When Matildas skipper Sam Kerr announced her move to Chelsea in January, it was widely regarded as one of the biggest club moves in the history of Australian football.
Her transfer made international headlines, not just because the competition she was joining had recently become the first fully-professional women’s league in the world, but also because she came with one of the biggest price-tags in the women’s game.
The reported $1m multi-season contract – and the hype that came with it – was a natural reflection of a once-in-a-generation talent receiving her just rewards.
Except Kerr is not a once-in-a-generation talent. Instead, she is part of a “golden generation” who, despite developing at a time when women’s football was still considered an amateur endeavour, have become some of Australia’s most loved and most popular athletes.
Ellie Carpenter, who was last year voted into the Guardian’s Top 100 Female Footballers of 2019, is the latest Australian player to burst onto the international club scene after signing for European giants Olympique Lyonnais this week.
It is a move that arguably eclipses that of Kerr to Chelsea and of Caitlin Foord to Arsenal earlier this year based on the fact that Lyon is considered by many to be the best women’s club on the planet.
Boasting superstars like Ada Hegerberg, Dzsenifer Maroszán, Wendie Renard, Saki Kumagai and Lucy Bronze, Olympique Lyonnais have claimed 14 consecutive titles in France’s top division as well as six Uefa Women’s Champions Leagues trophies – including four of the last five.
Off the field, Lyon’s women’s team – including their girls’ academy – share many of the same facilities, resources, and personnel as their men’s side. They also pay their players some of the best salaries in the world, with several athletes earning anywhere between $16,000 and $30,000 a month.
These are still paltry sums compared with their male counterparts, but such is the financial landscape of the women’s game that spending slightly more than your competitors can generate massive – historic, even – on-field results.
As New York Times football writer Rory Smith noted a year ago, “Such is its dominance that it is hard to think of a club team, anywhere in the world, whose résumé can compete. [President Jean-Michel] Aulas has compared Lyon to Real Madrid and Barcelona in the men’s game, but the parallel sells his team short […] It is the most dominant – and possibly the best – sports team on the planet.”
And now there is an Australian there. Not just any Australian, either – a 20-year-old woman from a country town whose first taste of professional football for Western Sydney Wanderers in the W-League was just five years ago. If we are to draw equivalences, as Aulas does, there is no Australian male player who has achieved a similar feat; there is no Socceroo at Real Madrid or Barcelona, and perhaps there never will be.
Carpenter’s move to the biggest women’s team in the history of the sport is not just testament to her individual talent, though; it is also further acknowledgement that – following Kerr, Foord, and several other players who have made moves to Europe in the past 12 months – Australia is producing some of the best women footballers in the world with far fewer domestic resources at its disposal.
The question becomes, then: what is Australian football capable of producing if more attention is paid to the development pathways of its women?
Currently, the W-League remains an under-utilised springboard for Australia’s emerging talent. At just 14 rounds and a finals series, the competition has – over the course of its 12 seasons – needed to be paired with other domestic leagues if Australian women are to make a full-time career out of football, often leading to fatigue, injury and burn-out.
And for those who aren’t able to make dream moves overseas, the only remaining option is to find a second job while maintaining fitness in the state-based National Premier Leagues competitions – which over half of players from the most recent W-League season have done.
While big-money moves for Australia’s top talent makes the headlines, it is the pyramid that produces them that ought to be the focus. How many Kerrs, Foords, and Carpenters have been lost due to Australia’s inhibitive patchwork pathway? How much more international progress could have been made given the raw talent at the nation’s disposal?
With the prospect of hosting the 2023 Women’s World Cup on the horizon, Australian football has a chance to address – or redress – these blind-spots. Because as Carpenter’s move shows, the next global star of the Australian game could be kicking around in a country town, just waiting for someone to notice her.