Footy codes wrestle with their own ‘women problem’
The footy war is on in the women’s game and the NRLW isn’t just chasing, it’s charging. Both major codes can learn a lesson from the Matildas. They need to. They know their futures are attached to it.
When the AFL was being lashed for the so-called demotion of footy boss Laura Kane in late May, giving her a remit to mostly focus on the AFLW, Eddie McGuire was one of the few who identified the bigger picture.
“Everyone goes, ‘Oh, it’s a demotion’,” McGuire said on his Channel 9 podcast. “We need her in there in the area she’s going to … I see them as major issues for football in the next few years. And that’s because the NRL’s women’s football has gone past us at 1000 miles an hour.”
Former Essendon coach James Hird chimed in: “The quality of the NRLW seems to have gotten to a level that the AFLW hasn’t quite got to.”
What fantasy land is this? Who could ever have envisaged a day when two AFL heavyweights were across the vagaries of women’s football? Of women’s rugby league, let alone consider its dominance of the AFLW as a “major issue” for their sport?
The major codes are torn about how to bottle the lightning of women’s sport, mostly because they understand their futures are attached to it.
Whether it’s Aussie rules, rugby league, rugby union, or soccer, organised women’s football competitions are untapped goldmines for the professional codes.
Is McGuire right? Has the NRLW “gone past” the AFLW?
The NRLW’s eighth season kicked off on Thursday night with Parramatta beating last year’s grand finalists, Cronulla, 18-16.
It was an entertaining match but the banks of empty seats on the TV coverage show the premiership is still very much in its formative years.
The competition expanded to 12 teams this season, bringing in Canterbury and the New Zealand Warriors, after years of taking it slow. It was ridiculed for having just four teams in 2018 while the AFL started the year before with eight, expanding to 18 in 2022.
McGuire describes the decision from the AFL to expand so quickly as a “positive mistake”, and the broadcast figures suggest he’s right.
The NRLW’s average free-to-air viewership for the last home-and-away season was 143,000, jumping to a staggering 521,000 for the finals. The AFLW averaged 53,000, with about 174,000 tuning in per finals match.
Then there’s the Women’s State of Origin: this year’s series averaged a whopping 1.025 million viewers across three matches.
Compare that to the Matildas, whose last three internationals had a combined viewership of 1.018 million.
Perhaps the best evidence is found in the product itself: an increase in pay and more money being ploughed into high-performance has produced stronger, fitter, and far more skilful players in a short space of time. Matches are fun to watch, devoid of the structure and wrestling in the ruck that has infected much of the men’s game.
More than that, it’s become a sport for young Pasifika women, either here or elsewhere in the Pacific, to play.
The NRLW has an inherit advantage over its rivals, particularly the AFLW. In the past, the opportunities to play contact football have dried up for girls once they hit their teens, but touch football has always been there to teach women attacking skills in the rugby codes.
For the first time in history, there’s a vigorous tug-of-war between the footy codes for young female talent.
The most neglected demographic has suddenly become one of the most important.
Rugby union and soccer can offer a pathway to the Olympics while playing in exotic locations around the world.
How many young girls watched Australia’s sevens team win gold at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and said, I want to do that?
How many said something similar when the Matildas trio of Steph Catley, Caitlin Foord and Kyra Cooney-Cross helped Arsenal win the Women’s Champions League final earlier this year?
The problem for rugby is the opportunity in sevens is limited, and for the young. By the age of 26, many don’t graduate to 15-a-side competitions, instead switching to the NRLW. No fewer than 22 players swapped codes from rugby to league this season.
“We want to be the biggest women’s sport in the world,” NSW and Parramatta prop Kennedy Cherrington, who was a rugby union centre before joining the NRLW, said on The Matty Johns Show on Fox Sports on Sunday night.
She also wants female players to be recognised as full-time, professional players when the next collective bargaining agreement is struck in 2028.
If this week’s season launch was anything to by, it will be a marathon negotiation after the NRL and RLPA squabbled over a $500 appearance fee for each of the 12 captains.
The NRL paid the players, even though it wasn’t required under the current CBA. Neither the RLPA nor the NRL would comment on the record.
The argument that funding for female athletes should be commensurate with the revenue they bring into their respective codes is simplistic and defeatist.
Not surprisingly, the AFL rejects McGuire’s claim that the NRLW has roared past the AFLW. It’s playing the long game, firm in the belief that a well-established premiership will benefit it in the next round of broadcast negotiations.
The AFL also pays its female players better than the NRL. By 2027, the average wage increases to $82,000. In the NRLW, it will increase to $63,250.
Fans will laugh at the suggestion that one day women’s players in both codes will be paid the same as men, but if any sport can illuminate the benefits of treating men and female athletes the same, it’s Football Australia.
In 2019, the players’ union lobbied for men and women who represent their country to receive the same pay. The Socceroos drove the issue hard on behalf of their female counterparts – and the FA listened.
We all know what happened next.
Four years later, while hosting the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the Matildas’ scored the highest television ratings in the history of ratings for any program. They sold out stadiums. They dominated the media for weeks. And they’re now one of the most valuable sporting brands in the country.
Invest and history can be made.
Weird in the Windies
It’s difficult to recall a scene quite as weird as the one playing out in the second Test in Grenada where a West Indies player who stands accused of serious sexual assaults of multiple women has been allowed to play.
The player was last week accused of sexually assaulting 11 women, one of whom he allegedly raped and another being a teenager. No police charges have been laid, and no investigation from West Indies cricket authorities launched, but the player’s name isn’t a secret.
Indeed, his name and face are plastered all over Caribbean news websites and social media.
Libel laws prevent him being named here.
While the player hasn’t been charged, and he deserves the presumption of innocence, could you imagine an Australian player being allowed to take the field during, for instance, the Ashes later this year with such heinous claims levelled at him?
These aren’t the claims of one woman but 11. It’s hard to fathom that the matter hasn’t been properly dealt with by police.
Australian correspondents in the Caribbean must be tying themselves in knots covering this Test, knowing the biggest story of the day concerns the player they can’t name.
West Indies coach Daren Sammy didn’t appreciate a hard line of questioning from Nine Newspapers’ reporter Tom Decent on the eve of the match.
“You’re a mean guy man,” Sammy said as we walked away from a media scrum. “Why you being so mean to the guy?”
Daren, you should meet the bloke!
Some weird things are also happening in the Australian team, mostly around Steve Smith.
When he was ruled of the first Test in Barbados because of a compound dislocation of his finger, he decided to leave the camp and duck home to his New York City love nest with wife Dani. As one does.
“I was honestly just bored here in Barbados, I couldn’t do anything,” Smith said. “I was sort of stuck in the room doing nothing. Dani was there in New York and the dog’s back there … so I sat in the airconditioning and watched the boys play.”
Smith proved his fitness after facing tennis balls in a baseball cage under a bridge in NYC. Batting with a splint on his dodgy finger, he made just three as part of yet another top-order collapse.
It’s all a bit of a worry in an Ashes year but, whatever you do, don’t suggest this team doesn’t have a succession plan: after 13 years, off-spinner Nathan Lyon has handed the singing of the team song Under the Southern Cross I Stand to Alex Carey.
It’s outrageous they didn’t give it to Konstas. I’m recording an angry TikTok video as we speak.
A royal breakaway
Former England captain Mike Tindall will be an interesting face in the crowd at the British & Irish Lions’ match against the Waratahs at Allianz Stadium on Saturday night.
Tindall, a member of the British royal family, is the face of the R360 breakaway league that has been the talk of the rugby world.
Like all good breakaway leagues, its very existence is shrouded in secrecy. Depending on who you talk to, the Grand Prix-style competition is either dead or buried – or very much alive.
The player managers I’ve spoken to believe it still has legs.
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