England manager Sarina Wiegman distinctly remembers the day she and her Netherlands team-mates checked into the White Swan hotel in Guangzhou, China to launch an experiment that would forever change women’s football.
It was 1988, Wiegman was 18, and while men had been participating in World Cups for 58 years, a women’s equivalent existed only as an idea – one FIFA decided first needed to be tested in the form of a proof-of-concept, 12-team tournament at a time when even the now-dominant Americans had played just 22 matches.
