u/mwr3

This is going to be a rant, and not something with answers, so sorry in advance!

I have been fortunate enough to be at the last two Women's World Cups, France 2019 and AUS/NZ 2023, roughly 20 games between the two contests. I am currently visiting Vancouver and watching this city prepare for the men's tournament starting in a few weeks, and what I am seeing here is making it impossible to ignore just how badly FIFA mishandled the women's game in France.

Walk around Vancouver right now and the city is awash in banners, hotels with game balls and jerseys on display, boots in glass cases, full memorabilia setups in lobbies, plus pop-ups, merch displays, and ad buys everywhere. This is in spite of the fact that ticket sales for the men's tournament have been underwhelming, and yet the marketing spend is enormous, with the whole city dressed up for an event whose actual demand has come in softer than they hoped.

Now compare that to France in 2019.

I don't want this to read as purely anti-France, but the contrast is impossible to ignore. Hotels in host cities were not festooned, there were no knockoff jerseys being hawked on street corners, no hosted parties outside of the official FIFA fan zone, no pop-up bars, no branded anything out in the wild, and if you stepped outside the stadium footprint, you would have had no idea a World Cup was happening. We had cab drivers who drove us to the stadium and didn't know it was going on. I am not exaggerating. I get that France has a pretty bad track record when it comes to women, but I understand that as an American this could be taken the wrong way, so I'll just add that there's evidence from the French government to support this. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/sexism-in-france-is-alarming-and-getting-worse-says-report

And then there is the merchandise, which is the part that really gets me, because at every single game I went to, especially the USWNT games, UK games, and Dutch games, every item down to the last keychain was sold out before the ball was kicked. They had so badly underestimated interest that they ran out before matches even started, and here is the part that broke my brain: nobody fixed it. No rush orders, no second runs, no street vendors with t-shirts hastily printed in the back of some warehouse overnight, just nothing. The supply situation stayed broken for the entire tournament, and that is the piece I could not wrap my head around at the time, because I assumed basic capitalist greed would have stepped in to fix what FIFA could not. American fans who had flown across an ocean were literally begging to give people money, and FIFA, the local organizers, and every potential entrepreneur in Paris with access to a screen printer all simply left that money sitting on the table for weeks.

I actually had the chance to ask a senior FIFA official about all of this at an event during the tournament, and the answer is something I have not been able to shake. He told me they "just did not think so many Americans would travel," which was already a strange thing to say given that ticket sales had been public for months and they could see the numbers. When I pressed on the lack of marketing and fanfare, he told me they did not think sponsors would want to pay to market a women's tournament, and when I pointed out the absolutely enormous amount of money spent in the US every year marketing specifically to women, he sort of waved me off and said the US "is not really that into football." Essentially he was using men's-tournament interest as the benchmark for the women's tournament, which is a piece of reasoning so circular it still makes me dizzy thinking about it.

That conversation, for me, is the entire problem captured in one exchange. The misogyny inside FIFA was so deeply structural that it was overriding the most basic instincts of capitalism, which is the part I find genuinely sad. Capitalism has plenty of flaws and I find most of them easy to name, but the one thing it usually does well is route greed around stupid prejudices given enough time, and as an American I assumed that was exactly what would happen here, that someone, somewhere would see the money sitting on the table and grab it. Nobody did. FIFA's gender bias ran deeper than its own profit motive, and that is not a thing I expected to watch happen.

AUS/NZ in 2023 was clearly better, and I want to give credit where it is due, because someone, somewhere had finally learned the merchandise lesson and game-day merch was vastly improved, to the point where you could actually buy a shirt. But the city-level fanfare, the sponsor activation outside the stadiums, and the broader marketing spend were still a fraction of what gets thrown at the men's game, and I am willing to chalk some of that up to geography, because travel was harder, the reachable audience was smaller, and that genuinely affected the math.

Vancouver in 2026 has no such excuse running in the other direction. The men's tournament here is underperforming on ticket sales and they are still spending more on atmosphere and marketing than was spent on two consecutive sold-out women's tournaments combined, which is not a market response, it is a value judgment dressed up as a market response.

The maddening part is that the women's game is now demonstrably one of the fastest-growing properties in sports, between NWSL valuations, broadcast rights deals, sponsor interest, continued USWNT interest, the Lionesses, the most recent Euros, all of it, and the data has been screaming for years. FIFA is still acting like it is doing the women's game a favor by hosting it.

I do not have a clean ending for this. I just keep walking past these Vancouver hotel lobbies with their pristine display jerseys and thinking back to that half-empty merch table outside Parc des Princes in 2019 with a sign that might as well have read "sorry we hate women more than we like money".