FIFA Women's World Cup 2011
Initially six national federations declared an interest in hosting the 2011 tournament but most withdrew leaving just Germany and Canada in the running. On 30 October 2007, one month after the German team had won the World Cup for the second time, FIFA's Executive Committee voted in favour of Germany hosting the sixth Women's World Cup finals.
Nine cities were chosen to stage matches. Five of the stadia were brand new and two had been recently remodeled. The DFB took a conscious decision to select a number of smaller venues with a capacity of 20,000-30,000 to ensure a good atmosphere at games.
The FIFA president, Sepp Blatter had proposed increasing the number of partipants to 24 but this was rejected due to concern that this would dilute the quality of the competition. The poor performance of the Argentinian team at the previous tournament swayed the opinion of several Executive Committe members.
In the past a considerable number of teams from Africa and the Middle East had withdrawn from qualification prompting FIFA to instruct its member confederations to ensure that at least a third of their membership participated otherwise they would review the allocation of places. There was in fact a change in the allocation for 2011. Asia now had three places (previously 2.5) while Europe's allocation was reduced to 4.5 (previously five). The last qualifying spot would go to the team finishing third in the CONCACAF Gold Cup and the winner of the repechage play-offs organised by UEFA. As usual UEFA was the only confederation to organise a dedicated qualification competition, a complicated affair in which the eight group winners played off to decide the four direct qualifiers. The losing teams from these play-offs then took part in the repechage competition for the right to play-off against the third placed CONCACAF team. For the first time in the history of the tournament China failed to qualify for the finals.
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Group A | Group B | Group C | Group D | Knock Out Stages