The Los Angeles 2028 Olympics will feature an increase in women's soccer teams from 12 to 16, while the men's competition will be down-sized from 16 to a dozen teams, the International Olympic Com-mittee said on Wednesday. The decision was part of a number of changes to the Olym-pic event programme with more mixed events across several sports and all team sports with at least the same number of women’s and men’s teams. The IOC said the reason for the sharp increase in women's soccer teams was the rapidly grow-ing popularity of women's team sports, especially in the United States, and that change in the competition format reflected that rapid growth. "We wanted to do something to reflect that growth and equally with the United States being the home of the highest level of pop-ularity of women's football," IOC sports director Kit McConnell told a press conference. He said the IOC had discussed the issue with both LA Games organisers and world soccer's governing body FIFA before going through with the changes. The total number of players men's and women's would not change. The United States, who will also host the 2026 men's and the 2031 women's World Cup, have won five Olympic gold medals in the women's competition. The men's teams use most-ly under-23 players at Olympic Games. The LA Games will have a total of 351 medal events in all sports, 22 more than at Paris 2024 Olympics. Several sports, including ar-chery, athletics, golf and gymnas-tics will be adding new mixed team events, with the total number of athletes unchanged at 10,500. The five sports proposed by the LA Games organising commit-tee baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash will have an extra 698 quota places.