Manchester United will compete in the inaugural edition of a lucrative, new women’s seven-a-side series from 21-23 May, alongside Bayern Munich, Ajax and Benfica, with the remaining four of the eight competing teams still to be confirmed.
Thenew competition, named World Sevens Football, which has a $5m (£3.75m) prize pool per event, with half understood to be set to go to the winners, is being staged in Estoril, Portugal in the run-up to this season’s Women’s Champions League final, and will be followed by another eight-team event – featuring a different set of clubs from around the world – in North America later this year.
The organisers are then planning to visit other continents in future years and eventually stage up to five competitions a year. While the remaining four participants for May’s event are not yet finalised, the Guardian understands that the English trio of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City have all held discussions about potentially taking part, as have other teams from different leagues around the world. The only European teams who will not be eligible to take part are the Champions League finalists.
“Innovation is a priority within our club,” said Ajax’s technical director, Alex Kroes, on their inclusion. “World Sevens Football provides an exciting opportunity for our players to demonstrate their creativity and skill in a fast-paced format. We have a young and talented team with a lot of players from our own academy and we’re ready to compete fiercely.”
Marc Skinner, Manchester United’s head coach, added: “This is a really exciting opportunity to be part of something new for the women’s game. Our only focus right now is on finishing the domestic season as strongly as possible in the WSL and the FA Cup; then we can travel to Portugal to enjoy what promises to be an entertaining three days of fast, fun, seven-a-side football.”
The competition will be broadcast live by the streaming platform Dazn and, for each individual match, teams can name a squad of 14 players with rolling subs, and can take a squad of up to 25 players overall to the tournament, to enable significant squad rotation. Each is 30 minutes long with 15-minute halves. The new event is being funded by $100m of investment over a five-year period, backed by the US-based philanthropist Jennifer Mackesy, co-owner of the NWSL club Gotham FC.
Many critics on social media have pointed to an already-congested women’s football calendar and the England head coach, Sarina Wiegman, has questioned whether there is room for this event in the schedule in the long-run. However, discussing the issue of player welfare on Thursday, the former England defender Anita Asante, who is an ambassador for World Sevens Football, said: “We wanted to centre the player welfare aspect in every decision that we made, regarding the format.
“Having a bigger squad allows them to be able to manage those minutes, manage the load and allow multiple players to have playing opportunities. These clubs are professional clubs who have professional staff who manage their strength and conditioning. We also trust that they make good decisions for their players because fundamentally these are players for their clubs as well. The short format, it’s three days, it’s going to be less taxing than an actual Euros in the context of a tournament format for players who have already played obviously a whole season.
Sign up toMoving the Goalposts
No topic is too small or too big for us to cover as we deliver a twice-weekly roundup of the wonderful world of women’s football
after newsletter promotion
“From the feedback we’re getting from players, they’re really excited to play in this competition. Players play a lot of small-sided games at clubs in their training sessions anyway, so they’re familiar with what they should expect from a game situation like this.”