Record-breaking crowds at Women's Champions League matches should spur investment, a US soccer star says
- Women's Champions League games have earned unprecedented interest and set attendance records this year.
- Lindsey Horan said the rise should push the powers that be to "start investing" in the women's game.
Nearly 92,000 spectators were on hand to watch Barcelona wallop Wolfsburg in their Women's Champions League semifinal Saturday.
Once again, Barca's women's team officially drew more fans to Camp Nou than the club's men's team had all season.
The sellout crowd at the lopsided first-leg match broke the world record for most fans officially documented at a women's soccer game. Last year's Champions League victors set the record at the same historic venue during their Champions League quarterfinal El Clásico against rival Real Madrid just a few weeks prior.
The massive uptick in fan turnout is an encouraging sign for the growth of the game. But US Women's National Team superstar Lindsey Horan said significant interest in women's soccer shouldn't come as a surprise in the larger community.
"It almost looks like a shock to the world of football, but I'm hoping now that people see this and they buy into women," Horan told Insider. "And they buy into actually investing time and energy and coming to see these professional footballers play, because they're some of the best in the world."
"Barca is just such a huge example of that," she added. "The fact that they go out and blow out the record to 90-something thousand, and now got it again with their semifinal against Wolfsburg, it shows what they put on for that first game against Madrid."
Horan is competing on the other side of this year's Champions League semifinals with Olympique Lyonnais, the French powerhouse that won seven Champions League titles in a 10-year span. Horan and her abundance of international superstar teammates will look to beat or tie rivals Paris Saint-Germain Saturday to advance to the Champions League final, where they'd likely face Barcelona for a shot at their eighth title as a club.
The 27-year-old American midfielder points to investment as key to the success achieved by Barcelona and Lyon, two of the world's oldest, most established women's clubs. Compared to Premier League giants like Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, which founded their women's teams just three years ago, clubs like the four in the 2022 Champions League semifinals have had a significant head start building prestige and loyal fan bases.
Horan hopes that clubs around the world will take note of this and "start investing a little bit more" on the women's side.
"It's cool. It's exciting. But this has been too long coming," Horan said of the massive crowds and attention paid to women's soccer. "We need to get better and better still. The one thing that I want to say is we can never stay content with this."
"We want to keep pushing the game because there are places that aren't getting this kind of fan base that should," she added.
The second leg of the Barcelona-Wolfsburg Champions League semifinal begins Saturday at noon ET, while round two of Lyon-PSG kicks off just after that game's conclusion at 3 p.m. ET. Fans around the world can watch both matches unfold for free on DAZN's YouTube channel.