UK Sport has set its sights on bringing the Women’s World Cup to Britain for the first time in the 2030s – but has ruled out hosting the Olympic Games for at least 20 years.
Simon Morton, the deputy CEO of UK Sport, also revealed the organisation would be evolving its strategy to focus on urban and e-sports because the rise of Saudi money made it harder to bid for large sporting events.
“The Women’s World Cup is the biggest sporting event that the UK has never hosted and so in that respect, it has a special appeal to us,” said Morton. “There is definitely an aspiration to host it in the 2030s.
“The impacts that we look for most strongly now around big sporting events are societal. And actually the ability to have these moments of real shared human experience where we bring people together, particularly in a sort of post-Covid world, particularly in an increasingly digital world.”
UK Sport will start looking more closely at the specifics after May, when Fifa will select the hosts for the 2027 tournament, with Brazil, Belgium/Germany/Netherlands and US/Mexico vying to stage it. If the European bid wins, the earliest Britain could host the Women’s World Cup would be 2035.
“We have to respect the fact that there are other countries interested in hosting them,” said Morton. “So that’s why you see a little bit of an open-ended position. But what is clear is that the UK’s mega-event hosting pipeline is tightening, and our international rivals are catching up. And so we need to respond.
“Live sport is a fundamental part of this country’s social fabric,” he added. “And our love of live sport is unsurpassed. No other country buys more tickets to major sporting events per head than we do in the UK.”
UK Sport also announced plans to bid for part of the Tour de France in 2027, the World Athletics Championships in 2029 or 2031, and the Rugby World Cup in 2035 or 2039. However it confirmed it would also pursue events which it said would “resonate and align with evolving consumer habits” such as urban and e-sports.
“When we talk to cities about events, pretty near the top of the list are urban sports,” said Morton. “And e-sports is quite a broad church. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got a pure gaming, Call of Duty, at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got virtual and simulated Olympic and Paralympic sports. And so where we’re going to start exploring is from that place, rather than the opposite.”
However Morton admitted that tightening economic conditions and the rise of Saudi money meant that UK Sport had to be strategic with the events it targets. And, significantly, there is no Olympics Games, men’s World Cup or Commonwealth Games on its list of targets for the next two decades.
“The challenge for us thinking about the Commonwealth Games in the future is simply a value for money one, rather than does it have benefit?” said Morton.
“We’ve got an open dialogue with the Commonwealth Games Federation, but until there is a little bit more clarity on what a sustainable Commonwealth Games model looks like in the future, it doesn’t appear on our list.”
UK Sport also downplayed the possibility of hosting the Olympics until at least 2044, given that the US and Australia both waited 32 years between Games. “To the IOC – with us hosting the games in 2012 – we are still a recent host,” said Esther Britten, head of major events at UK Sport. “We can’t see that until the 2040s at the earliest.”
