Euro 2022 stadium choices appeared unambitious in 2018 – they look worse now

This week the Iceland midfielder Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir voiced her frustration over the choice of venues for this summer’s women’s Euros in England. She questioned why two of her country’s games would be played at the 5,000-capacity Manchester City Academy Stadium and her remarks highlighted a number of important questions, chiefly among them whether the FA was ambitious enough in its choice of stadia and whether it has done enough to adapt to the accelerating growth of the game? Arguably, the answer to both questions is no.

There can be some sympathy towards the position the FA has found itself in four years on from crafting the bid to host the tournament. Back in August 2018, when the FA revealed its plans, and in December of that year when the solo bid was revealed to have been successful, women’s football was in a very different place.

However, the signs of potentially rapid growth were already there and were either overlooked, ignored or woefully underestimated. A staggering four million people had tuned in to watch the Lionesses’ semi-final exit to the Netherlands on Channel 4 the preceding summer. The Dutch, who hosted the tournament, rode to victory in the Euro 2017 final on an orange wave, with mass carnival-like fan walks to the grounds swamping Dutch streets before every sold-out Netherlands game.

As Gunnarsdóttir pointed out when speaking to the podcast Their Pitch: “I don’t know what’s going on in their heads or if they’re even following women’s football. Because if you would, it’s just common sense. Women’s football’s exploding, it’s getting so much better, and it’s just stupid to speak about it because it doesn’t even make sense.”

It was, and always has been, clear that major international competitions