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Watching, up close, a world-class footballer nonchalantly manoeuvring a ball is a transcendent experience. She juggles and dribbles, while recalling for me (a passionate football fan usually up in the nosebleed seats at international games) the various superstitions that ran through the Matildas’ camp during their 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup campaign: wearing the same sports bra, shaving their legs before every game. The team’s loss to Nigeria during the tournament’s pool stages was blamed on a teammate forgetting her manicure. It’s all light-hearted, of course. For the record, Cooney-Cross is decidedly not superstitious. She has made her own luck, arguably, with sacrifices that even by the standards of elite international sportspeople sound serious.

Earlier on this winter’s day, we had sat down to talk at Poppie’s, a cafe-cum-nursery just off the Great Ocean Road. It’s a favourite haunt for Cooney-Cross, her three younger sisters and her Mum, but even in such a familiar setting she is wary. “I’m quite introverted, and I don’t like speaking too much,” she says. And yet  she will soon open up, sharing her extraordinary and little-known story. The kind of origin tale that’ll enter football folklore as she continues her rise in the sport. For the precocious talent, who wowed the A-League Women’s competition as a 15-year-old and then made her senior debut for the Matildas at 19, is no longer just Australian football’s Next Big Thing. Now the whole world is seeing what she can do.

I’ve caught up with Cooney-Cross during a break at home following a long season of Women’s Super League football and off the back of the extraordinary success of her London team, Arsenal. The “Gunners”, as they’re known, defeated Barcelona 1-0 in the UEFA Women’s Champions League final in  Portugal on May 24. Arsenal were the clear underdogs – Barca is stacked with stars from Spain’s 2023 World Cup-winning team, including three-time Ballon d’Or winner Aitana Bonmati and two-time winner Alexia Putellas. 

Back in September 2023, Arsenal paid a transfer fee of around $270,000 to bring ­Cooney-Cross to England from Hammarby IF in Sweden. Arsenal’s then coach Jonas Eidevall boasted he’d secured the signature “of one of the best young players in world football”. He likened her ability to pass through the line to “an American quarterback”. She has since played more than 50 matches for the club, but – in what’s been raked over as a dubious decision – watched the Champions League final from the bench as a substitute.

Although Cooney-Cross has played as a central midfielder for her national team since she was a teenager, moving to one of the best club ­football teams in the world was a different beastShe has put in solid performances for ­Arsenal, scoring her first goal for the club in January. She started in two pre-season friendlies in August, and got game time in the side’s return to the Champions League this week, but has ­remained on the bench for the first rounds of the WSL. It’s one of many decisions by manager Renee Slegers that has provoked the ire of fans. 

“It’s been very hard – probably more difficult than I thought it would be,” she says. To a less determined personality, it might have been a blow to the ego. Not her. “I feel more confident now, more sure of myself,” she says. Her appetite for improvement is insatiable: a professional footballer’s off-season is measured in weeks, not months – but before flying home to see her family Cooney-Cross went to Portugal for a training camp with Premier League stars Myles Lewis-Skelly and Josh Nichols, pushing her body to new limits. “I would love to do that every year,” she says. “I’ve probably never trained at that level.”

It’s quite a statement for Cooney-Cross, who has trained, in some way or another, ­almost every day of her life. A life that led her to live in four different states before her 16th birthday, first with her single mother and three younger sisters as they looked to find stability and establish a new life, and then on her own, to pursue her football dreams. It wasn’t an easy road, but difficulty works for Cooney-Cross. “90 per cent of the time, football’s difficult,” she says. “10 per cent is happiness and excitement. There’s so much that happens in between.”

Australians are not short on sporting heroes: Freeman, Thorpie, Warnie, Arnie, Ricky, Cadel, Cahill – take your pick. We each have our ­favourites. As kids, many of us took their faces and plastered them on our walls. After the ­heroics of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the Matildas joined their ranks.

So, who was Cooney-Cross’s biggest inspiration growing up? “Hmmmm … I didn’t really have one,” she tells me. “I didn’t watch football, so it’s a bit hard for me to pick.” She considers the question in silence until at last offering her response. “It’s a bit cliché, but I’d have to pick my Mum.” And she covers her face instantly, a soft cry seeping through the cracks between her fingers. It’s the kind of quiet sob you try to dull when you know what’s about to happen, when you grapple with the words you’re trying to get out. “Every time,” Cooney-Cross continues, wiping her eyes. Her mother, Jessica, sitting ­opposite us in Poppie’s, leans over and holds her hand. “Every time,” she echoes, laughing. 

When Cooney-Cross looks up, I get a glimpse of the tear-stained freckles on her cheeks. What moves this gritty young athlete to tears every time? “She did everything,” Cooney-Cross manages to say, looking over at her mother. They smile at each other, and there’s a sense of shared hardship. There could be a ­mirror between them; Cooney-Cross is a young carbon copy of her mother. Not just in her looks and ­mannerisms, but also her kindness and patience. Jessica grounded her daughter with the strength it takes for a champion to cry in public. 

“Sometimes she couldn’t drive me to training because she didn’t have money to get petrol,” Cooney-Cross explains, breaking into tears again as she describes 1.5-hour-long journeys to training sessions at Heidelberg, in Melbourne, when the family was living in Ballarat. 

Jessica Cooney is so far removed from the “soccer Mum” stereotype, she often raises eyebrows when people learn she’s the parent of an international footballer. “I was pretty quiet,” she laughs, reflecting on her lack of sideline antics. In fact, her total lack of sideline presence. “Mum would sit in the car sometimes!” chimes in Cooney-Cross. Says Jessica: “Other parents can’t believe I have a daughter who is a professional because I didn’t really get involved – I was just being her parent – and she wanted to play football.”

Kyra Cooney-Cross was born in Brisbane and spent her early years on the  Sunshine Coast. Her ­father, Jai Cross, is a tiler who played semi-professionally for the Sunshine Coast Fire in the Football Queensland Premier League. When Jessica and Jai split, Kyra moved with her mother – first to Alice Springs and then to Ballarat, before ending up in Torquay. It was a peripatetic upbringing that gave her the fortitude for the nomadic life of a professional footballer that has so far taken her from Melbourne to Sydney, Sweden and the UK. 

Jessica recalls her daughter’s talent from her earliest moments. “She could drop-kick a ball, she liked to kick a footy, a soccer ball, tennis, anything.” As a four-year-old, she excelled in Soccer Squirts, the junior soccer skills class where children  usually pummel one another’s shins mindlessly while all attempting to get the ball at once. Not young Kyra. “Dad used to give me a dollar for every time I scored,” she says. The earnings accumulated so rapidly that their deal ended within a year. “It was a lot easier to get a goal back then,” she laughs. 

She excelled as a junior, first at Ballarat City FC and then at Heidelberg United. By the age of 14, she had trialled with the  Junior Matildas.  At 15, she signed her first professional contract with Melbourne Victory. 

A year later, Cooney-Cross made the painful decision to leave her mother and her sisters to chase her football dreams up north, and joined the Future Matildas program through Westfield Sports High School in Sydney. The school has a footballing pedigree (its alumni include Matildas Ellie Carpenter and Alanna Kennedy, and Socceroos captain Mathew Ryan), but she knew nobody in Sydney and lived between two host families. I ask her if she has any regrets about this time in her life. She says that being so far from home, she learned to live with a certain amount of fear and discomfort, which evolved into focus. No regrets. 

“There were a lot of girls in my age group at the time who had the opportunity to do it, but they were just too afraid, too young, or too family-oriented. Having to meet new people and make yourself at home, yeah, it was scary, but I think doing that at such a young age in Australia made it easier for me to move overseas.”

Her mother interjects: “You do feel like you’ve lost your youth at moments.” Cooney-Cross smiles and lists off the teenage milestones and rites of passage that passed her by. No parties, no pubs (not even now, she says – not even to watch a game), no alcohol, no weekend trips away with friends, no music ­festivals. There was a rock concert: one time, she accompanied her aunt to see Green Day. But even now, as she details the things she has supposedly missed out on, Cooney-Cross gives the clear impression she doesn’t really feel like she’s missed out on anything at all. She has a love of the game so genuine and natural, it’s as necessary to her as breathing or sleeping. 

By the time Cooney-Cross was playing ­regular team football for the Melbourne ­Victory in 2017, in what was then known as the W-League, professional women’s football was well and truly on the rise all around the globe. The American women’s national team, which dominated the sport throughout the 2010s, had begun to churn out stars that became household names – Abby Wambach, Megan Rapinoe,  Hope Solo. The Sam Kerr phenomenon was gathering steam, too; Kerr was setting alight the W-League while also taking up contracts to play in the US. The Matildas claimed their first Tournament of Nations title, sweeping aside the US, Brazil and Japan. But Cooney-Cross hardly noticed all that at the time: “I didn’t ­really think about the Matildas. I just knew I wanted to get better.”

It’s April 2021, and Kyra Cooney-Cross is in the starting line-up for the W-League grand final. She’s playing centre midfield for the Melbourne Victory. The opposition is Sydney FC. In the men’s competition, the A-League, this ­interstate rivalry is known as “the big blue”, after the two teams’ strips. It’s a time before Matildas mania – just 4600 people are scattered across the grandstand and on the hill  at Jubilee Stadium in Carlton, Sydney. For 120 minutes – that’s a full match plus two periods of extra time – the scores remain locked at 0-0. 

Cooney-Cross has been a constant threat in midfield; she’s been involved in three of the match’s best scoring chances. First, when she dribbled the ball down the left flank, deftly weaving through Sydney’s midfielders before stopping, pivoting and peeling off a long-range strike from her right boot, only to have it sneak over the crossbar. Then, when she whipped in a pin-perfect cross for  Lisa De Vanna, whose header hit the post. The third chance had the ball land at Cooney-Cross’s feet just metres from goal, and she snapped  a shot only for the keeper to pull off a miracle save. 

The match seems destined for penalty shoot-out. In the final seconds, Kyra Cooney-Cross prepares to take a corner. It’s almost certainly the last kick of the game. She has jogged to the corner, placed the ball on the ground, taken three steps back and glanced oh-so-briefly at the tangle of bodies in front of goal. She puts her head down and  whips a ball that sails over them all, curves and carves its way through the air. Without taking a touch, it sails into the goal. It’s what’s known as an Olympic goal, scoring from a corner kick. Game winner. 

Everybody knows they’ve seen something special. How long can the domestic competition keep her? Just a month later, as a reward for her outstanding form, she will be called in to make her international debut as a 19-year-old Matilda at the Tokyo Olympics. 

One person who had been watching her progress was  Pablo Pinones-Arce, manager of the Hammarby women’s team in Sweden. From the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Cooney-Cross was scheduled to fly to Europe with the Matildas for a friendly against Ireland. Pinones-Arce pounced and insisted she detour to Stockholm to watch a game. “As soon as I saw that game – their fans, their coach, the sports director – I knew I was coming,” Cooney-Cross beams. “It was a derby. The stadium was sold out, and I had never seen that before in women’s football. I was just hooked.”

Still a teenager, she returned to Australia, said her goodbyes, and before long was strapped into her economy seat to Sweden. But when she arrived, she quickly realised something was amiss. “I think she ticked the wrong box [at ­Immigration],” her mother tells me. She was going over there to work, to play football, but unbeknownst to her the paperwork had not been finalised, so her new team had left her literally out in the cold. “I was supposed to say I was on a holiday, but I didn’t know that. Two cops told me to get out of the line and wait in a corner. I was stuck at the airport for 24 hours, and the police took me down to the station. I was getting questioned about everything. It was so scary. I was sleeping there at the airport on the chairs. And then I got deported.  I stood at the back of a plane, straight back to Australia. It was the worst experience of my life.” 

Sitting at Poppie’s,  Jessica flinches. She shudders to think about it. But what can you do when you’re 16,000km away? 

Hammarby made its amends, sorted the paperwork and flew her back – this time with her aunt as a chaperone. It was a rude ­introduction to the world of international football transfers. “I laugh about it now,” Cooney-Cross smiles. Within a few months, she  was a starter in Hammarby’s midfield and would go on to play a crucial role in the side’s first and only championship.

Pinones-Arce may have had Cooney-Cross on his radar for another reason. Then Matildas coach Tony Gustavsson, also a Swede, had been his predecessor at Hammarby. Gustavsson gave Cooney-Cross her international debut in June 2021, just before the Olympics. “Not many coaches would do something like Tony did,” she recalls. “He was willing to take risks and bring in players and give them a go, give them experience and minutes.”

What was it like joining the Matildas set-up? To suddenly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Caitlin Foord, Steph Catley, Katrina Gorry and Samantha Kerr, who that year had been among the nominations for the Ballon d’Or? “Big ­characters, big names,” she acknowledges. “It’s not easy coming in – they don’t make it easy. You’ve got to earn respect.” Under Gustavsson’s tenure, she would go on to become a lynchpin of the national team and a central figure in the 2023 World Cup campaign. Among her admirers was pundit Ian Wright, a former Arsenal great. “Can I just say: Cooney-Cross? Player,” he was quoted saying after Australia’s 4-0 win against Canada in the final group match at the World Cup, and followed it up with a gushing tweet to his 2.2 million followers. Wright would later divulge on his podcast that he’d spotted Steph Catley in the players’ tunnel on the same night, and begged her to “get [Cooney-Cross] at our place. Have some words, see if it’s something she might want to do. We’ve got to get her, Steph!”

A few months after our time on the windswept Victorian south coast, we speak again over a Zoom call, with Cooney-Cross talking from her new apartment in London. I note that the room is quite bare, with only a dartboard on the wall. She doubles down on the concept of athletic resolve. “If there’s something you want to do, you just have to push through because it’s a part of the job. If you love the sport, you need to do it and go through the process. But it does get tough. Just the other day, I was looking up flights to get my Mum and my aunt over, because I would love some help around the place!”

Her Arsenal and Matildas teammate Catley, often subject to Cooney-Cross’s off-pitch hijinks, had this to say of her young colleague after the Matildas defeated Germany in a friendly late last year, in a match where Cooney-Cross scored her first goal for the national team – a rocket from close to the halfway line: “Her journey has been pretty amazing … knowing her personally, from where she started to where she is now, it’s just amazing to witness her growth. She’s become so open-minded about getting better and working hard. I see it at Arsenal every day. She’s doing everything she can to be the best player that she can, and it’s really starting to come into fruition. She’s coming out of her shell.” 

After a lacklustre Matildas showing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the “tactically defensive” Gustavsson’s contract was not renewed. Then, for 10 months, from August 2024 until June 2025, the role of head coach for Australia’s most popular international team sat vacant. It’s a situation that rankles Cooney-Cross even now. “It would never happen in the men’s game,” she remarks. “Never happen.” 

She repeats herself intentionally, mulling over how to phrase the frustration that simmered within the team when they were left without leadership. “[For the men] they’d find a new coach straight away, and we waited almost a year,” she says. And yet Cooney-Cross is ­obviously buoyed by the appointment of new national coach Joe Montemurro, who has coached elite women’s teams at Arsenal, Juventus, and French powerhouse Lyon. She  first encountered him when she was just a kid at the National Training Centre in Victoria. 

Montemurro remembers meeting a small kid with a huge amount of promise. “She was very talented on the ball and stood out for her age,” he says. “She was more of an attacking-minded player. Also, very cheeky. I was overseas when she made her A-League debut, and I remember there was a lot of talk about her ­maturity and talent. She became more of a midfielder involved in creating the play. She has matured and evolved her level of professionalism; being in top football environments naturally pushes high standards. To survive, you need to be at a high level constantly. Kyra is important for the future of the national team.”

Cooney-Cross is a fan of the man and his methods. “Joe’s coached world-class teams, world-class players. And he wants to play football.” She emphasises those last two words, now clearly relishing the change to a more attacking style. “I don’t think the Matildas have ever ­really played this style of football before.” 

She describes the shift looming over the team, which will be a stark transition from Gustavsson’s preference for defence and counter-attack. As a midfielder, she will be crucial to its application on the pitch. In her view, the changes will play to the team’s innate strengths – their speed, athleticism, and national mindset. “Aussies have a never-say-die attitude in us. The way we grow up is so different compared to over here [in Europe].”

For Matildas mania to continue, Cooney-Cross knows the team needs to win. “That was the best experience of my life. Like, having a World Cup at home, selling out stadiums. Young boys, young girls, men and women, families coming to watch us play. Australia coming together – I don’t think anything will ever really beat that,” she says. “Even now, when we’re all walking on the street and stuff, people notice us and are taking photos. Before the World Cup, that never happened. I just think because we have so many sports in Australia, people always watch the AFL or the NRL, and having a big tournament like that on home soil brought everyone together. During the World Cup parents came up to me saying, ‘My son wants to be a Matilda’, but I had to say, ‘He has to be a Socceroo’… and they get upset’,” she laughs. 

But fans naturally are fickle – the ‘Tillies’ supporters who once memorised every starting line-up, wore their jerseys to work and cheered with unreserved passion have been muted. The Asian Cup, which the Matildas have not won since 2010, is to be played at home in March. It could be the opportunity to put the team back in the national consciousness. Back on the back page, and on the front. “We want to come home and win the Asian Cup. Look at what the Lionesses did,” she says, referring to the England women’s team that won the Women’s Euro tournament in July and returned home to rapturous scenes. “We want to win the Asian Cup and bring everyone together again.” 

In the meantime, her focus is on breaking into the Arsenal starting side. “The start of the  season has been a testing time. I feel fit, strong and ready and there’s not been a chance to contribute on the pitch to the team yet,” she says. “So this makes me even more excited to get back with the Matildas. So many of them have been really supportive. Joe [Montemurro] came over to visit and we constantly chat; so many of the girls and my ex teammates and coaches have been in touch to check in. I’ve also got Wrighty, who is always sending me positive messages and funny memes to keep my spirits up. Honestly, I couldn’t feel more ready and excited by the opportunity. Get me on that pitch!”

At 24, Cooney-Cross is evolving into a generational force for the Matildas. Could she one day captain her country? I ask  Montemurro. “Kyra is important for the future of the national team. Developing as a leader is also important for the future generation of Matildas,” comes the reply. She’ll get her next opportunity to play in the green and gold when the Matildas take on England and Wales in October.

With reporting by Jessica Clement.