The Women's World Cup 2027: How Women's Football Got Here

The Women's World Cup 2027 will be held in Brazil — the first time the tournament comes to South America. But before the first ball is kicked in Rio or São Paulo, it is worth understanding how long and how hard the road to this moment actually was.

The Opening Ceremony of Women's Football: The Forgotten Pioneers

Women have been playing football since the game existed. The first recorded women's match took place in Scotland in 1881, in Inverness, though the reports of the time treated it more as curiosity than sport. In England, the first organised women's football club of note was the British Ladies' Football Club, founded in 1894 by Nettie Honeyball — a pseudonym, because the women involved understood that public association with the game carried social risk.

Honeyball's stated ambition was to prove that women could play the game as seriously as men. The first match, held in March 1895 at Crouch End Athletic Ground in London, drew a crowd of around 10,000. The press covered it. Some found it comic; others found it threatening. Almost none took it seriously as sport. That indifference, or hostility, would define the next century.

The First World War changed things briefly and dramatically. With men at the front, women entered the factories — and with the factories came works teams. The most famous was Dick, Kerr Ladies FC, formed in Preston in 1917 among workers at a munitions plant. By 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies were drawing crowds of 53,000 at Goodison Park. They were the best team in the country by any measure, and they were women.

The Ban, the Wilderness Years, and the Slow Return

The FA's 1921 ban was blunt in its reasoning: football, the governing body declared, was "quite unsuitable for females." Member clubs were prohibited from hosting women's matches on their grounds. The effect was immediate and lasting. Women's football was pushed to the margins — church halls, local parks, informal competitions with no infrastructure and no path to growth.

Dick, Kerr Ladies kept playing. They toured North America in 1922 and beat every team they faced. Lily Parr, their left-winger, is now considered one of the greatest footballers — male or female — of the interwar period. She had a shot that broke a male goalkeeper's arm in training. She scored over 900 goals in her career. She was inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame in 2002, more than thirty years after she retired.

The UEFA Women's Championship began in 1984, tentatively, without the full backing of the governing bodies. It was a start. The FA finally lifted its ban in 1971, the same year UEFA officially recognised women's football. Fifty years of suppression, ended by a bureaucratic memo.

The First Women's World Cup: China 1991

The first FIFA Women's World Cup was held in China in 1991 — quietly, without much fanfare from the wider football world, and with a tournament name that did not even include the word "World Cup" (it was officially called the FIFA World Championship for Women's Football). Twelve teams competed. The United States won it, beating Norway 2–1 in the final in Guangzhou.

The US team of that era — Michelle Akers, Carin Jennings, April Heinrichs — were genuinely extraordinary footballers operating in near-complete obscurity. Akers scored ten goals in six matches. The tournament averaged crowds of under 20,000. Almost nobody outside the competing nations knew it had happened.

Four years later, Sweden 1995 gave Norway the title, with Hege Riise and Ann Kristin Aarones producing football of genuine quality. But it was the 1999 tournament, in the United States, that changed everything.

The Rose Bowl Moment: USA 1999

The 1999 Women's World Cup final was played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before 90,185 people — at the time, the largest crowd ever to watch a women's sporting event. The United States beat China on penalties. Brandi Chastain scored the winning spot-kick and pulled off her shirt in celebration: the image ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Time, and Newsweek simultaneously. It is one of the most reproduced sports photographs in history.

What 1999 proved was that the audience existed, if you gave women's football a proper stage. The Rose Bowl was not a charitable gesture toward a minority sport — it was a sold-out stadium in one of the largest media markets on earth, and it was full because people wanted to be there. The lesson took time to be learned everywhere, but it was there to be learned.

Mia Hamm, who had been the face of that tournament, retired in 2004 as the all-time international top scorer in world football, male or female. She had 158 goals in 276 appearances. She had also, almost incidentally, become the most commercially successful female athlete in history.

From Australia 2023 to the Women's World Cup 2027 in Brazil

The 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand was the largest edition yet — 32 teams, record attendances, and a global television audience that for the first time genuinely rivalled major men's tournaments in several markets. Spain won it, with Aitana Bonmatí producing some of the finest individual football seen at any World Cup in recent years. England reached the final. The semi-finals were watched by tens of millions across Europe.

The 2027 Women's World Cup heads to Brazil — a country where women's football has its own deep history, and where the passion for the sport is unlike anywhere else in South America. The host cities include Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Porto Alegre, Manaus, Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, and Belém. The stadiums are the same ones that hosted the men's World Cup in 2014. The infrastructure is in place. What remains is the football.

We are building our Women's World Cup 2027 packages around the tournament now. If you want to follow your team through Brazil — whether that is England, Australia, the USA, Colombia, Argentina, or any of the other nations — send us an enquiry and we will put together the right itinerary.