London
London plans to host multiple series of major women’s sports events in 2025 — including football, rugby, tennis, cricket and netball. London Mayor Sadiq Khan deems the capital will be the “undisputed global capital for women’s sport in 2025.”
Wednesday night, the England Lionesses football team defeated previous world champions Spain 1-0 — a repeat match of the FIFA Women’s World Cup Final, in which Spain took home the gold. There was a power outage during the second half of the match, which temporarily stopped play for just a few minutes. England’s Jess Park was the only scorer in the matchup at Wembley Stadium, securing England their best match of this year so far.
Further, the Women’s Rugby World Cup final will be held at Twickenham Stadium on Sept. 27 — over 220,000 tickets have already been sold, marking it the highest-attended Women’s Rugby World Cup in history. The final match of the World Cup is also predicted to surpass 2024 attendance significantly.
“We’ve seen unprecedented demand for tickets across the tournament and now the iconic Twickenham Stadium hosting the final,” Sarah Massey, the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 managing director, told BBC.
Women’s tennis will return to the Queen’s Club for the first time in over 50 years, with the Women’s Tennis Association event commencing on June 9, right before Wimbledon. The tournament will follow a week after the French Open, lying right in between these two major tournaments, marking the beginning of the grass-court season. This shift means that the UK’s three most significant tennis events will take place in London in 2025.
The men’s tennis tournament will follow the week after the women’s, and despite both being at the 500 point on their given tours, the men’s contest will boast significantly higher prize money — nearly three times more than the women’s. The men have also complained about the condition of the grass after the women have played on it.
“We have absolute confidence that we can stage a two-week event at the Queen’s Club,” Chris Pollard, the Lawn Tennis Association digital and events coordinator, told The Guardian. “It goes without saying that the [Wimbledon] Championships itself has proven that the tournament can withstand two weeks of tennis.
France
The right-wing dominated French Senate voted to ban headscarves and any other wearing of items that reflect a “political or religious affiliation” in sports last Tuesday evening. The bill targets Muslim women and girls who wear hijabs during competition and furthers prior attacks toward Muslim female athletes.
The bill has yet to become law as it awaits the lower-house National Assembly, but there are several sports, including football and basketball, that have already prohibited religious clothing during competition.
France cited its strictest rules yet on secularism, prior to the 2024 Paris Olympics. The incentive contradicts the clothing rules of the larger body of international sports organizations and makes France the only European country to have an imposed ban on religious headwear.
“At the Paris Olympics, France’s ban on French women athletes who wear headscarves from competing at the Games drew international outrage,” Anna Błuś, Amnesty International’s researcher on gender justice in Europe, told Amnesty. “Just six months on, French authorities are not only doubling down on the discriminatory hijab ban but are attempting to extend it to all sports.”
Washington, D.C.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from women’s sports on Wednesday, Feb. 5, and further restrictions continue to follow this week in Washington, D.C. The litigation will reverberate globally, as the United States will host the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics toward the end of Trump’s term.
The executive order signed earlier this month, “Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports,” imbues the Trump administration’s own understanding of Title IX, interpreting sex assigned at birth as equivalent to an individual’s given gender.
“We strongly believe that clear, consistent and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” NCAA President Charlie Baker said in response to the new legislation. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
As of Tuesday, the Trump administration is pushing the issue even further — ordering officials worldwide to deny visas to transgender athletes attempting to travel to the United States for competition, and further ordering permanent, life-long visa bans to those who have supposedly “misrepresented” their gender listed.
On the first day of his term, Trump also administered an executive order instructing the federal government to define sex within a strict binary, noting that government-issued identification ought to reflect this.
“I’m also directing our Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem… to deny any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes,” Trump said while speaking about the 2028 Olympics, as first reported by The New York Times.
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