The 2020-21 W-League season starts next week. This seems like a perfectly ordinary sentence. In any other year, it would not carry any particular weight to it; it would be easily tweeted and texted and mentioned in passing. But 2020 has not been any other year.
For the past several months, hundreds of people across Australian football have worked tirelessly in order for the W-League to kick off before the year ends, albeit two days later than scheduled, on 29 December. And even now, after all of that, the entire thing could come undone overnight.
This is the exhausting reality of football in a pandemic-affected world. Sydney’s northern beaches Covid-19 cluster and the last-minute changes to fixtures it caused, shows just how rapidly the sport’s parameters can change; how fragile and interdependent its entire ecosystem really is.
But the W-League knew that already. It was, after all, one of the first sports leagues in the world to respond to the pandemic when it emerged back in March. The 2019-20 grand final was played out behind closed doors, with Melbourne City’s championship celebrations met only by the echoes of their own voices. It was a preview of the naked soundscape that accompanied live sport for the rest of the year.
In the nine months since that quiet afternoon in Melbourne, a lot has changed in Australian women’s football. The Matildas qualified for the Tokyo Olympics. Australia and New Zealand won the rights to host the 2023 Women’s World Cup. A number of the country’s best players signed contracts with some of the world’s biggest football clubs. And the W-League was all but “unbundled” from the national governing body, putting the professional game on the path to what has been promised is a brighter, more sustainable future.
While the global pandemic continues to puncture our lives, the women’s game in Australia has been one of the year’s rare feel-good stories. It shouldn’t be a surprise, of course, given women’s football has flourished over the past half-century despite oppressive – sometimes outright hostile – circumstances. That the W-League will kick off on Tuesday, with everything that has happened this year, reflects this deep resilience.
It is this resilience that will see an entirely new generation of young Australians step up to fill the void created by the departure of some familiar faces from the competition, including Sam Kerr, Caitlin Foord, Ellie Carpenter, Kyah Simon. While the exodus of senior players to Europe has caused doubt about the quality and commercial possibilities of the W-League, this is the season it needed to have – just as it did a decade ago – to create the Kerrs, Foords, Carpenters and Simons of the future.
As far as first impressions go, there has never been a season quite as important as this one. It will be the first that incoming Matildas head coach, Tony Gustavsson, observes. This is the league from which he will pluck the players who will represent Australia at the Olympics, the Asian Cup, the World Cup and beyond. For the rest of the football community, this is the moment to get to know the women who will carry the game forward; the players whose names will be emblazoned on the backs of the jerseys worn by the next generation of fans.
They will be guided by a new crop of local coaches who have emerged from the depths of state-based football. Four of the league’s nine clubs enter 20220-21 with a new coach, three of whom have recent history further down football’s domestic pyramid. It is no coincidence that these same clubs – Adelaide, Newcastle and Perth – are the same ones whose squads are overwhelmingly local in complexion.
Indeed, this could be one of the most competitive seasons yet as all clubs have been forced by the pandemic to turn inwards for talent. Some senior Matildas have returned, but international visa players are few and far between. The league, then, is anyone’s for the taking – the clubs that have kept a core group of local players together for several seasons could find themselves reaping the rewards of past austerity.
There is a sense of an ending of eras to the 2020-21 season as City – the most dominant club of the past five years – embark on their first serious rebuild after being decimated by the player exodus. But endings are also beginnings and a new dynasty could now emerge to mark the start of the league’s next chapter.
This feeling extends to the professional leagues more widely as they step into their new “unbundled” era. For the W-League, which will become one of the first women’s leagues to be operated (mostly) separately from its national governing body, the opportunities presented by independence could see it flourish in the ways its players and fans have always believed it could.
