Australia’s favourite sports team is no longer male. Will the dollars follow?
Audiences and marketing dollars are flowing into women’s soccer. But as the AFLW shows, the tide can turn and administrators, coaches and athletes must figure out how to capitalise on the Matildas moment.
Caitlin Foord’s first kick of a soccer ball was in 2004 when, as a nine-year-old, she started to play with the boys in the school playground. She’d never watched a match, but she had natural ability, having played touch footy and competed in athletics. In her first game, she scored six goals and, with the help of sister Jamie, she convinced their mum, Simone, to let her do one more sport. “All the boys’ parents were saying how good I was,” she says. “That’s kind of where my journey started.”
By the time Foord was 12, she’d made the state soccer team. Her mum, a single parent, didn’t have enough money to cover her travel costs so Foord sold Caramello Koalas and Freddo Frogs to schoolmates to raise the funds. “I can’t tell you how much I used to hate it. I thought it was embarrassing to have to sell chocolates,” she says from her home in London. “But at the end of the day, I would have done anything I could to be on these trips.” She remembers, with gratitude, a certain school bus driver. “Whatever I couldn’t sell, he’d buy the rest of the box,” she says. “He was a legend.”
Matildas players Charli Grant (far left); Caitlin Foord (centre) and Lydia Williams (below). John Davis, Benny Capp
Australians owe that bus driver a vote of thanks, as one of many who helped Foord to overcome the hurdles to make it as a professional athlete. Now aged 29, she’s become a household name: the Matildas’ No. 9 and Arsenal’s No. 19 in England’s Women’s Super League, with contracts estimated to be worth more than $250,000 a year and sponsorship deals with Adidas, Patrón and W Hotels.
In 2011, she became the youngest Australian player at a FIFA Women’s World Cup and has played another three since. In the team’s 2023 campaign, she scored a crucial goal in Australia’s 2-0 win over Denmark. Last August, her image covered one side of a 30-storey office tower in Sydney, an ad for Adidas featuring the words: “Impossible is nothing.”
It’s a tagline that could easily apply to women’s soccer in Australia, which has been set on a newly upward trajectory thanks to last year’s World Cup. More than 60 per cent of the population watched the semi-final between Australia and England and six months on, the momentum is still there. Twelve consecutive Matildas matches have sold out.
Crowds for the A-League Women have more than doubled in the first 10 rounds of this year’s competition. Club memberships have spiked and the number of kids registering for their free passes to games has tripled. Stars such as Foord and Hayley Raso are signing lucrative sponsorship deals and younger players such as Clare Hunt and Charli Grant are joining some of the world’s biggest clubs in Europe.
“We used to play Matildas games at suburban venues in front of a few thousand friends and family,” says Venues NSW chairman David Gallop, who previously ran Football Federation Australia. “We even shut the gates at times when we couldn’t afford the operating costs for such small attendances. [Whereas now] sellouts are a realistic expectation.”
The numbers of fans, media mentions and marketing dollars are adding up to a tipping point. Australian women’s soccer is shifting from a semi-professional sport into a new – if nascent – industry, overtaking women’s NRL and AFL, which ought to have had a home ground advantage And yet, as the experience of AFLW shows, the rise of women’s sport is not a straight line.
Attendances in that league have slumped 70 per cent since the inaugural round in 2017, a result of bad timeslots, venues and poor broadcast quality, according to AFL insiders. In the big-money world of major sport, scoring goals doesn’t necessarily move the dial.
Which makes this moment such a critical juncture for the Matildas. Administrators, marketers, coaches and athletes are trying to figure out how to capitalise on their popularity to ensure it endures. And how to put the pieces together to achieve what until recently seemed impossible – making women’s sport as bankable as men’s.
Former professional golfer Adam Wilcox typifies how money is moving into women’s soccer. His company, Major Events Live, creates events featuring sports stars and for 25 years his usual fodder has been men: ex-NRL players like Johnathan Thurston and Cameron Smith, and retired surfer Mick Fanning. Last August, Wilcox watched the Matildas’ emotion-charged penalty shootout against France.
This feature appears in the Innovation issue of AFR Magazine out on February 23. John Davis
“I hadn’t heard of Mackenzie [Arnold] before,” he says. “But the way she performed on that night, you couldn’t not watch.”
In December, Major Events Live held its first event featuring some of the Matildas. Foord and defender Alanna Kennedy kicked the ball around CommBank Stadium in western Sydney, attempting to score against Arnold. Tickets were $49 to watch, or $99 if you wanted to also meet the players. Wilcox sold 6000 tickets. “The Matildas have such a strong database, especially young kids who idolise them,” he says.
Women’s soccer is growing faster in Australia than in France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Only the US, England and Germany have larger average crowds at their matches, and sometimes, it’s Australians they’ve come to see.
At a match in December between Chelsea and Arsenal, which was attended by more than 59,000, Matildas captain Sam Kerr went head-to-head with national teammates Foord, Steph Catley and midfielder Kyra Cooney-Cross.
Of the 23 players that make up the Matildas squad, 19 play in tier-one competitions across the US and Europe. The majority of Socceroos squad members play in lower-tier European football leagues. Goalkeeper Joe Gauci is the only player from the men’s team competing in the English Premier League – he signed with Aston Villa in early February – and 17-year-old prodigy Nestory Irankunda will join German club Bayern Munich in 2024.
It’s curious as to why we tend to export female players, and not men. It’s also curious, given the dominance of AFL and NRL in Australia, that it’s the soccer field on which women have advanced the furthest. Women’s sport is broadly gaining traction – total viewing in Australia has climbed 18 per cent since 2022, according to sports data firm Gemba – but the uptick isn’t evenly dispersed. The organisation in charge of netball, once the most popular sport played by women, is struggling with participation and funding. Until recently, the governing body was embroiled in a messy pay dispute with its players.
“There has been a sea change,” says Jon Marquard, who leads broadcast rights consultancy Janez Media and worked with Optus on securing the rights to last year’s women’s World Cup. “There is much more of a broad-based acceptance of watching women’s sport in a way that probably wasn’t there a generation ago.”
That said, women’s soccer is moving into a league of its own. Charli Grant, 22, is one of the youngest members of the Matildas. Her first match was in September 2021, as the team’s popularity was starting to climb, and her experience has been very different to some of her older teammates.
Grant knew a lot about soccer from a young age – it was the main sport offered at school and her brother played it. She knew women played because her dad took her to watch Cumberland United Women’s Football Club, one of the first Adelaide-based women’s clubs. While others looked up to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, Grant’s early inspiration was her coach, former Matilda Sharon Black.
Mary Fowler reps Adidas.
When her professional career began, she also got paid. At 17, Grant was given a salary at Adelaide FC – about $10,000 for the season. “I was really fortunate to come in at that time,” she says. “I remember being told by some of the senior girls that some wouldn’t get paid or some would get like $60 – petrol money.”
National team salaries, prize money and funding from sponsors allow Grant to play soccer full-time. She has just signed with English club Tottenham Hotspur, a move that was under way before the World Cup, and has seen firsthand what playing on a world stage has done for her friends. “Look at Clare Hunt [playing for Paris Saint-Germain] and Kyra Cooney-Cross [playing for Arsenal]. They are two of the best clubs in the world,” she says. “The World Cup would have helped to push those players into those positions.”
Interest from international clubs has benefits for Football Australia too. The governing body receives 10 per cent of the money made from the transfer of a player from A-leagues into international competitions, which ultimately goes back to grassroots.
James Johnson, Football Australia’s chief executive, tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine he wants to make $20 million a year from the international transfer market, which is ultimately reinvested back into the local game. “The global transfer system is valued at $US10 billion [$15.2 billion],” he says. “We need to get our clubs to understand the value of playing young players . . . and the value of young players playing for national teams in major tournaments. In 2023, we will be north of $7 million in terms of the total transfer revenue in Australian football – a historical record.”
Mary Fowler, Sam Kerr, Caitlin Foord and Steph Catley celebrate Australia’s World Cup quarter-final victory Getty
It’s not the only revenue stream Football Australia can grow off the back of the Matildas. Johnson says sales of Matildas merchandise in the first quarter of this financial year already exceeded the $3.1 million total for the previous financial year. The ratio of Matildas merchandise sales to Socceroos is now two to one.
Adding fuel to the energy behind women’s football is social media, which has allowed young fans to find their idols, regardless of what’s being broadcast on TV. The team has gained almost 500,000 Instagram followers since the World Cup, and Football Australia data reveals it has a social media unique reach of 48.5 million.
Grant and Cooney-Cross, another of the squad’s younger members, are among the most active on social media. One TikTok video of the pair lip-syncing to a Taylor Swift song, which was posted towards the end of last year’s World Cup, has had more than 1.3 million views. “It’s important to show that we’re ordinary people because then people can relate to you and feel comfortable,” says Grant. “We’re not just inspiring people to play football, we’re just trying to inspire people to be [themselves].”
Back in 2012, Foord appeared in a photo in her local paper, the Illawarra Mercury, with her mum and sister. Simone Foord, a supermarket checkout worker, said she was worried she couldn’t pay $6500 for her daughter to play at the Australasian School tours of China, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.
“Finding sponsorship is really hard, I don’t know if it’s because Caitlin is a girl,” she told the paper. “I will do whatever I can, she wants to one day play for the Matildas and I want to help her get there no matter what.”
These days, sponsorship dollars are flooding in. The Matildas are backed by major Australian businesses including CommBank, Qantas and Rebel. Cadbury, which helped fund (and embarrass) a young Foord selling its chocolates, is a sponsor too. Along with sponsorship, sports bodies make money from ticketing, merchandise and broadcast partners. The money is used for infrastructure, support staff and to pay athletes. But none of it comes without a fan base.
Caitlin Foord, Matildas No. 9 and also plays for Arsenal. John Davis
Data from Gemba, collected after the Women’s World Cup, found the Matildas are now the most marketable national sports team in Australia – significantly more well liked and well known than the Australian men’s cricket team and the rugby union team, the Wallabies.
It also found that player asset power – particularly for Foord, Ellie Carpenter and Mary Fowler – had dramatically increased between February and August 2023. This year, the Matildas will be sponsored by at least 10 brands across banking, airlines and global sporting gear. Kerr, who took home an estimated $3.3 million last year in salary and endorsements, works with six brands, including Uber and EA Sports. Oroton, Tommy Hilfiger, Amazon and Calvin Klein are among some of the other brands that have deals in place with Matildas players.
Andrew Condon, Gemba’s managing director, says the group’s appeal is partly down to the documentary The World at Our Feet, which aired on Disney in 2023 and gave fans a behind-the-scenes look at the team’s World Cup preparations. “Pre-World Cup, sponsoring women’s sport was seen as the right thing to do,” he says. “Sponsorship of women’s sports is now more about a genuine effort to drive marketing outcomes. That next generation coming through is going to benefit . . . in terms of player salaries, but also in terms of other commercial opportunities, should they wish to pursue them.”
Condon says a time will come when the men and women’s games will need separate commercial programs. “At what point would Cricket Australia, for example, allow CommBank to sponsor the women’s program and have another financial institution on the men’s program? Given the momentum that women’s sport has, we now need to focus on resourcing it properly and commercialising it appropriately,” he says.
There are already signs that broadcasters and streaming services are getting more value out of women’s sports. Three months after the World Cup, the US women’s soccer league, the NWSL, announced a media rights deal with CBS Sports, ESPN, Prime Video and Scripps Sports, worth $US240 million over four years. It was the largest women’s broadcast rights deal in history and up from just $4.5 million under the previous deal.
Australia’s longest-serving Matilda, Lydia Williams, has watched the team’s rise to national consciousness. She’s been in the Matildas squad for 18 years and, like Foord, relied on Cadbury fundraising boxes and scholarships for travel and to pay for her goalkeeping gloves. “We didn’t get a lot of things,” she says of her early days in the squad. “Everything was . . . go out and search, or barter. It was self-funded.”
Lydia Williams, goalkeeper for the Matildas, also plays for Melbourne Victory. Benny Capp
Williams’ introduction to soccer was similar to Foord’s. She started playing late – at 11 years old. When it was clear she had talent, and soccer was what she wanted to do, Williams began working part-time as a zookeeper. It was the only way she could afford to keep playing. Once she finally decided she needed to move overseas if she wanted to make some money, she used Google to search for an agent, who ultimately took her to Sweden.
The only reason she never quit, she says, was because of her parents. Her American mother, who moved from the US to live in the outback with her Indigenous Australian father, refused to let her give up. “I’ve had that push in me from a really young age,” she says. As years went by, Williams and her teammates became frustrated about being paid minimum wage, deprived of even the most basic requirements to play – boots, for example. “You’re using every part of you to try and win something,” she says. “When you’re paid minimum wage, it makes you think is this really worth it? It got to a point where we all got fed up with that treatment.”
Clare Hunt after the Matildas’ Asian Olympic qualifier win in November. Getty
In September 2015, Williams and the Australian women’s team went on strike. Players withdrew from a training camp and cancelled a planned tour of the US. The move worked; the Professional Footballers Australia and Football Federation Australia agreed to improve work and pay conditions for the Matildas.
“It made everyone look and say ‘wow, this is not just an individual player speaking out. It’s the whole team’,” Williams says. “We did get quite a little bit of backlash for that because it seemed like we wanted equal money. It was never about that. It was just the opportunity to be treated like a professional athlete. And what the men get in those areas, like having Wi-Fi and getting your laundry done and not worrying about excess baggage.”
Four years later, the Matildas became the first women’s national team in the world to be paid the same base salary as the equivalent men’s team. Williams, who now plays for Melbourne Victory, still finds it hard to believe how far the sport has come.
The way Football Australia sees it, last year’s Matildas moment was always part of the strategy. In its Whole of Football Plan released in 2014, a key aim was to host a women’s World Cup. “We all recognised that it could be a galvanising force for the women’s game and the sport generally,” Gallop says. “Put simply, the various factions of Australian football would come together if we hosted such a tournament and we had a team that could be a genuine contender.”
So, if last year’s success was part of a bigger plan, what then is the plan from here? How should the money be reinvested to maximise success on the field and interest from the stands?
“The tournament was a moment in history and may never see such a meteoric rise again, but the growth can definitely now continue,” Gallop says. “Commercial interest . . . is going to come knocking so the administrators will need to shape the program in a way that maximises the opportunity. Quality opposition, good venue choices and managing the workload of the overseas stars like Sam Kerr will be important.”
Charli Grant, Matildas No. 22 and signed with Tottenham Hotspur earlier this year. John Davis
As will the Matildas’ performance. Their next big moment will be the Paris Olympics in July, for which, at the time of print, the squad is tipped to qualify. There’s the possibility of another major tournament on home soil – the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup. And then there’s the 2027 World Cup, for which Football Australia, with the help of global sports company IMG, has already bought the rights amid expectations that a record broadcast deal will be set.
“Whether it be broadcast, sponsorship, licensing or ticketing revenue, all are trending upwards,” says Tom Rischbieth, Football Australia’s head of commercial and events. “From a commercial perspective, we are being bullish about the value that we’re seeking in the market, given this team has proven its worth time and time again.”
Charli Grant with Tottenham Hotspur fans.
The federal government, well aware of the feel-good factor emanating from the Matildas, is watching closely. At the end of the team’s World Cup run in August last year, a hyped-up Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a $200 million pledge to provide additional funding for sports facilities and equipment in local communities. “The Matildas have given us a moment of national inspiration,” Albanese said. “This is about seizing that opportunity for the next generation, investing in community sporting facilities for women and girls around Australia.”
It was an important statement. Before the Women’s World Cup, just 41 per cent of Australia’s 2400 soccer clubs had female-friendly facilities such as toilets in dressing rooms and enclosed showers. Guidelines for allocating the funds are expected to be released before the end of March.
Some are sceptical about the pledge and whether it will have the intended impact. “The government has not put money into tangible things around the women’s leagues or community football or stadia,” says Marquard. “Some of the infrastructure around stadia changerooms is dreadful.”
Albanese also used the August announcement to reform Australia’s anti-siphoning list, which determines the significant sports and cultural events that should be made available to the public. In November, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland revealed plans to add women’s sport and para-sports to the anti-siphoning list.
Some think that could do more harm than good. Rebecca McCloy, Foxtel Group’s executive director of commercial sport, says any limitations on rights to televise the sport could reduce revenues and hit investment. “Women’s sport is already more freely available for viewing than men’s sport and has been for many years, so you have to question the practical effects of listing these sports.”
Marquard claims the move is a “nice political grab”. “I worry that putting women’s sports on the anti-siphoning list doesn’t ensure continued game investment. Sports will always seek out the widest exposure but will need to balance that up with the financial investment they need to have. The WWC was not on the anti-siphoning list, but Optus Sport did a deal with Seven for several games.”
James Johnson, Football Australia CEO. James Brickwood
The need to reach a large audience has always been an ambition for sports bodies that want the women’s game to grow. But that’s not always consistent with maximising commercial outcomes. As Gemba’s Condon puts it: “The challenge is … we want everybody to have the ability to watch and be inspired by the Matildas, but we also want our female athletes to be fairly paid – we want them to realise their commercial potential. Often, these two things are mutually exclusive.
“The real value to women’s sport comes in 10 years when all the young women and girls who have been inspired to take up these sports and play these sports, become lifelong fans. That’s the long game the sports should be playing.”
Another factor to maintaining the enthusiasm of fans and sponsors is culture. If the team is not working well together or is playing in bad faith, the tide can change quickly, as seen in the ball tampering scandal that engulfed Cricket Australia in 2018.
Left to right: International stars Katrina Gorry of West Ham; Clare Hunt of Paris Saint-Germain; Kyra Cooney-Cross of Arsenal. All three Matildas players have signed with their clubs since the World Cup. Getty
Tim Harcourt, sports economist and professor at the University of Technology Sydney, says investment in sports integrity and safety will be key to driving women’s sport forward. Men’s leagues typically have processes in place for players with concerns about teammates, coaches or administrators. It’s something that is still evolving as women’s sport grows.
The Matildas have generally been a scandal-free zone but at the end of 2021, it was rocked by claims of a “toxic culture”. Lisa De Vanna, the Matildas’ second-highest goal scorer, said she had suffered sexual harassment and bullying throughout her career. Her allegations prompted an investigation by Sport Integrity Australia; the findings are not public.
“If you don’t put in a proper process to protect alleged victims and perpetrators, it’ll fall over and they’ll lose the momentum,” Harcourt says. “They can use the opportunity of more investment in the sport to look after this.”
In 2024, Foord has enough money to buy her own home. But she still needs to think about what she will do once she retires (she says she will probably be a “firie”, like some of her friends). The reality is that even with extra fans and extra money, the gap between male and female athletes is astronomical – particularly in soccer.
“You can live comfortably, but you’ve still got to have a plan after football,” she says. “In the men’s game, if they invest in the right areas like with Messi or Ronaldo, they’re never going to have to work again. That’s where the big differences lie.”
David Gallop at a Matildas-Chile friendly in 2019. Getty
The Matildas team is proud and humbled by what they’ve achieved. And in a way, they know they’re playing for a prize that’s even bigger than a World Cup. “You don’t want to see any stalling,” Williams says. “There has to be more funding in the game to see growth, whether that’s in ticket sales or another team.”
If they succeed in the qualifiers, the Matildas will compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics, where they will try again for a gold medal. It’s almost certain they will be without captain Kerr, who sustained an ACL injury earlier in the year. Foord believes they can go all the way and that’s where the focus lies. Even if they don’t, they know they’ve already done something to change the nation.
“The biggest change that stands out for me,” says Foord when asked about the legacy of last year, “is random people coming up and saying thank you. The first time someone did it, I was so confused, but then more people would say it, and then say ‘thanks for showing that women can be powerful and empower our whole nation’.
“It was weird because we’re just doing what we always do. It’s just the whole country is watching now.”
The March issue of AFR Magazine – featuring the launch issue of Highflyer magazine – is out on Friday, February 23 inside The Australian Financial Review. Follow AFR Mag on Instagram.
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