Families urged to flock to Finland finals

UEFA WOMEN'S EURO 2009™ tickets go on sale from 08.00CET on Monday with all prices pegged at an affordable level and special offers for families. As a result, tournament director Outi Saarinen is hoping that at least a quarter of a million fans will watch the finals unfold in Finland this summer.

Ambitious aim
The tournament is the biggest football event ever held in Finland and is also the first finals in the competition's history to involve 12 nations, increased from eight in recent editions. Running from 23 August until 10 September, 25 matches in all will be played in Helsinki, Lahti, Tampere and Turku, and Saarinen told uefa.com: "Our aim is to get an average crowd of 10,000."

Experience
That would be an impressive feat, and would be helped if the competition-record crowd of 29,092 – set when Finland faced hosts England in the opening game four years ago in Manchester – was broken in this summer's curtain-raiser: the home nation against Denmark at Helsinki's Olympic Stadium. The Football Association of Finland has plenty of experience in staging final tournaments having put on the 2003 FIFA U-17 World Cup and the 2004 UEFA European Women's Under-19 Championship, and Saarinen is pleased with preparations so far.

Promotion
"It is 12 teams, it is bigger than England, but I think we are doing pretty well when it comes to the organisation itself," she said. "We have organised some FIFA and UEFA youth tournaments and we have had a lot of guidance from [UEFA in] Switzerland. It's going really well and I'd like to highlight the importance of the cities in the promotion of the tournament."

Growth
Indeed, like England in 2005, they are targeting WOMEN'S EURO publicity at the grassroots. "I think everything will be a bit bigger, the numbers have grown," Saarinen said. "The spectator recruitment campaign in England was good and we are doing the same, working with schools and football clubs and cities." Not least to recruit spectators who may not normally venture into football grounds, with children's admission starting at €5 and further offers for family tickets "We are hoping to get families into the stands, so we are aiming to introduce a family ticket to encourage more boys, girls and women," she added. "Men have already found the football stands, so we hope to get lots of families to the grounds."

Full details about the price and categories of tickets and how to buy them online will be published on uefa.com on Monday.