From training in the light of a car’s headlights to dreaming of the World Cup in just 40 years. In the 1980s, playing for the Australian women’s football team meant paying for your own travel, accommodation or tracksuit costs. “We didn’t have the right to keep the shirt – remembers Karen Menzies – it wasn’t until later that they put our names on the back”.
I had no reference. She leaned on football when she discovered she had been given up for adoption without her mother’s permission. When she was denied the possibility of being a coach for being a lesbian, she didn’t stop watching (and playing) matches. You can change the world, because “it’s not just about touching the ball”, adds Menzies, a member of Football Australia’s National Indigenous Advisory Group.
“Being Aboriginal is political, being a member of the LGBTIQA collective is political, being a woman is political. What is personal is political”, he emphasizes. “And it’s fantastic that the Matildas are raising their voices to ask for fairness and equal pay.”
Ahead of the World Cup, the Matildas – Australia’s women’s soccer team – released a video asking FIFA to give them the same money they allocated to teams in Qatar, an equality the organization expects to achieve by 2027. “I think that women’s sport is always related to other problems, it is never just sport”, says the 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, in which she recovers the history of the women’s team. He was “surprised” that the squad spoke before the tournament, but he acknowledges that thanks to “their high profile” important questions will be asked and there will be more pressure on FIFA to do better.
In a sport made by and for men, women have had to fight to stop wearing white pants (which the AFLW, the Australian Football League has followed), receive cash prizes, unlike when the Aussies they won the Asian Cup in 2010 and received plasma TVs, or to fly in business class, like them.
For a few years now, Football Australia has started promoting and funding women’s football, Crawford explains, but not so long ago it wasn’t even their shirts: “It’s a positive thing for women’s sport and for their pockets “.
In 2015, ahead of a US tour and the possibility of facing Rapinoe, Morgan and co, the Australian women staged a strike during contract negotiations with the Federation to achieve the same pay as the men’s team .
Chloe Logarzo, former member of the national team, remembers that until 2017 many players were not professionals and that thanks to the strike or the qualification for Rio 2016 “they placed the team in a special place”. “The Matildas have begun to transform women’s sport”, she adds, “but this is only the beginning”.
In every dressing room of the Matildas there is someone who hangs the flags of Australia – including the indigenous ones – and that of the LGBTIQA collective. Logarzo, who these days is a commentator for 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 voice heard”.
A voice that, as Crawford indicates, the athletes have found on social networks. “They have been fantastic for players like Sam (Kerr), as they have been able to tell their stories and connect with audiences” (and with sponsors), he says.
Alana Jancevski dreams of playing with the absolute. She grew up with Alex Morgan as her only reference and is now a Perth Glory player, the team where Kerr, the captain of the national team, started. In October he will return to Perth, where he spends most of his salary on rent: “It’s hard to have to think about these things and know that men don’t have these concerns.”
Alana grew up with Morgan, and today there are girls who trade Taylor Swift for the Matildas. Australia-Denmark had an audience of 6.5 million, double that of the AFL final. For Jancevski, it’s time to give the athletes what they deserve: “We do the same training, we make the same sacrifices, the same is asked of us. I think they are running out of arguments”.
