Man, sometimes you just get stuck on the stupidest little questions, right? It was early Saturday morning, just trying to enjoy my coffee and actually read the newspaper for once instead of just scrolling through the doom-feed. My daughter, she’s obsessed with football—soccer, whatever you call it—and she was trying to tell me about some huge tournament coming up. I kept hearing about the big senior Women’s World Cup which just finished, but she was insistent: “No, Dad, the next one. The U-17s!”
I didn’t even know they had a separate major tournament for the Under-17 crowd. Being the know-it-all parent I sometimes am, I casually threw out a guess. I figured FIFA always tries to spread the love around, so I said, “Bet you five bucks it’s in Europe or maybe somewhere in the Americas.” That was my official entry point into this whole silly investigation. She immediately demanded proof, so there I was, half-awake, coffee cooling rapidly, forced to start digging up the actual location info.
The Messy Start: Mashing Keys and Hitting Dead Ends
The first thing I did was what everyone does: I grabbed the tablet and mashed the obvious keywords into the search bar. I typed something truly awful, like “where is the next fifa womens world cup u17 going to be played 2024.” Immediately, the results were a disaster. I got links talking about 2022, which was India. I got speculation articles from random sports blogs dated 2021. It took me a good ten minutes just to sift through the noise and find anything relevant to the actual next event.
I kept running into a brick wall because the information was either old, or the articles were mostly focused on the qualification process, not the final host announcement. I clicked through maybe five different reports, all citing different rumors. One said Brazil was interested. Another insisted it was going to be an African nation, possibly Morocco. I was getting nowhere fast, and my five-dollar bet was starting to look shaky.
- I tried refining the search by year: “U17 Women’s World Cup Host 2024.” Still too much old clutter.
- I tried searching specifically for “FIFA press release U17 host.” This was smarter, but I kept landing on confusing official pages that were dense and hard to quickly parse.
- I almost gave up and decided I’d just buy my daughter the five bucks worth of ice cream, but my stubbornness kicked in.
I realized I needed to stop trusting the rumor mills and zero in on the definitive decision date. These major decisions are always announced by the FIFA Council during specific meetings, usually toward the end of the previous year. So, I changed my strategy.
Changing Tactics and Unlocking the Official Announcement
I started searching for “FIFA Council decisions October 2023.” That was the key phrase that unlocked the real location information. Why October? Because I remembered a flurry of news about hosting rights for multiple youth tournaments being announced all at once around that time. I finally found an article—a reliable one this time, summarizing the FIFA Council meeting minutes.
The announcement was buried deep because the same release was talking about the U-20 Women’s host (Colombia) and the Futsal World Cup host. They were just rattling off locations one after the other. I had to read the summary three times slowly to make sure I wasn’t mixing up the age groups.
And there it was. Confirmed. The FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup for 2024. I practically yelled in the kitchen when I found it. It wasn’t Europe. It wasn’t Brazil. It was somewhere that really surprised me.
The host country for the immediate next FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup, scheduled for 2024, is the Dominican Republic.
I high-fived the dog and immediately went to tell my daughter, feeling incredibly smug about my successful sleuthing. But then I kept reading that same article, and that’s when the real twist came out. I had found the answer to my question, but the FIFA Council had thrown in a massive curveball for future tournaments.
The Unexpected Bonus: The Next Four Years of Hosting
The article explained that they were completely changing the structure of the U-17 tournament, making it annual starting in 2025, and expanding it to 24 teams. And get this: they decided to award the hosting rights for the four subsequent annual tournaments (2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028) to one single host nation!
I had to double-check this unbelievable detail. One country gets to host four years in a row? That’s unheard of for a major youth World Cup. I immediately started looking for the name of this lucky, massive host, because this was the real long-term location info everyone missed in the headlines.
I searched specifically for the ‘multi-year U-17 host.’ And sure enough, the rumors I had dismissed earlier turned out to be partially correct, just for a later phase.
- Immediate Host (2024): The Dominican Republic. I won the bet.
- Long-Term Hosts (2025–2028): Morocco. They secured the rights for four straight tournaments.
So, I started looking for one host country for one tournament and ended up confirming five years of hosting locations. I walked back to my daughter, dramatically announcing the immediate host, and then hit her with the news about Morocco running the show for the foreseeable future. Her eyes went wide. That’s the beauty of falling down a research rabbit hole, folks. You go looking for a simple yes or no, and you pull back the curtain on a massive restructuring plan. Always pays to dig deeper than the first headline you see.