Euro 2025: How ‘small' Switzerland came to host a tournament that could spark ‘cultural change'

New York Times

01-07-2025

Sometimes Tatjana Haenni felt envious during her teenage years and her eyes would flit towards football's traditional behemoths — Germany, France, Italy, Portugal or the Netherlands.
'I was almost jealous I wasn't one of them,' the former Switzerland international, now chief executive officer of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), tells The Athletic.
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'We (Switzerland Women) never qualified for anything. We were in the middle of Europe, surrounded by big footballing countries, smaller ones that still qualified.
'In my head, we were similar to the rest. But we were just so small.' So small, a well-trodden euphemism for 'too small'.
Upon Pia Sundhage's appointment as Switzerland's head coach in 2024, the former USWNT head coach cast the sentiment of smallness, of needing permission 'to dream', as her new team's biggest weakness. Despite the women's national team having existed since 1973, the team didn't qualify for a major tournament until the 2015 World Cup. Their overall European Championship record, having competed in 2017 and 2022, reads one win, two draws and three defeats.
In 2022, as former Swiss Football Association president Dominique Blanc uttered the proposition of a bid for this year's tournament to Haenni, then the association's head of women's and girls' football, she felt the familiar chorus slink through her mind, calculating which nations could be their co-hosts, just as Switzerland had done with the men's tournament in 2008 (their co-hosts were Austria).
When she convinced herself a solo bid was possible for a country of 8.9million people (Europe's 22nd-biggest population, couched between Belarus and Bulgaria), the chorus of smallness was this time repeated back to her, first from the Swiss FA, then the halls of UEFA, European football's governing body.
Switzerland had never hosted a major international women's tournament and its largest stadium, St Jakob-Park in Basel, has a capacity of less than 40,000. By comparison, when England hosted Euro 2022, Wembley — the nation's largest stadium and where the final was held — boasted 90,000 seats. Up against Poland, France and a joint-Nordic bid of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which had support from Iceland and the Faroe Islands, Switzerland looked like a pipe dream.
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'At one point, people in UEFA even told us to withdraw our bid,' Haenni says. ''Your chances are so small. Why don't you withdraw? England was such a success, we cannot go to a small country now'.'
Spoiler alert: Euro 2025 went to a 'small country'. The tournament starts on Wednesday, with Switzerland taking on Norway at St Jakob-Park on the opening day. For the next 26 days, Switzerland, a country that shares its borders with Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein, is at the epicentre of women's European football.
The title is not without hard work, including lobbying for funding, organising a rap artist to perform for UEFA's executive committee (you read that correctly), obtaining a cardboard cutout of Roger Federer and pulling together a bidding team of all women, the first for a major tournament in UEFA's history. But the hardest was arguably recalibrating what it means to be a woman in football in the country.
A source, who has chosen to remain anonymous to protect relationships, fails to stymie a smile as the tale of Switzerland's pitch is put to them.
How in October 2022 in Nyon, near Geneva, a rapper — a local Swiss citizen who speaks four different languages and came from an immigrant family — performed a two- or three-minute rap in front of UEFA's 20-member executive committee (the main decision-making body responsible for selecting host cities for tournaments). How there was a cardboard cutout of Swiss tennis star Federer standing tall in the room's centre and how, a few seconds into the rap, the 20 Grand Slam title-winner was facedown on the floor, a message clearly planted as the performer danced around the room rapping to the 19 men and one woman: 'We're here to talk about women's football in Switzerland.'
UEFA executive committee meetings are confidential affairs, so there is no public video of the pitch, but the source, familiar with the proceedings, confirms Haenni's tale.
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The pitch was the first of its kind in more ways than one. While a staple of the men's competition, pitches were only first used for the Women's Euros during the bidding for this tournament, UEFA agreeing to 15-minute presentations after it was suggested by Marion Daube, now director of women's football at the Swiss FA.
Switzerland's pitch for Euro 2025 was unconventional not only in its machinations but also in its architects. Haenni, director of women's football during the bid preparation, hired Daube, previously managing director of FC Zurich for 13 years, to lead operations. After the bid was confirmed in April 2023, the tournament's leadership team was an all-women affair.
'I have to stress that, because this is key to the bid's success: that it was women from women's football doing this,' Haenni says. 'Once we got the bid, all these guys from Euro 2008 came out and said, 'I'm tournament director, I know what to do'. Instead, we hired Doris Keller, who has worked in football for 30 years, as tournament director. Again, a woman out of football who is passionate.
'That's why Switzerland will be an amazing tournament and have an amazing legacy. Because women who care were involved.'
The significance of the all-women leadership team grows greater when juxtaposed with the nation's historic relationship with women's football. The Swiss FA was one of many associations to ban women's football in the 1920s, refusing to formally recognise the game until 1993 amid ordinances from global governing bodies FIFA and UEFA, despite a national league and team being in operation since the early 1970s.
But the prism through which women's football was and is considered nationally is still fraught. The Swiss Women's Super League (the nation's highest tier) is not fully professional, forcing players to supplement playing careers with side jobs or move abroad to pursue careers, such as 32-year-old midfielder Lia Walti (Arsenal), record goalscorer Ana-Maria Crnogorcevic (Seattle Reign) and 18-year-old forward Iman Beney (who has just joined Manchester City).
When Haenni approached the Swiss FA about the budget for the bidding process — 250,000 to 400,000 Swiss Francs (£228,000 to £360,000; $313,000 to $501,000) — she said the council said they would only provide a deficit guarantee, forcing Haenni to lobby to cantons (the districts that make up the Swiss state of which there are 26) for additional funding.
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While the districts agreed, controversy arrived in January 2024 when the Swiss government announced it would offer 4million Swiss Francs to support the tournament, despite initially promising 15m Swiss Francs and allocating 82million Swiss Francs for the men's Euros in 2008. The cuts were met with outrage, and the decision was eventually reversed in May (the Swiss government only meets four times a year for three-week sessions).
Haenni views the nation's relationship with women's football as symptomatic of an entrenched culture.
'Switzerland was also a conservative country when it comes to women's rights and women in society,' she says, adding that the last canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, to grant women the right to vote did not do so until 1990 after a ruling by the nation's supreme court. Swiss women had gained the right to vote in federal elections in 1971 — 51 years after the United States had established women's suffrage and 43 years after the United Kingdom.
'It comes back to Switzerland is conservative,' Haenni says. 'It was that thinking of, 'Oh, it's a women's tournament. It will be in a few cities with a few girls kicking a ball around'.
'They didn't understand the size of it, the importance of it, the opportunities. It was a political decision to reduce funding in an area, at a moment when they were reducing everywhere across the country. But they realised they made a mistake.'
A bid that once required Blanc to lobby UEFA nations for legitimacy has now surpassed 600,000 ticket sales before the first game, with 22 of 31 matches already sold out. Prize money has increased 156 per cent from Euro 2022 to €41m (£35m; $48m), with players guaranteed to receive a 30-40 per cent share of national association's allocation for the first time. With over 180,000 international fans set to attend, the tournament is estimated to generate 193 million Swiss francs (£176m, $242m) in economic impact, according to UEFA.
'That's why we wanted the tournament,' Haenni says. 'Sporting wise, this will be really, really difficult. We qualified as the last team for the 2023 World Cup, we had luck in the play-off draw.
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'But sporting success was not the goal. People think you have to do well as the host for the atmosphere and emotions in the country. But if you build your ticketing strategy and overall concept on that, it's a mistake. Germany 2011, Canada 2015. It's not about the host team being successful.
'The goal is to host a tournament to show Switzerland how great women's football is. All these people will jump from a low level of either not knowing or not watching it to, holy f*** this is great. If you do that with 20 to 30 per cent of society, it will be a cultural change for women and women's football in this country for the future.
'Because you cannot just go bigger, bigger and bigger. Because then it will only be Germany, England, Spain, Italy.
'UEFA has 55 member associations. The smaller nations cannot just host under-17s and under-19s. It's not about the size of the stadium or every match having 90,000 people. What really matters is that the whole country's behind it, then you sell it to the world. And in women's football, it's so much more.
'You really change a country if you host it properly. But you need people out of women's football who know why you host a tournament.'
Midway through preparations for Switzerland's Euro 2025 bid, Haenni was asked to become the NWSL's chief sporting director. 'In typical American style, they asked if I could start in two weeks,' Haenni says with a laugh. 'I told them no, I have a really important project I need to finish. I'm not running away.'
Haenni instead began working in America on January 1, 2023, two months after the bid's submission. But her eyes regularly darted to Switzerland, eagerly awaiting news of the decision. 'I was super nervous, but also, we had nothing to lose,' she says.
'We were super happy with our bid. We raised awareness. We raised funding. We woke people up. And it was the right decision because the other bids were mostly guys. It's not possible that after 50 years of women's football (being officially integrated), there's not a woman who can run things.'