My First World Cup: How ready is Australia to co-host its first Women’s World Cup?
There is less than a month to go until the 2023 Women’s World Cup gets underway. Competing nations are finalising their travelling squads, players are gathering for training camps and managers are starting to dust off their tactical playbooks to get ready for the most significant occasion on the footballing calendar.
With some nations, such as Jamaica, having problems in terms of preparation, and international broadcasters taking their time in agreeing deals to televise the tournament, it has perhaps gone under the radar of the global game that Australia and New Zealand are preparing to co-host their very first football World Cup.
Neither nation has a particularly illustrious Women’s World Cup history having won just one knockout match in the competition between them, and both have a reputation for valuing other sports above football. So is Australia ready to co-host this World Cup?
“Australia’s always ready for big events,” says Sydney-based football journalist Texi Smith. “There’s no need for infrastructure to be built. It’s all there. We’ve got everything in place already; they’re using existing stadiums, the transport is all set up. I’d say Australia would be ready to host any big event, even at short notice.”
Smith will be attending games both as a reporter and as a fan, and although his description of Australia’s World Cup infrastructure would appear a stark contrast to the stadiums and transport systems that were constructed specifically for last year’s Men’s World Cup in Qatar, he believes there will be some similarities between the two tournaments.
Despite the distance between host cities and therefore individual matches being far greater in Australia compared to Qatar, Smith believes that it is the organisers that will be the driving force behind the similarities.
“This is a FIFA event,” he says. “Qatar was my first World Cup as media and it’s obvious that it’s a road show. FIFA rolls into town, and everything’s provided. You get given all of the signage, all of the identity. The people who are employed and the volunteers are all provided by FIFA. The tournament could be anywhere in the world.”
Over 1 million tickets have already been sold for the tournament, and the decision was made in January to move Australia’s opening Group B match against the Republic of Ireland to the 85,000-seater Stadium Australia in Sydney having originally been scheduled to take place at the 45,500 capacity Sydney Football Stadium.
At the time, FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samoura said that the change of location would provide “more opportunities for supporters to engage with the FIFA Women’s World Cup as a month of football we will never forget gets underway.”
Whilst Smith says that opening fixture will be “huge”, he is acutely aware of the issues football in Australia faces in terms of competition from other sports. Throughout the World Cup there will be days when matches clash with National Rugby League fixtures and Australian Football League games. On July 27th, the Matildas’ group fixture against Nigeria in Brisbane is on at the same time as a Brisbane Broncos NRL game against the Sydney Roosters.
“Football is not the top sport [in Australia],” Smith explains, “it has to compete for the non-football [watching] public with rugby league, AFL, cricket. These are the big sports. They’re the sports that the media concentrates on and that your everyday person talks about.
“In Australia it seems that if you’re not into football, you would have no idea that it is happening unless it is fed to you. There’s nothing on the news, they’re just concentrating on the sports that they’re involved in.”
Despite this seemingly long-standing national aversion to the sport, Smith is confident that local supporters will get behind Toni Gustavsson’s side – even if the Australian winter means attending matches might be a cold and wet experience.
“I’d say [Australia reaching] the quarterfinals would be good,” he says. “I think the general public are expecting a final, so expectations are high. The Matildas have been on quite a journey over the last three years. They’ve had experimental matches where they’ve lost heavily but right now we’re looking at the latest results and thinking Australia have hit their straps. In a footballing sense, we’re in a good place.”
Whilst winning the World Cup would no doubt gain both the Australian team and football in the country some new supporters, Smith is keen to see the legacy of the upcoming tournament go beyond the action on the field.
“If you compare it to the Euros in England, I think the fact that they [England] did really well helped,” he says. “Women’s football just took off exponentially because of that tournament. I would love the same thing to happen here.
“The ideal scenario would be for numbers to go sky high for women’s participation. To get people interested in the sport, get funding for the sport and bring it up to the same level as the men.”
