This coming summer, the Women’s World Cup will run from June 7 until July 7. The tournament will be held in France this year, as opposed to Germany last year. After the Men’s World Cup the previous summer, the U.S. Women’s team will be looking for some redemption for their country as the men’s team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup held in Russia.

A standard Men’s World Cup format involves group stages and then knockout stages. The group stages are round-robin style, consisting of eight groups with four teams in each of them. The groups are drawn by a member of Fifa, who selects one team from each of the four pots, which split teams based on their Fifa rankings. For example, pot 1 holds the world’s strongest teams. This method is important because it allows for the best teams in the world not to have to play each other in the very first round. Once the groups are completed and the tournament has commenced, each team in the group plays every other team in the group one time. The teams will earn points based off of these results on a three-point system, which means the team is rewarded with three points for a win, one point for a tie, and zero points for a loss. After each team plays all three games in the group stage, the top two teams of each group move on to the knockout stage.

Although this is the standard Men’s World Cup format, the Women’s format is slightly different. Instead of starting out with eight groups of four teams, the Women’s World Cup only has six groups of four teams because the Women’s World Cup is still expanding. Freshman Andrew Myerson states, “I think it’s a little bit ridiculous that the Women’s World Cup doesn’t have as many teams as the Men’s Cup. FIFA might as well just expand to the size of the Men’s Cup because the round of 16 becomes confusing with only 24 teams in the tournament.”

In the Men’s knockout stage, the top two teams from each group go through into the round of 16, but since the Women’s World Cup only has six groups, four of the teams that finished third in their group get to move on as well. The third place teams chosen to advance are the ones with the most points. For example, in the 2015 Women’s World Cup, Thailand and Costa Rica both finished third in their group but they were unable to move on because they had fewer points than the other third place teams. After determining which teams will move on to the round of 16, the rest are placed into games and the knockout stages begin. The teams will play until there is just one winner.

Last year’s Men’s World Cup was incredibly popular, accumulating 3.572 billion total viewers. That means over half of the global population over the age of four ended up tuning in. But how does that compare to the Women’s World Cup? Senior Beck Taylor states, “I watched some games in the Men’s World Cup last year but I honestly didn’t know the Women’s Cup was this summer.” I believe this underrepresentation of the Women’s World Cup can be chalked up to a simple lack of advertising from FIFA. I remember seeing many advertisements before the Men’s World Cup but I have not seen a single advertisement for the Women’s World Cup so far.

In the last Women’s World Cup, the United States of America team destroyed the competition with winning every single game except for one tie in the group stages. Junior Cameron Kovats states, “I really enjoyed watching the U.S. dominate [the] last world cup. It’s always super awesome to see players from the U.S. become some of the best in the world.” The U.S. team is indeed fully packed with talent. Sophomore Annie Barrett says, “Alex Morgan is easily my favorite. She is an absolute goal machine and she is a fantastic role model for myself and many other female athletes.” However, Alex Morgan is far from the only weapon on the team. With players like Carli Lloyd, Julie Ertz, and Seattle Reign’s own Megan Rapinoe, I would give the U.S. a good chance to go out there and do it again this summer.