With more than one million tickets sold for FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023, Australia and New Zealand are preparing to host the largest football tournament in the history of the women’s game, welcoming millions of travelling fans from all over the world to stay and watch the world-class football on display – and they’re set to welcome a bunch of Poms.
This year’s tournament will be the biggest the country has seen since the Sydney Olympic Games held in 2000, with businesses, pubs and restaurants all anticipating an unprecedented influx of football fans within nine of Australia and New Zealand’s host cities.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino announced that more than 1 million tickets had been sold to this year’s tournament: “As I write this, 1,032,884 tickets have been sold… meaning that Australia & New Zealand 2023 is on track to become the most attended FIFA Women’s World Cup in history. The future is women – and thanks to the fans for supporting what will be the greatest FIFA Women’s World Cup ever!”
With millions of fans all descending on Australia’s cities, demand for short-term accommodation throughout the tournament has sky-rocketed. No more true than for short-stay specialists Airbnb, whose exclusive search data has been able to determine how many travelling fans are coming to watch the FIFA Women’s World Cup this year. Through their study, Airbnb have revealed that searches for accommodation throughout Australia and New Zealand’s cities have been dominated – unsurprisingly – by fans from the United Kingdom.
England is amongst the favourites to win FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 following its success in the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship held last year, and presents a real challenge, not only to Australia, but other hopefuls USA, France and Spain.
Rounding out the Top 5 for Airbnb searches is the USA in second place, then New Zealand, Korea and Germany.
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Australia, however, will be hoping that this could just be their tournament to lose; led by national team captain and this tournament’s poster girl Sam Kerr, the Matildas open their World Cup campaign against Ireland on July 20 2023, having beaten England in a friendly earlier this year. Also in Group B are Nigeria and Canada.
And after the Matildas FIFA Women’s World Cup squad was announced, fans are eagerly looking beyond the group fixtures and firmly into the crucial knockout rounds, where, as expected, Australia could just go all the way.
Expectations for Australia’s World Cup campaign are high following their final preparations in Melbourne last week, and the Matildas have as good a chance as any to lift the FIFA Women’s World Cup this year on home soil. In front of a full-capacity crowd, Australia grounded out a defiant 1-0 win against tournament rivals France to enter the competition on a high.
The Matildas enter the tournament as favourites to progress to the latter knockout stages and will hope to beat their previous finish in 2019 when they fell in the R16, losing to Norway on penalties, with renewed optimism that this could just be their year.
Australia kicks off its FIFA Women’s World Cup campaign against Ireland on July 20 2023 at 8:00pm AEST.