Former Matildas captain Melissa Barbieri has warned that footballing authorities must improve the state of women’s football in Australia, in light of the women’s AFL announcement yesterday.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Football Show, Barbieri lauded yesterday’s announcement as a positive for women everywhere in a move toward gaining parity with male sportsmen.
“Any increase in participation for female athletes is a good thing,” she said.
However, the 36-year-old also highlighted the possible dangers that this landmark news presents to the W-League and Australian football in general.
“Unless you’re highly passionate about football – and you’d have to be extremely, extremely passionate about the game to rebuke the fact that AFL is going to have a really hefty pay packet,” Barbieri said.
“If you can get over the fact that you’re going to go to an AFL club and not your beloved football, for the fact that you could earn six figures – I’m sure people will get over that pretty quickly”
“The sports outside of AFL are going to have to step up,” she said.
It has been suggested from some quarters that the women’s AFL announcement is long overdue, but despite this, Barbieri commended the approach and insisted the challenge is now with other codes of football, and other sports to improve the renumeration for talent and overall viability.
“I’m pretty sure that our football (soccer) is one of those sports that is going to have to put up or shut up.”
“The only reason why anybody would speak negatively against this edition for the AFL is because they know they can’t keep up. And they know that they’ll have to do something about it to make sure that our girls stay our girls,” Barbieri said.
“From what I hear, it (womens AFL season) is going to be outside of the W-League, so they’ll (W-League talent) will be able to play both.”
The inaugural women’s AFL season will feature six home-and-away rounds, with a finals series thereafter for the top four teams. As it stands, the W-League season runs from November to February, while the initial eight week women’s AFL format will exist between February and March.
“A lot of the girls are very happy about that, so that they can still do both,” she said.
“For me, that means that those girls are going to be able to do both, but soon enough, it (women’s AFL) will start to grow, they’ll get more players in, and the league will start to grow quite quickly.”
“That’s when you might see the fact that those girls cross over, and might not be able to come back (to the W-League).”
“Once they (the players) have to start choosing, that’s when it’s going to start hurting the sport (soccer).”
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