Brazil to host 2027 Women’s World Cup after seeing off European bid

Brazil was declared the host of the 2027 Women’s World Cup at the Fifa Congress, beating the joint bid of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany to become the first South American country to hold the tournament.

The Brazil bid received the backing of 119 member associations to host the 10th edition of the competition, compared with 78 votes for the European bid.

“We knew we would be celebrating a victory for South American women’s soccer and for women,” said the president of the Brazilian Football Confederation, Ednaldo Rodrigues. “You can be sure, with no vanity, we will accomplish the best World Cup for women.”

Brazil was given a slight edge after a Fifa technical evaluation released last week gave it a score of four out of five, against 3.7 for the Belgium-Netherlands-Germany bid. The race was whittled down to two last month after the United States and Mexico withdrew their joint bid to pursue the 2031 tournament. Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, said the Brazil tournament would be “the best Women’s World Cup ever”.

Infantino also told the congress that the prospect of a legal row over Fifa’s plans for a 32-team men’s Club World Cup next summer was a “futile debate”. Fifa has been told it faces legal action from the World Leagues Association, chaired by the Premier League’s chief executive, Richard Masters, and the world players’ union Fifpro if it does not reschedule the tournament, due to take place in the US in June and July next year.

Infantino said that even with the expanded Club World Cup Fifa organised “around 1% of the games of the top clubs in the world” and that “the one or 2% of matches that Fifa organises is financing football all over the world. The revenues that we generate are not just going to a few clubs in one country. The revenues that we generate are going to 211 countries all over the world.

“There is no other organisation that does that. So I hope these figures – which you can of course check and calculate – should probably stop this futile debate which is really pointless and focus on what we have to do, what our mission is, which is to organise events and competitions and to develop football around the world, because 70% of you, the member associations of Fifa, would have no football without the resources coming directly from Fifa.”

The Fifa Council is set to make a decision no later than 20 July on whether to agree to Palestine’s call to suspend the Israeli federation.