Women's soccer at Euro 2025 aims for global impact with world champion Spain eyeing 1st title

GENEVA (AP) — The European Championship in women’s soccer has global ambitions.

The 16-team tournament that opens Wednesday in Switzerland features 31 games in total and will be broadcast in the United States by Fox and across Latin America by Disney+.

It will draw a tournament record attendance of more than 600,000 fans in the eight stadiums with ticket buyers from more than 120 countries, according to European soccer body UEFA.

“We knew we needed to activate a bigger global fan base that travels (and) follows their team,” said Nadine Kessler, the managing director of women’s soccer at UEFA.

She said 35% of the tickets sold so far went to traveling fans including 5,000 to residents of the United States. The biggest international buyer is Switzerland’s neighbor Germany with 61,000 tickets.

“That is unheard of in women’s football,” Kessler told reporters at a pre-tournament briefing.

World champion Spain is the expected favorite — even with a question mark on the status of star Aitana Bonmati — and starts Thursday against Portugal in Bern.

The third Women’s Euros in the 16-team format has drawn record income from broadcasters and sponsors, which include global brands Adidas, Amazon, PlayStation and Visa.

Overall tournament revenue close to 130 million euros ($152 million) will be more than double the Euro 2022 edition in England.

Prize money also has more than doubled — to 41 million euros ($48 million) from 16 million euros ($18.75 million). The champion can get more than 5 million euros ($5.9 million) if its run includes winning all three group-stage games.

The revenue share to clubs releasing players selected for the tournament also doubled, to 9 million euros ($10.5 million), lifted by a bonus subsidy of 3 million euros ($3.5 million) from a similar program for men’s national-team competitions in Europe.

UEFA will make a loss on the tournament of up to 25 million euros ($29.3 million) though is happy to do so.

“We invest more despite not making money with the Euro because it’s just the right thing to do,” said Kessler, a former FIFA World Player of the Year who won the Euro 2013 title with Germany.

Germany’s title with Kessler 12 years ago was its sixth straight but a seventh has been elusive. The Germans are an expected contender after several high-scoring victories in 2025 and taking a bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, where they lost twice to the United States.

Spain is the current World Cup and Nations League title holder though has never reached a Euros final and lost that bronze medal game in Paris to Germany.

Spain's plans have been disrupted by star player Aitana Bonmatí being hospitalized over the weekend with viral meningitis.

The host nation won in each of the past two Euros editions, and now defending champion England and 2017 champion the Netherlands are in the same group; they'll meet on July 9 in Zurich. It's a tough group that includes France.

Both title wins were coached by Sarina Wiegman, who will lead England against her native country with an extra layer of intrigue. After the tournament, Wiegman’s assistant Arjan Veurink will go home to coach the Dutch toward qualifying for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil.

A host nation hat trick looks unlikely, even with coaching great Pia Sundhage hired for the Switzerland job and a kind group draw with Norway, Iceland and Finland.

The Swedish veteran, and two-time Olympic champion with the United States, has called finding a winning blend in her squad of veterans and teenagers — like Barcelona prospect Sydney Schertenleib — the biggest challenge of her career.

Losing a training game 7-1 to the Under-15 boys’ team of top-tier men’s club Lucerne fueled negative headlines though Sundhage insisted: “The result doesn’t matter.”

“This is a good way to prepare,” Sundhage insisted, and seemed to be proven right days later when a final warmup friendly against the Czech Republic was won convincingly 4-1.

Switzerland opens its tournament Wednesday evening against Norway at a sold-out St. Jakob Park in Basel.

Switzerland, which co-hosted the men’s Euro 2008 with Austria, wants the women’s version to drive progress on gender equality in soccer and society.

A wider goal around the tournament is doubling the number of female players, referees, coaches and club directors, said national soccer federation president Dominique Blanc, one of 52 male leaders of the 55 national members of UEFA.

“We have come a long way in a really short time,” said former national-team great Lara Dickenmann, who was 29 when Switzerland first played at a major tournament in the 2015 World Cup.

The Ohio State University graduate said showcasing so many teenagers in this squad at home “is massive. A lot of younger kids are going to identify with these players.”

All eight tournament venues are home stadiums of top-division men’s teams, including all four Euro 2008 venues: in Basel, Bern, Geneva and Zurich.

Fans with tickets will have free public transport on match days using a national train service which should be more reliable than Germany’s proved to be at the men’s Euro 2024.

Euro 2025 games are on the main national free-to-air networks in Europe, unlike the live-streamed FIFA Club World Cup, which runs until July 13 in the United States.

Broadcast overlaps mostly involve France, whose game against England on Saturday clashes with the first half of a Club World Cup quarterfinal in New Jersey likely featuring Real Madrid. France-Wales on July 9 goes against a semifinal at the FIFA event.

The Club World Cup final goes directly up against the simultaneous kickoffs of France-Netherlands and England-Wales that complete Group D.

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer

Spanish head coach Montserrat Tome Vazquez, rear center, gestures during the training session of the Spanish women's national football team in Lausanne, Switzerland, Monday, June 30, 2025, ahead of the UEFA Women's EURO 2025. (Cyril Zingaro/Keystone via AP)

Fans react to the arrival of the Spain's women's national football team at their hotel, the Royal Savoy in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the sidelines of the UEFA Women's Euro 2025, Sunday, June 29, 2025. (Gabriel Monnet/Keystone via AP)

FILE - Spain's Aitana Bonmati, right, plays the ball past Portugal's Dolores Silvia during the Women's Nations League Group A3 soccer match between Spain and Portugal at the Balaidos stadium in Vigo, Spain, Tuesday, April 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Lalo Villar, File)

Spain's Maite Zubieta, left, and Laia Aleixandri, right, poses with fans for a selfie during a training session of the Spanish women's national football team in Lausanne, Switzerland, Monday, June 30, 2025, ahead of the UEFA Women's EURO 2025. (Cyril Zingaro/Keystone via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)