Women’s Euros to be rescheduled but dates unknown

The 2021 Women’s European Championship will be pushed back following the move by UEFA to reschedule this summer’s men’s iteration to next year over the coronavirus pandemic. 

The men’s tournament has been given a new start date of June 11, with the final set for July 11. Current scheduling would give an overlap of four days, with the women’s tournament set to kick off on July 7 2021.

According to The Guardian, a new timeframe for the women’s tournament has not yet been decided. The paper reports that some federations believe that the tournament will be moved to summer 2022, but the possibility of staging the men’s and women’s tournaments back-to-back in 2021 is still an option.

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, stated that a summer 2022 tournament is “one of the most likely” options, with the body also planning on postponing the Under-21 championship. He told the Associated Press: “We will have to postpone both because I don’t think that we should cannibalise the women’s Euro with the men’s Euro just one month before.”

While staging both the men’s and women’s tournaments one after the other could be feasible, there have been concerns that this would oversaturate the attention for football and leave little appetite for the women’s tournament – a direction that all football bodies are actively trying to avoid.

However, pushing the women’s Euros to 2022 would also potentially see a three-year gap between top international tournaments, result in necessary renegotiations of sponsorship contracts, and have a knock-on effect on the qualifying for the 2023 World Cup.