SheBelieves dates and venues released early

Oh those French.

The French Football Federation released upcoming dates and venues for their women’s national team on their site, and included three dates and locations in the United States in March marked as “SheBelieves Cup.” Assuming there are no late changes or announcements from US Soccer, they are:

March 1, 2017: France - England, Chester
March 4, 2017: France - Germany, Harrison
March 8, 2017: USA - France, Washington

That’s Chester, Pennsylvania, Harrison, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., or Talon Energy Stadium, Red Bull Arena, and probably RFK.

Extrapolating, if they continue to do it double-header style as they did this year, that makes the rest of the USWNT schedule as follows.

March 1: USA - Germany, Chester
March 4: USA - England, Harrison

March 1 and 8 are both Wednesday games, with only March 4 lying on a Saturday. This is how SheBelieves was scheduled in 2016 as well; both weekday games this past year pulled about 13K+ in attendance while their weekend game pulled over 25K. This year, hopefully with an established name and better promotion, the weekday games will do as well or better, although Pennsylvania in March is no picnic, weather-wise.

All this information is based on the assumption that the WNT will manage to renegotiate their collective bargaining agreement with US Soccer in time; if not, then SheBelieves is probably the biggest and closest leverage they would have in case of a strike.

The USWNT CBA is set to expire December 31, 2016, so everybody get their Strike Advent Calendars set up. Hopefully the team and the federation will be announcing a new deal before then.