The Impact of the UEFA Women’s EURO on Hotel Overnight Stays: Evidence From a Causal Analysis
Hannes Wallimann & Anna Mehr
What the paper says
The impact evaluation of female sports events remains an important yet neglected area of research. To fill this gap, this 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, where hotel overnight stays increased by 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.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.