Why the 2023 Women's World Cup could be a watershed moment for women's soccer

This Sunday, England and Spain will face-off in the final match of the 2023 Women's World Cup. It's the first time either team has ever made it to the championship game.

And with typically dominant teams including the U.S. and Germany making early exits from the tournament, some sports experts are saying this marks a new era in women's soccer.

"I think it says so much [about] the development of the game," said Sonja Missio, the co-founder of the soccer publication Unusual Efforts.

"There's all this new attention on the game. All these countries that wouldn't necessarily, you know, pay attention to as much before are now having all of these eyes on the game," she told The Current's guest host Catherine Cullen.

Broadcasters reported breaking viewership records for Women's World Cup games, including an estimated 6.43 million people watching the U.S.-Netherlands match according to Fox News. FIFA announced it sold 1.5 million tickets earlier in August, surpassing total sales of tickets compared to the 2019 event in France.

The exposure is pulling people in and making them feel more connected to the players, the teams and the sport, said Missio. And this creates a "snowball effect" of more lucrative sponsorships and more countries investing time and money to develop high-caliber players. 

The tight matches, high drama and upsets that came with such a strong lineup of teams made this World Cup special, according to Laurent Dubois, author of Soccer Empire and The Language of the Game. 

"Sometimes in earlier tournaments you had kind of more lopsided games early on, you know, really big differences" in the final scores, he told The Current. "We had very few games like that this time. And I love that somehow."

As women's soccer