As the Women’s World Cup enters its final week, the Guardian says football fans are turning to their coverage of the tournament more than ever before with minute-by-minute live blogs, match statistics and analysis, in-depth news reports, and wide-ranging feature stories engaging readers around the world. Guardian sports writers from the UK, US and Australia have been providing reactions to the games, with reports from Suzanne Wrack, Sophie Downey, Jonathan Liew, Jeff Kassouf and Kieran Pender, alongside guest columns from Karen Carney, Anita Asante, Abby Wambach and Joey Peters.
The Guardian has covered women’s football since 2010, and says it has seen audience interest grow ever since. According to an Enders report on UK news publishers, in 2022 the Guardian was second only to the BBC in having the highest proportion of its online sports articles dedicated to women's sport, and with the 2023 Women’s World Cup drawing to a close the Guardian has been guiding fans with extensive coverage on and off the pitch from expert writers, columnists, podcasters and pundits.
The Guardian says coverage highlights from the 2023 Women’s World Cup include:
Readership
- The Guardian has so far produced over 400 articles on the 2023 Women’s World Cup – this already surpasses the total number of articles produced during the 2019 Women’s World Cup
- The Guardian’s 2023 Women’s World Cup coverage has received over 25m page views to date reaching a large, global audience, including the UK (34%), the US and Canada (24%), Australia and New Zealand (21%), Europe (14%), and the rest of the world (7%).
- The day of the quarter finals (12 Aug 2023) was the Guardian’s biggest day for sport since England’s World Cup quarter final last year (10 Dec 2022).
- The 2023 Women’s World Cup is the Guardian’s most read women’s football tournament ever – Guardian coverage of the 2019 competition saw 22.9m total page views and the 2015 tournament ended with 5.4m total page views.
- At the halfway point of the competition, the Guardian’s 2023 Women’s World Cup coverage had generated almost 3x more page views compared to the 2022 Women’s Euros.
Live blogs
- The Guardian has live blogged every 2023 Women’s World Cup game, averaging almost half a million daily page views.
- Australia’s quarter final win over France became the Guardian’s third biggest live blog ever for a women's football match amassing over one million page views – by comparison the top two were the 2015 Women’s World Cup final in which the US beat Japan (1.5m page views) and England winning the Euro 2022 final (1.3m page views).
- Page views to England’s opening game in this year’s tournament were up nearly 70% compared to England’s first game in the 2019 Women’s World Cup.
- In terms of average daily page views, the Guardian's live blogs make up around 50% of the Guardian's Women's World Cup coverage, highlighting a demand from readers to follow expert, minute-by-minute reporting of the games.
Women’s Football Weekly podcast
- The Guardian’s Women's Football Weekly podcast received 50% more downloads during the first four weeks of 2023 Women’s World Cup 2023 than the entire 2022 Women’s Euros tournament.
- Just over a third of listeners have been in the UK, with the majority coming from an international audience, including the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe.
- Top performing episodes include the World Cup preview episode, a review of England's first game, and shock exits at the group stage for Germany and Brazil.
Owen Gibson, deputy editor, Guardian News & Media, said: “The Guardian has long been committed to high quality coverage of women’s sport globally. From Wimbledon in tennis to the Ashes in cricket and, in particular, the football World Cup we have seen women’s sport take centre stage among some of our most read sport articles in 2023. A real shift is happening and the Guardian is leading the way.”
The Guardian’s interactive guide on all 736 players, written by experts from the players’ countries, also allows fans to get to know every team in the tournament featuring a breakdown into each player’s ratings, skills, history and life outside of football.
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