History of the Women’s World Cup

The U.S. team celebrating after they won the 1991 FIFA Women’s World Cup (courtesy of FIFA.com)

Origins of the Women’s World Cup & Previous International Women’s Tournaments

These pages will be summarizing the six prior Women’s World Cups that have been contested. An additional page will delve into the origins of the World Cup as it pertains to earlier versions of the tournament as well as similar competitions.

As you can read in these pages, the World Cup has grown from a small tournament with minimal media coverage and public exposure that FIFA did not even want to put their name on in 1991 to the massive cultural phenomenon it is today. The tournament slowly grew before exploding in 1999, when it set attendance and TV ratings records that still stand today. While the tournament has yet to match the mania seen in 1999, in the next three World Cups continued to grow women’s soccer and solidify itself as an important cultural event every four year.

The summary pages have been setup in an easy-to-read fashion. Each World Cup is broken down by group play in each group, the knockout round, and a longer recollection of the final. Because of the nature of this structure, a specific part of any tournament (i.e. who advanced from Group B in the 2011 WWC), therefore, will be easy to identify. Hard and quick facts about each year’s tournament is available as a header on each page.

The World Cups 

Pre 1991 Women’s Soccer

 1991 Women’s World Cup in China

 1995 Women’s World Cup in Sweden

1999 Women’s World Cup in the U.S.A.

 2003 Women’s World Cup in the U.S.A.

2007 Women’s World Cup in China

2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany

How to cite this article: “History of the Women’s World Cup” Written by Anthony Russo, Ben Taylor, Francesca Brancati, James Ziemba, James Peek, James Pierpoint, and Nakul Karnik (2015), World Cup 2015 Guide, Soccer Politics Blog, Duke University, http://sites.duke.edu/wcwp/world-cup-guides/world-cup-2015-guide/history-of-the-womens-world-cup/ (accessed on (date)).

2 thoughts on “History of the Women’s World Cup

  1. Pingback: 2007 Women’s World Cup in China | Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

  2. Laurent Dubois

    This looks like it is coming together, but I’d make a few suggestions. First, hopefully you’ll write up some general introduction here on the broader themes taken up in the sub-pages. Second, it seems like you aren’t always following guidelines regarding the presentation of images: please read over the instructions regarding images and make sure they are all credited; the best is to make the images themselves into links that will bring people to the larger image url or the original page the image is from. I’ll try and check back to see how this is going!

    Reply

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