on the upswing under new coach John Herdman, who led them through the Olympic qualifying campaign with flying colours. There's a long way to go before 2015, but the Canadian women's team looks like a legitimate top-10 side at the moment, and if they can keep that up, they could use the home-field boost to do something really special in a few years. The 2015 Women's World Cup will be a solid event regardless of how the locals do (the winless, goalless performance of the home side at the U-20 World Cup in 2007 didn't spoil the party), but a strong Canadian showing could make it truly special, and there seems to be a good chance that could happen. It's going to be well worth watching.