“I think we always knew,” says Moya Dodd, as she reflects on the growth of women’s football. Dodd, a former Matildas vice-captain and trail-blazing sports administrator, represented Australia at the 1988 Fifa Women’s Invitation Tournament. The event in southern China was a test-run for the first Women’s World Cup in 1991.
Next month, Australia will co-host the the 2023 World Cup; with 1m tickets already sold, it is expected to be the most-attended women’s sporting event in history. Women’s football has come a long way since the Matildas walked out for their opening match of the 1988 tournament, beating Brazil in the summer heat in Jiangmen. But Dodd says even then they had no doubts about the sport’s trajectory.
The “88ers” gathered on Zoom earlier this month to reflect on that match 35 years on. “There were a lot of people at that game,” Dodd says. “For me, it was the first time I had played in front of a crowd of 15,000 or so. That, for us, was the moment we felt the game was getting the spotlight it deserved.
“We always knew the sport is fantastic to play and watch, and I couldn’t figure out why the rest of the world didn’t get it.” Dodd acknowledges the lengthy bans on women’s football in the early 1900s played a big part in that. “Most of us grew up watching football, seeing men’s crowds, and imagining that as the game that we could play,” she says. “So, I don’t want to say ‘I told you so,’ but I think that those childhood visions are now coming through for the generation playing now. And it’s fabulous – I’m just so, so happy to see it unfold.”
Dodd’s role in the rapid growth of women’s football, as a member of the 88ers and a leading global football administrator, was recognised this week with her appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in King Charles’s birthday honours list.
“I think it’s a great tribute to how far football has come and how far women’s sport has come in Australia,” Dodd says. “And I think it is a tribute to the communities that I’m part of, that are also very much part of [the upcoming] World Cup: the LGBTQ+ community and the Asian Australian community.”
The honour recognises an incredible career, from suburban Adelaide to the heights of international sport. Since ending her playing days and becoming a lawyer, Dodd has served on the governing boards of Football Australia, the Asian Football Confederation and Fifa (she was one of the first women to ever join the body’s executive committee), plus a host of sporting NGOs and charities.
Even Dodd, who prefers driving change to being in the spotlight and tries to deflect attention, pauses to concede pride in this recognition. “I am proud – and am proud of the Australia it reflects,” she says. “And it reflects football’s experience too – football was ‘othered’ for many decades.”
Dodd’s father was a firefighter, her mother a Chinese Seventh-Day Adventist and a vegetarian “before it was popular”. “I was conscious that we were different; people like us didn’t belong to the mainstream, to the establishment,” Dodd says. “Thanks to free university education, and thanks to an Australia that is prepared to embrace people with different experiences and backgrounds, it is a country where someone like me can win an award like this.” But she expresses concern about the current rise of populism and inequality, adding: “Let’s make sure Australia continues to be the land of the fair go.”
Dodd says her honour is a tribute to all those who came before her, and the many people and organisations she has worked with to effect change (such as embedding gender equality in Fifa’s governing framework).
“I think it’s a recognition of all the pioneers who made women’s football what it is today,” she says. Dodd highlights the 100-year-plus history of women’s football in Australia. “At least the first 50 or 60 years was done without any international recognition whatsoever. So it’s on the shoulders of all of those pioneers we stand.”
On 20 July the Matildas will walk into Stadium Australia to an anticipated record-breaking crowd for their first World Cup match. Three and a half decades since Dodd and her teammates took part in the Fifa Invitational, the scene will underscore how far the game has come. Dodd will be in the stands – cheering loudly.
“Every time the Matildas play, I think the Matildas alumni feel a sense of being out there with them,” she says. “Certainly I do. All the pre-match feelings you had as a player come back. It is a massive moment for Australia. There’s this sense of the unknown when you play in such a big game, it’s like climbing a mountain, you don’t know how you are going to perform at altitude until you go out there and have a go.”
But Dodd has always had a pretty good sense of where the game is heading, and she is prepared to suggest that we have not reached the mountain’s peak just yet.
I have always felt that I knew how this was going to end,” she says. “And let me tell you, there’s even better stuff to come.”
