From training in the light of the headlights of a car to dreaming of the World Cup there are only 40 years. In the 1980s, playing for the Australian women’s soccer team meant paying for travel, accommodation, or tracksuits yourself. “We didn’t have the right to keep the shirt,” recalls Karen Menzies, “it wasn’t until later that they put our names on the back.”
I had no reference. She leaned into soccer when she discovered that she was put up for adoption without her mother’s permission. When she was denied coaching because she was a lesbian, she didn’t stop watching (and playing) games. You can change the world, because “it’s never just kicking a ball,” adds Menzies, a member of Football Australia’s National Indigenous Advisory Group.
“Being aboriginal is political, being a member of the LGTBIQA collective is political, being a woman is political. The personal is political, ”she stresses. “And it’s great that the Matildas stood up for fairness and equal pay.”
Before the World Cup, the Matildas – the Australian women’s soccer team – released a video asking FIFA for the same money that they allocated to the teams in Qatar, an equality that the organization plans to achieve in 2027. “I think that women’s sport will always it’s related to other issues, it’s never just sport,” says writer and teacher Fiona Crawford, “while men in many ways can sit back and watch the game, women have to fight hard to get there.”
Crawford is the author of the books Never say die (the motto of the Matildas) and The Matilda effect, where she recovers the history of the women’s team. She was “surprised” that the squad spoke up before the tournament, but she acknowledges that thanks to “her high profile” there will be “important questions asked and there will be more pressure on FIFA to do better.
In a sport by and for men, women have had to fight to end the white pants (something that has been followed by the AFLW, the Australian Football League), prize money, not like when the Aussies won the Asian Cup in in 2010 and received plasma televisions, or to fly in business class, like them.
It’s been a few years since Football Australia started promoting and funding women’s football, Crawford explains, but not that long ago there weren’t even their shirts: “It’s a positive thing for women’s sport and their pockets.”
In 2015, before a tour of the United States and the possibility of facing Rapinoe, Morgan and company, the Australians went on strike during the negotiation of the agreement with the Federation to get the same pay as the men’s team.
Chloe Logarzo, a former member of the national team, recalls that until 2017 many players were not professionals and that thanks to the strike or the qualification for Rio 2016 “they put the team in a special place.” “The Matildas have started to transform women’s sport,” she adds, “but this is just the beginning.”
In each Matildas locker room there is someone who hangs the flags of Australia – including the indigenous ones – and that of the LGTBIQA collective. Logarzo, who these days is commentating on the World Cup, remarks: “I don’t know if it happens in the men’s category, but we will not lose the opportunity to make our voices heard.”
A voice that, as Crawford indicates, athletes have found on social media. “They’ve been fantastic for players like Sam (Kerr) as they’ve been able to tell their stories and connect with audiences” (and sponsors), she says.
Alana Jancevski dreams of playing with the absolute. She grew up with Alex Morgan as the only reference and is now a player for Perth Glory, the team where she started Kerr, the captain of the team. In October she will return to Perth, where she has to spend most of her salary on rent: “It’s hard to have to think about these things and know that men don’t have these worries.”
Alana had Morgan, and today there are girls trading Taylor Swift for Matildas. The Australia-Denmark had an audience of 6.5 million viewers, twice the number of the AFL final. For Jancevski it is time to give the athletes what they deserve: “We go through the same training sessions, we make the same sacrifices, the same things are asked of us. I think the arguments are running out.”
