📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

The impact evaluation of female sports events remains an important yet neglected area of research. To fill this gap, this working paper provides a timely assessment of the 2025 UEFA Women's European Championship (WEURO) in Switzerland-the largest women-specific sports event in Europe with more than 657,000 spectators. Using city-level data on hotel overnight stays, we apply the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences approach of Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) to compare WEURO host cities with non-host destinations. In summary, our results do not support strong claims of large tourism impacts but rather point to a small positive effect. Sensitivity analyses also suggest positive effects. However, confidence intervals permit firm conclusions only for the main venues, indicating an increase in overnight stays of 1.6% attributable to the WEURO. Overall, our findings indicate positive but modest tourism impacts of the WEURO and outline a framework for further policy evaluation of sports events.