FIFA cancels U17 Women's World Cup 2021

The 2021 U-17 Women's World Cup, which was scheduled to be held in India, has been cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic, FIFA announced on Tuesday. It has also been decided that India will host the 2022 edition of the World Cup.

The tournament was supposed to be held in November 2020 initially, only for the pandemic to force a postponement. FIFA then revised the schedule and the tournament was to be held in February and March in 2021 in India.

India was appointed as the host by the FIFA Council meeting at Miami on 15 March 2019. But after taking stock of the pandemic situation, the governing body for the sport decided to scrap the event in its entirety. The 2020 U20 Women's World Cup has also been cancelled along with the U17 edition. 

"Since the previous decision earlier this year to reschedule both tournaments to early 2021, FIFA has been consulting with all stakeholders. As a result and after careful consideration of the feedback received by the stakeholders combined with the inability to further postpone these tournaments, the FIFA-Confederations COVID-19 Working Group subsequently recommended that the 2020 editions of the two women’s youth tournaments be cancelled and that the hosting rights for the 2022 editions be offered to the countries that were due to host the 2020 editions," a release from FIFA stated. 

FIFA also asserted that the decision was taken after the various stakeholders decided to take a 'health and safety first' approach.

India will now host the 2022 U17 Women's World Cup while Costa Rica will get the chance to host the 2022 U19 Women's World Cup. 

Most of the qualifiers for the 2021 U17 Women's World Cup also had not been completed and with the pandemic still continuing worldwide, it seemed highly unlikely that they would have been conducted in time for the tournament.

It must be noted that the CAF (Africa), CONCACAF (North and Central America) and CONMEBOL (South America) qualifiers had not been conducted while UEFA (Europe) cancelled their qualifiers outright earlier this year, nominating Spain, England and Germany (as the highest-ranked teams) for the World Cup.

OFA also cancelled their qualifier and nominated New Zealand as their representative in the World Cup.

Five venues had been selected as host cities for the tournament - the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan (VYBK) in Kolkata, Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati, EKA Arena in Ahmedabad and the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.

Source: Goal.com