The next of the Royal Canadian Mint’s extremely popular $20 for $20 coins has launched today and it celebrates one of the most important womens sporting events in the calendar, the 2015 FIFA Womens World Cup. The range that pioneered the $ for $ concept now beginning to be embraced by other mints, the RCM releases have covered a wide range of subjects over the last few years and this sports-themed one is a rarity.

The mintage of this ¼oz fine silver round is set at the new lower limit of 200,000 pieces, down from the 225,000 of the early 2014 dated coins. It’s a nice enough design, quite complex for a $20 coin, and the first of a total of ten coins themed around this football tournament. The other nine will be available for sale from 07 April, but we’ll have the full range up in a post in the next 24 hours. Comprising a further six silver coins and a trio of gold, all are considerably more expensive than the one here, although obviously struck in smaller numbers and to a higher standard.

This one is available now, although limited to 3 per household, and in the US/Canada only. The rest of us can usually pick them up elsewhere easily enough.

2015 FIFA WOMEN’S WORLD CUP

The 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup will be the seventh FIFA Women’s World Cup, the quadrennial international women’s football world championship tournament. In March 2011, Canada won the right to host the event. The tournament will be held from 6 June to 5 July.

For this tournament, the number of teams was expanded from 16 to 24, with the number of matches increasing from 32 to 52. After North Korea had several players test positive for performance-enhancing drugs during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup, FIFA banned the North Korean team from participating in the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada. This is the first time a women’s team has ever been banned from a Women’s World Cup, and it will be the first time since 1995 that North Korea will not participate in a Women’s World Cup.

The cities of Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal and Moncton have been selected to host tournament matches. Due to FIFA’s policy against commercial sponsorship of stadium names, Investors Group Field in Winnipeg and TD Place Stadium in Ottawa will respectively be known as Winnipeg Stadium^[20] and Lansdowne Stadium^[21] during the tournament.

Countries qualifying are;

AFRICA:  Cameroon, Cote d’Ivorie, Nigeria

ASIA:  Australia, China, Japan, Korea Republic, Thailand

EUROPE:  England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland

NORTH AMERICA: Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, USA

OCEANIA: New Zealand

SOUTH AMERICA:  Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador

Source: Wikipedia & FIFA