A profitable new seven-a-side international girls’s soccer collection has been introduced with the primary occasion set to happen in Portugal from 21-23 Could. The brand new competitors has been named the ‘World Sevens Soccer’ and it’s understood there’s a dedication to take a position $100m (£77m) within the collection over a five-year interval.
The brand new collection of invitational “grand slam” tournaments, first reported by the Guardian, will function $5m prize cash per occasion. It’s funded by funding from the US-based philanthropist Jennifer Mackesy, co-owner of the NWSL membership Gotham FC, and will probably be broadcast dwell by the streaming platform DAZN.
The groups concerned within the first eight-team competitors haven’t been confirmed, however a unique set of golf equipment will compete within the second occasion in November-December, which will probably be staged on a unique continent. The profitable staff at every occasion will obtain $2.5m.
The organisers say gamers will probably be “on the coronary heart” of the collection and so they have been guided by a participant advisory council, which is led by the previous USWNT winger Tobin Heath and likewise contains the previous Sweden captain Caroline Seger, the previous England and Group GB defender Anita Asante, the ex-USA right-back Kelley O’Hara, and the previous France defender Laura Georges, who beforehand spent greater than seven years because the secretary common of the French soccer federation.
‘World Sevens Soccer’ has named the previous US girls’s worldwide and Bay FC co-founder Aly Wagner as chief of technique, and he or she informed the Guardian: “That is a type of actually pivotal moments in girls’s soccer, and a possibility for us to do one thing distinctive and completely different. This can be a international collection that may journey the world and one of many keys to that is actually opening the market and rising the market of ladies’s soccer in these locations.
“The seven-v-seven format is one the gamers love, it’s considered one of their favorite issues to do in coaching, the small-sided video games and it’s one which I believe followers will find yourself clamouring for. It’s so intense, action-packed and it’s all of the stuff that gamers love, one-v-one duels, photographs, objectives.
“That is going to be a world-class occasion for these gamers, they’re going to be handled the way in which we all the time dreamed of being handled as gamers, from the second they step off the airplane.”
The inaugural event will probably be staged from 21-23 Could in Estoril, Portugal, on a grass pitch at Estádio António Coimbra da Mota, the place it’s understood a ‘stadium inside a stadium’ will probably be constructed round a half-sized pitch for the seven-a-side video games. That’s instantly within the run-up to this 12 months’s Girls’s Champions League last, being staged close by in Lisbon, so the 2 finalists is not going to be concerned within the first occasion.
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The venues for future occasions haven’t been introduced however the organisers say they’re planning to go to cities “throughout america, Mexico, Asia, Europe, and past”. The group have been in dialogue with Fifa and Uefa however don’t anticipate to wish any governing physique’s permission to run the collection, as a result of seven-a-side just isn’t a codified type of the sport.
