Why should you watch the Women's World Cup, you ask? Why don't we start with the fact this is the World Cup that FIFA corruption has not tarnished.

This is one time that ­women's football has benefitted from being the poor relation to men's football. This competition is solely about sport rather than selling fizzy drinks, weak beer or childhood obesity.

The women's game may be less supported in terms of finance, press coverage and fans but that doesn't make it less compelling. Given that not all of the players are full-time professionals there is something even more football about it, in terms of the quality of the ­players and the football they play.

Everyone knows Marta, the five-time FIFA Women's Player of the Year but there are plenty more who deserve to be household names. Anyone who has seen the Puskas Award-nominated goals from Australia's Lisa de Vanna, Japan's Kumi Yokoyama, USA's Heather O'Reilly, France's Louisa Necib over the last few years will know that the quality of play can match anything anywhere.

Those players will all be on show in Canada but, with the tournament being extended to 24 teams for the first time and eight countries making their World Cup debuts, there will be plenty of players and teams that are unknown quantities.

That is a quality that the men's World Cup has lost: the pleasant surprise of discovering a new footballer. In this age of obsessive wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of the men's game, there are few players, let alone teams, that offer anything unknown at a World Cup. It used to be one of the joys of the tournament that the first time you saw some of these players was when you were filling in the Panini sticker album in the days leading up to the opening game but after seeing them a couple of times they were your new favorite players.

There's even a Group of Death to make you feel more comfortable. All eyes will be on Group D where two of Australia, the US, Nigeria and Sweden are going home. Before they do, we get to watch Canadian ­Sydney Leroux be roundly booed in her homeland as she plays for the US, half-­American Australia goalkeeper Lydia Williams come against the country of her mother's birth, Nigeria's Asisat Oshoala try to live up to the promise that saw her crowned player of the tournament at last year's ­Under-20 Women's World Cup and US captain Christie Rampone vie to become the first 40-year-old to lift the trophy. And that's only a few of the narratives from just one group.

Maybe the question is: Why wouldn't you watch the ­Women's World Cup?

The author is a Beijing-based writer. jmawhite@gmail.com