Women’s Club World Cup to take place in middle of the season with January-February dates proposed
Winter dates in the middle of the European season have been proposed for the new Women’s Club World Cup competition which Fifa aims to launch from 2026, Telegraph Sport can reveal.
January to February is being discussed – a contrast to the June-July dates that have been planned for the revamped men’s Club World Cup, which is being held in the United States in the summer of 2025.
Any final decision on the inaugural women’s competition’s schedule and format would still have to be approved by the Fifa Council, which could be as early as Wednesday’s meeting in Bangkok.
Sources indicate that the new women’s competition could initially be much smaller in size than the 32-team male counterpart and may be given the green light before the end of May.
The proposed January-February dates would fall before the start of the club season in the United States, where the NWSL kicked off in March this year, whereas in Europe it could sit in the gap between the Women’s Champions League group stages and the knockout rounds.
There is understood to be strong support across different confederations around the globe for the principle of creating the women’s event, with a feeling that it can help develop the women’s game and a widespread belief that the women’s edition could be more globally-competitive than the somewhat predictable current men’s version, which has been won by a European team 11 times in a row.
The global women’s club game has different power bases, with America’s highly successful NWSL likely to provide strong contenders, along with teams from Mexico’s flourishing league, Australia, Japan and Europe.
Fifa formally announced its intention to launch an inaugural Women’s Club World Cup back in 2022, but the idea was touched on by Fifa president Gianni Infantino back in 2019 and its potential creation has been a wider talking point in the women’s game for far longer than that.
The global women’s game has been having an ongoing discussion about the future international calendar beyond 2025. The current schedule up to 2025 has proven hugely unpopular with many of Europe’s leading players in particular, mainly because of the lack of a summer off-season break.
Currently there are no formal dates for any international women’s football that have been published past December 2025.
It comes in a big week for the global women’s game, with the Fifa Congress set to vote and decide the hosts of the 2027 Women’s World Cup on Friday. Brazil are the favourites, after the United States and Mexico withdrew their bid. A joint bid from Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands is also still in contention. The women’s tournament has never been staged in South America.
