July 14, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
The captain of the Australian women’s team, known as the Matildas, Kerr regularly tops rankings of Australian athletes, has received numerous awards and even carried the Australian flag at the coronation of King Charles III in May.
But her biggest moment may be yet to come: The Australian is one of the most exciting players in the world at a time when her country will co-host the World Cup with New Zealand starting July 20. The Australian team, ranked 10th in the world, is in Group B with Canada, Ireland and Nigeria, and matches will be held in five cities across the country.
The world will be looking at Australia — and at Kerr, who seems aware of the next few weeks’ potential for enduring significance.
The World Cup could be a “Cathy Freeman moment,” she told the official FIFA website in the run-up to the tournament, referring to the groundbreaking Indigenous Australian sprinter who won gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and who remains a beloved icon Down Under.
“She’s the sporting moment that really changed how I thought about sport,” Kerr said of watching Freeman’s famous win as a 7-year-old. “Just watching how one person can be so focused and have the weight of the nation on her back, that really appealed to me as a kid. I feel we can have a Cathy Freeman moment. Everyone knows where they were when Cathy ran that race.”
Kerr is already inspiring little girls here to take up soccer.
“Sam Kerr is really good. She scores lots of goals, and she says she doesn’t care about the money — she just cares about having fun,” said 10-year-old Connie Ruigrok, who was practicing at the Beaumaris Soccer Club in Melbourne on a recent day.
Her team can’t wait to see the Matildas play in the World Cup. “It will be really cool to watch them,” said Connie, wearing goalie gloves for the training game.
“She’s cool,” said Connie’s teammate Valentina Ceddia, 9, of Kerr, “and she’s very good at soccer.”
Beaumaris has gone from having “hardly any” female players a decade ago to almost even numbers, club president Joe Mottola said — about 300 in each gender category. Until last year, the club didn’t even have female changing rooms or restrooms. Now it has a new pavilion, funded by the local council, with proper facilities.
“It’s just changed so dramatically, in recent times,” he said. “We’re fielding 20 calls a week now for girls to play football. When the World Cup starts, every club is going to get 200 phone calls.”
Football Australia has a goal of gender parity: Currently, about a quarter of the country’s more than 1 million soccer players over age 15 are female, according to government data. For juniors, there are about 175,000 girls to 530,000 boys.
Kerr is helping bring about that change. She has cut through to mainstream stardom “just being herself,” said Sarah Walsh, head of women’s football at Football Australia and a former national player. “We’re unpacking these gender stereotypes that existed in broader society about how women should be viewed in sport, and I think she’s been a big part of that.”
It’s not just kids who are inspired.
At the Dynamo Victoria women’s soccer club training across the city, women from 15 nations make up the amateur team. They plan to attend several of the World Cup games held in Melbourne together.
Several recent arrivals to Australia — including those from soccer-mad countries — said they picked up the game as adults only after relocating, because of Australia’s increasingly supportive attitude toward women’s soccer.
“Definitely it’s a male-dominated sport in South American countries,” said Adriana Urrunaga, 30, from Peru. Colombian Natalia Castaneda, 29, added, “I love the fact that [here] you can join a club, a female club, in almost every suburb.”
That’s a relatively new phenomenon, said Ella Healy, 29, who grew up in Melbourne and remembered only one female athlete of similar stature for Australian girls: Freeman.
“Women’s sport just wasn’t taken as seriously,” Healy said. “You didn’t have heaps of people to look to. And now you do.”
At the same time, fans have flocked to women’s games in Australia in increasing numbers: a record 36,000 watched the Matildas play the world’s top-ranked team, the United States, in 2021. More than 80,000 tickets have been sold for Australia’s World Cup opener against Ireland on July 20 in Sydney.
Overall, more than a million tickets have been sold across Australia and New Zealand, putting the 2023 World Cup on track to be “the most attended stand-alone women’s sporting event in history,” according to Football Australia.
Over the past three years, Australia’s federal and state governments have spent more than $138 million on women’s soccer, including on encouraging participation and building infrastructure such as the “Home of the Matildas” precinct in Melbourne, with four pitches and attached training facilities, which opened this month.
Kerr fell into soccer almost by accident. Her father and brother were Australian rules football players, and she has said the game was her first love as a child. But when she was growing up she couldn’t play past the age of 12 as a girl due to a lack of organized competition at the time, so she turned to soccer instead.
By 15, she was playing for Australia and is now the country’s all-time leading goal scorer. In club competition, she holds the same position in the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League, where she played between 2013 and 2019. In the U.K. Women’s Super League, where she has played for Chelsea since 2020, she has scored the most goals in two of her three full seasons.
She is the only female player with a Golden Boot — awarded each season to a league’s top scorer — from three continents. Photos of her doing backflips were projected onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House in 2020, when Australia was announced as co-host of the World Cup.
Kerr’s personality — a laid-back, kinetic confidence — has added to her appeal.
“She’s pretty much magic to watch,” said Sophie Kirton, who is 29 like her soccer hero. Kirton, who has a tattoo of the number 20 — as worn by Kerr — on her wrist, is a new soccer “obsessive.” She started watching the Matildas during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when Melbourne was under a strict coronavirus lockdown and the televised games provided a welcome relief from the monotony.
Since then, she has been getting up in the middle of the night to watch Kerr play for Chelsea on the other side of the globe. At the World Cup, she’ll be cheering in the stands.
