All that was needed: Swiss coffee and croissants

The 6th of June is Sweden´s National Day. Television viewers will, as every year, by live broadcasting watch the royal family attend the ceremonies in Stockholm. The 6th of June is also the day when the king of Swedish football, Zlatan Ibrahimovic,  may at last win the UEFA Champions League.

While the ceremonies in Stockholm are going on, some 70 000 out-of-city football fans will take the U-bahn or the S-bahn and head towards western Berlin and start filling up the imposing Olympiastadion.Together with me and hundreds of millions other viewers in front of screens of all sizes, they will follow the fate of the players lucky enough, or rather skilful enough, to reach the final of the world´s biggest club tournament. Starting at 8.45 CEST, we will all hopefully witness ninety minutes (and then some) filled with fabulous football and big excitement. May the best team win!

By the time the teams have left the pitch and the stands of the Olympiastadion are emptied, two other nervous teams will be warming up far far away, eight time zones westwards. In Edmonton, Canada, the host nation will face the People´s Republic of China in the opening match of the Women´s World Cup, hopefully in front of a capacity crowd of 54,000. Kick-off is set to 4 pm local time. That´s less than ninety minutes after the final whistle of the Berlin match.

As I´ve written in an earlier post there are signs that 2015 can be a breakthrough year for women´s football. Great efforts are made in marketing the World Cup, and more than 600,000 tickets have been sold by the end of March (link here).
The two most powerful football organisations FIFA and UEFA both talk and write about the importance of supporting the development of women´s and girls´football in different ways. However, with these two matches being played on the same day, a lot of potential attention will be drawn from the match in Edmonton. The Champions League final is a huge, huge match, and there are not many events that would not lose the battle for attention with the build-up talk for a clash between Bayern München and FC Barcelona or between Cristiano Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

I don´t know which schedule was set first, and it doesn´t matter. If UEFA and FIFA really meant something with their words on women´s football, they could have just sat down and reached an agreement over some coffee and a few croissants. If the 256 km distance between Nyon and Zürich felt too far to travel, they could have settled with one or two domestic calls.

I can easily accept that the Champions League final is played on Sweden´s National Day, but it will be much harder to overcome the lack of decency in not caring for the top athletes of the World Cup. FIFA and UEFA have a lot of work to do if they want some credibility in this matter. For starters UEFA could celebrate Easter by announcing major changes in the prize money structure and the choice of venues for the Women´s Champions League 2015-16, but that´s a totally different sad story.