Holland Women huddle through the Euro 2025 match against France on the St Jakob Park on July 13, 2025 in Basel, Switzerland.
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The continued boom in women’s soccer is delivering a tourism spending boost to Switzerland this summer, as international visitors descend for the Euro 2025 tournament.
The variety of travelers to Switzerland increased 12% year-on-year over the primary week of the competition, in response to figures shared exclusively with CNBC by payments giant Visa based on its cardholders. Visitor numbers from Germany, Poland and the Netherlands jumped 25%, arrivals from the U.K. rose 20%, while Italy and France saw upticks of 15% and 10%, respectively.
Spending meanwhile rose 27% for the week starting July 2 across the country’s host locations, which include Basel, Bern, Geneva and Zurich, in addition to the smaller towns of St. Gallen, Sion and Thun.
Restaurant takings nearly doubled in Bern, as spending on entertainment greater than tripled by the picturesque lakeside shores of Thun, which hosted Norway v Iceland and Spain v Belgium last week. Retail goods spending in Switzerland was up 30%, which Visa Europe’s Chief Marketing Officer Kim Kadlec said showed the tournament’s “powerful ripple effect, with a rise in real-time consumer spending across industries.”
Untere Schleuse wood bridge in Thun, Switzerland. Visitor spending rose 25% year-on-year within the town in July 2025 because it hosted Euro 2025 women’s soccer matches.
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The sight of packed major stadiums for ladies’s soccer matches — which are actually expected throughout Euro 2025 — once seemed a good distance off. The ladies’s game only began to grow to be professionalized at a club level, key to overall talent development, within the 2010s.
Euro 2022, hosted by England, proved a landmark success when it comes to reach as greater than a decade of grassroots sporting investment, recent and expanded broadcasting deals, and increased public and media interest got here to fruition.
The nearly 90,000-strong attendance for England’s final against Germany at London’s Wembley Stadium was the highest-ever for either a men’s or women’s Euro final, tournament ticket sales increased almost fourfold to 60 million euros ($70 million), and global live TV viewership soared to 365 million from 178 million in 2017 and 116 million in 2013.
Breakthroughs for the worldwide game have also included the equal pay deal agreed stateside in 2022 by US Soccer, and a five-year rights agreement with broadcasters Sky Sports and the BBC for the English Women’s Soccer League starting 2025 which is ready to offer unprecedented reach to matches. Those come whilst deal sizes and overall funding and viewership remain dwarfed by the juggernaut of the boys’s game, the world’s most-watched sport.
Georgia Stanway of England scores her team’s first goal through the UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 Group D match between England and Wales at Arena St. Gallen on July 13, 2025.
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Recent records are already being broken at Euro 2025, with advance ticket sales totaling 600,000 and selling out 22 of 31 matches. Of those, 35% were purchased by international visitors, in response to organizing body UEFA.
“Already there are 61,000 Germans, 41,000 English, 16,000 French, 15,000 Dutch and 5,000 American fans,” Nadine Kessler, UEFA director for ladies’s football, said in a press release last month.
“I believe we’re at 114 nationalities and that is exactly what we wish – that is unheard of in women’s football – and it shows we’ve taken the best lessons from England 2022.”
