Is this the tipping point for women’s sport – or a World Cup-sized outlier?
So, let’s rip the band-aid off: the Matildas went down to England 3-1 in their semi-final. But their stellar run at the FIFA Women’s World Cup has done something incredible: inspired us, united a country behind a team, and drawn millions of eyes to the game.
So is this the much-hoped tipping point for women’s sport in Australia? Or, is it an Olympics-style outlier, where the nation gets caught up in the excitement and the spectacle, then returns to their regular scheduled programming? We still have one more game to play against Sweden – but what happens after that?
Mumbrella posed these questions to the experts.
It’s hard to imagine that football in Australia could ever be the same again – an entire generation has just been inspired by the spectacular achievements of the Matildas.
Will the goodwill and interest spill over into other women’s sporting leagues, such as the AFLW, which starts on September 1, or the NRLW, which has all 48 games broadcast on Foxtel, as well as certain games on free-to-air with Nine?
Rebecca Sowden is a former New Zealand Football Fern and founded the women’s sport marketing agency, Team Heroine. She is also a founding partner of the campaign, Correct The Internet, which aims to fix factual errors online which erase the achievements of women in sport. An example of this is how the internet will tell you Cristiano Ronaldo has scored the most goals in international football. That achievement actually belongs to women’s footballer, Christine Sinclair.
