The Sam Kerr effect: Matildas now Australia’s fourth-most popular team - and climbing

Is there anything Sam Kerr can’t do? On Thursday night, she was marked out of the game by the Czech Republic as the Matildas fired blanks in a frustrating first half of their Cup of Nations opener - so Kerr took charge of the situation, and found another way to put her stamp on the contest by giving a rousing half-time talk to her teammates that put them on track for a 4-0 win.

“Don’t freak out. Don’t stress out. Believe in the plan, believe in the process,” she told them. She wasn’t even wearing the captain’s armband, which she gifted to Clare Polkinghorne on the night as she made her record 152nd international appearance, but continued to lead by example.

Sam Kerr scores during the Cup of Nations match against the Czech Republic.Credit: Getty

When asked post-match about how Australia turned things around so well at the break, coach Tony Gustavsson shrugged and said: “What did Sam do? It was her speech.”

Kerr’s influence, it seems, has no bounds. If anything, at 29, it’s still finding new ways to grow - both on and off the field.

It should be little surprise, then, that she has played a big hand in another major step forward by the Matildas, who have surpassed the Wallabies to become Australia’s fourth-most popular national sporting team, according to an independent market research firm.

Futures Sport and Entertainment’s monthly “market landscape tracker” illustrates the rise of the Matildas as a national brand - as well as the Socceroos’ massive boost in reputation after their World Cup success in Qatar - and Kerr’s ascent into global superstardom has had a lot to do with it.

It is not the first time the Australian women’s team (6.4 per cent) has edged in front of the Wallabies (5.0 per cent) - that also happened briefly in July 2020 and March 2022 - but never before has the gap between them sat more in favour of the Matildas, who are expected to break into the top three in the lead-up to their home FIFA Women’s World Cup in July and August.

While no team has come close to challenging the supremacy of the Australian men’s Test cricket team (25.7 per cent) over the last five years, it will mean football’s two senior representative teams will round out the podium once the Matildas manage to leapfrog rugby league’s Kangaroos (9.8) in the coming months.

The Wallabies and Kangaroos will receive their own spikes when they return to action in due course, but Simon Wardle, the president of Futures Sport and Entertainment, said the overall trend lines look positive for football in Australia.

Sam Kerr poses with fans after the Matildas beat Thailand in Gosford last November.Credit: Getty

He said the sport is benefiting from the “double whammy” of the Socceroos’ round of 16 berth in Qatar and the anticipation for the Women’s World Cup - but there were other powerful forces at play, including a growing appetite across the board in Australia for women’s sport, and, of course, the Kerr factor.

A constant goalscorer for her nation and for Chelsea in the FA Women’s Super League, and a regular nominee for awards such as the Ballon d’Or, Kerr, 29, has become a textbook example of how younger fans tend to demonstrate more loyalty towards individual athletes over teams, and connect with them differently, Wardle said.

“It goes to demonstrate the power of having that person who really embodies and personifies that national team,” he said, comparing her status with the Matildas as on par with, or even bigger than, Tim Cahill’s with the Socceroos.

“We see the same with [Lionel] Messi winning the World Cup - it wasn’t Argentina winning it, the story was Messi winning it. What we’re seeing from a lot of the research that Futures does is that ‘hero worship’ to that star player is becoming more and more of an important factor for fans engaging with sports.

“A lot of that is being driven by the fact that, especially when you look at those younger fans, the Gen Z fans, more of their consumption is through non-traditional [media], social, digital. They’re engaging with the players ahead of, or as well as, the teams.

“That celebrity element is so important to those fans and their engagement with the sport and the team. It’s a stronger driver of passion for sport. Here, we’re talking about favourite national teams, but what you’re also seeing now is a relatively new phenomenon where star players are moving from club to club, and fans are changing loyalty, depending on where their favourite player is playing, which would never have happened back in the day.”

The Matildas’ current score on the Futures’ tracker is higher than what it was after the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France - and with more than five months until they play the next edition on home soil, Wardle said it was difficult to put a limit on how much more popular they could get.

Football Australia chief executive James Johnson said it was a vindication of their strategy to develop the brands of the two national teams, and in particular the Matildas, by putting as many matches as possible on free-to-air television, scheduling fixtures at opportune times and locations, and aligning them with corporate partners who share the same values as the players.

“There was a lot of room for growth for the Matildas even three years ago,” he said. “To grow a sports brand, you need to perform on the pitch, but also off the pitch. They’re on free-to-air, they get more exposure, they’re associated with brands that are healthy in the community ... and then you’ve got this thing called the Women’s World Cup.”

Other research provided by Futures to Football Australia, as part of a “brand health report” prepared for the federation, shows that football is by far the most popular sport (20 per cent) of people surveyed between the ages of 14-24 - the highest rate ever recorded by any sport for that age group, almost double football’s ‘fan favouritism’ share (11 per cent) after the 2018 men’s World Cup, and far outstripping the AFL (8.2), NRL (2.7), and cricket (7.0).

‘It goes to demonstrate the power of having that person who really embodies and personifies that national team’

Simon Wardle on Sam Kerr

But with most local interest in football pointed towards the Socceroos, Matildas and major overseas competitions like the English Premier League, the challenge for administrators remains converting these fans into followers of the A-Leagues and other domestic products.

“One of the keys to success is building those human connections between the A-League players and the fans, and through that celebrity aspect of it, rather than maybe the traditional marketing of the teams and heritage of the teams,” Wardle said.

“These new fans, especially when you’re talking about these 14 to 24-year-olds, it is a different relationship that they’re having to the sport, different ways in which they’re consuming content and feeding their passion for a sport that they clearly have a high predisposition towards. It’s a case of speaking to those fans on those terms.”

Watch every match of the UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Europa Conference League on Stan Sport.