Seeing the Women’s Asian Cup take centre stage in the Australian sporting landscape over the past month was incredible, building on the legacy of the hosting of the similarly successful 2023 Women’s World Cup. Attendance records for the Asian Cup weren’t just broken but were obliterated, including just under 75,000 passionate fans attending the nail-biting final in Sydney between the Australian Matildas and the Japanese Nadeshiko.
The Matildas couldn’t quite get their hands on the trophy against the thoroughly impressive Nadeshiko, going down 1-0, but as far as the social impact goes, a progressive leap forward has been made that will be very hard to undo.
As a woman involved in sport on both a social level playing over-30s with my friends and a professional level working in Sport for Social Impact, the change is palpable and inspiring. I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s, mad about soccer, playing every lunch time with my friends but without a female role model in the game, as it was then a society that didn’t allow me to even know the Matildas existed. Now we have little girls and boys walking around with Matilda’s names on the back of their national team shirts – definitely more common than the names of Socceroos!
In regards to the future, the most exciting part for me is the normalisation of having female athletes as heroes and household names – of course huge for little girls but *almost* more importantly for little boys. There are boys and young men now for whom the last three years of “Tillies fever” stretching from the two major tournaments hosted by Australia, the World Cup in 2023 to the Asian Cup in 2026 has fallen in a pivotal developmental point of their lives.
The flow on from that into other aspects of society and respect for and attitudes toward women in general is almost impossible to measure but undoubtedly significant. With this firm belief, I can’t help but be filled with hope and optimism. There are little girls being empowered who know no different. They know that an equal share of the sporting landscape is something they inherently deserve.
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Margie Andreasson
Employment Pathways Coordinator
