The drumbeat of the Euros was barely noticeable in England, background noise to the hustle and bustle of life, before growing louder and louder until it reached a climax when the Lionesses triumphed over Germany to win a first major tournament last year.
Public consciousness of the Euros was earned; each kick of a ball, each victory, turned attentions to the players, the teams, the jeopardy.
Years of work had been done to build the tournament’s profile. In the weeks or months before it kicked off, the faces of England players – such as the captain, Leah Williamson – stared back from crisps packets, drink bottles and other adverts in supermarkets. Adverts ran on TV, pundits and commentators would give teasers looking forward to the action. But with the Premier League rumbling to its conclusion it was fighting to not be background noise. It was hard work, but the work was being done.
The peripheral feel was never going to last. The moment 68,871 fans filtered into Old Trafford for the opening fixture things shifted. Suddenly those faces on products, billboards and adverts were brought into focus and Euro fever started to take hold. It was incremental but rapid, the 8-0 defeat of Norway in England’s second game supercharging already high expectations for the Lionesses and drawing in more and more people.
It felt like a gamechanging tournament for women’s football in England, and proved to be so. The Lionesses are now household names, gracing the front pages as much as they do the back, becoming cultural and political icons, not just sporting ones. Their history-making performance changed society.
In Australia, another home nation has embraced women’s football; except it hasn’t been incremental, there has been no rumbling beneath the surface. Promotion of the tournament has been unrivalled from the off. Sponsors at Euro 2022 impressed with their promotion of the England team and the tournament, but in Australia it is next level.
Brands have gone big, but the host cities and local organising committee have too, on a scale that dwarfs the France 2019 edition (not hard) and puts the ambitious European Championship hosts in the shade. World Cup fever has gripped Australia. From tiny “Go Matildas!” on the bottom of baggage carousel screens and images on the steps in train stations, to huge murals and projected images on the sides of buildings, this is about more than those contracted to promote through sponsorship deals – it is everyone.
Walk through Sydney, Brisbane or Adelaide (I can’t speak for Australia’s other host cities, Melbourne and Perth) and it is impossible to avoid the presence of the tournament. Corner shops sell merchandise, fans walk around wearing shirts, scarves and badges, irrespective of whether it is a matchday, and coffee shops have handwritten signs outside celebrating the Matildas.
Fifa has done its bit too, the fan parks a huge improvement on the 2019 offering, with numerous giant screens, seating, food stalls, activities and merchandise shops, prompting more than half a million people to pass through their gates 19 days into the 32-day tournament.
Australia also passes the most famous of litmus tests, with cab drivers extolling the virtues of Tony Gustavsson’s side, pointing out which teams are staying where and discussing the matches. That is being built on with each Matildas win, as was the case with England last year, except the starting point has felt higher, broader, more ambitious (and the push around the Euros was far from unambitious).
Should Australia beat England in their semi-final on Wednesday, the impact will be stratospheric. Already other sports have paused press conferences and used screens in stadiums to show the team’s penalty shootout win against France in the quarter-finals.
There was a plan to engage the public in this way. Football Australia’s chief executive, James Johnson, said as much in a recent briefing. “There’s been two parallel strategies that we’ve tried to leave at the same time and arrive at the station at the same time, if that makes sense,” he said.
“One is the World Cup strategy, and one is the Matildas strategy. The reason we try to align these is they’re interconnected. We knew when we won the bid that in order for the competition to be successful, we needed the hosting nation to fire.
“Now, when we say we needed the Matildas to fire, I don’t just mean on the pitch. I’m not saying we needed to go and win the World Cup to be successful, but we needed the Matildas to be successful off and on the pitch in order to create interest in the World Cup. That’s what you’re seeing at the moment.
“The Matildas today are the most loved sporting product in the market … We’ve done a lot of this broader building of the brand, and we think that’s directly related to the success of the tournament. People are following the Matildas, they’re following the World Cup. If the Matildas continue it’s going to be something huge, but if they hadn’t got to the back end of the tournament, we think we’d got the Australian public already on that World Cup wave.”
Perhaps it helps that there is no direct competition here in Australia, no Premier League, no sense of ownership of the game, no 1966. There are other sports, bigger sports; Australian rules football, rugby league, cricket. But in football – or soccer – terms, the Matildas have an open field to run into. The A-League and A-League Women, or even the Socceroos, are not in the same ballpark, unable to challenge the top leagues and national teams globally.
In that respect, the impact of the Matildas and the World Cup in general could surpass that of England’s Euro 2022 win, regardless of whether the co-hosts reach the final or lift a trophy.
A Woman’s Game by Suzanne Wrack (Guardian Faber Publishing, £9.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
