Former Matildas head coach Tom Sermanni remembers the moment he knew Sam Kerr was different.
It was February 2009, and she was 15 years old.
Her debut for the Australian women's football team was rather unremarkable: she came on as a 76-minute substitute in a 5-1 loss to Italy in front of a smattering of fans in Canberra. She looked every part the teenager she was: baby-faced, nervous, and not quite filling out the green-and-gold jersey she wore. Nobody expected much.
But then she started moving.
"She was so new to everything, she was so young, but even then, even at that age, she was up there with the best players and the best athletes in the team," Sermanni said.
"She had all the raw materials, but I don't think she knew how good she was, or how good she could become."
Over the past 13 years, Sam Kerr's trajectory has paralleled the rise of women's football.
Starting her career in quiet suburban stadiums and playing in front of small crowds filled mostly with family and friends, she is now one of the most recognisable athletes on the planet, walking out onto some of the world's most famous pitches to the screams of tens of thousands of fans.
Since joining her first professional club, Perth Glory in Australia's A-League Women competition, Kerr has won almost every individual award on offer.
She has been named the Golden Boot winner seven times on three different continents, an award for the league's top scorer. She has been voted the Most Valuable Player five times in three separate leagues and is the all-time leading goal-scorer for the nation she now proudly captains.
She has won awards voted by fans, voted by journalists, and voted by her fellow footballers. She is the first woman to grace the global cover of the famous FIFA videogame and is the face of some of sport's biggest brands. She has a medal of the Order of Australia and even has a key to her home city of Perth.
And next week, she's one of the favourites to win the prestigious Ballon D'Or award, which recognises the best men and women's player over the previous year.
But how did she get here?
The beginning
To find out, we decided to look at the data in the hope that it would paint a picture of the evolution of her game.
The problem was that very little data exists from the early days of her career.
So we decided to rectify that by sifting through archived matches, old online and television news reports, social media posts and spoke to some of her old clubs in an effort to track down footage of as many of Kerr's 257 professional goals as possible.
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In all, we managed to find and document 238 Sam Kerr goals.
We weren't able to find footage for the other 19.
Most of the ones missing were from early in her career in Australia’s W-League.
The ones we did locate, like her first ever goal in 2008, offered glimpses of her raw speed and talent.
“She had all the raw materials, but I don’t think she knew how good she was, or how good she could become,” Sermanni said.
Her second goal a year later, a long-range strike which was judged the W-League's 2009 goal of the year, again showed flashes of her brilliance.
This goal for the Matildas was her first for her country - an opportunistic tap-in followed by what would become a trademark backflip celebration (albeit a little shaky one).
For every goal we found, we documented where and how she scored.
The resulting dataset traced the evolution of her game from a promising youngster to a goal-scoring machine.
From deft chips, to flying headers and even a bicycle kick for good measure.
The more games she played, the more the goals began to flow.
By 2017 her goal scoring exploded.
Before 2017, Kerr averaged just under 8 goals per year.
With the exception of the pandemic interrupted year of 2020, Kerr has scored more than 30 goals every year since 2017.
The evolution of Sam Kerr started slowly – in part because of where, and how, she played.
Her first position at Perth Glory, between 2008 and 2011, was on the wing.
Naturally gifted with lightning speed, she was often played out wide, sprinting around or between slower defenders to latch onto long passes or through-balls before charging in-field towards goal.
She didn't score much back then, though. Just five goals in her first three seasons at Perth – with a knee injury in between – was all she had to show for that raw talent.
She continued to play on the wing for her first overseas club, Western New York Flash in America's National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), where she signed in 2013. She started 19 times in her 21 appearances for the Flash that year, supporting the likes of legendary USA striker Abby Wambach, and scored six goals herself.
But it was on her return to Perth in 2014-15 that everything changed.
"We changed her position from a winger to a striker when she joined Perth," former Glory coach Bobby Despotovski told The Sydney Morning Herald last year.
"The simple reason was I was thinking she was not utilised enough at the winger position because she was so far away from the goal, and why would you limit such a footballer like that to be on the wing rather than being a number nine and being close to the goal?"
Sermanni saw that potential, too, and started to transition Kerr into the centre-forward position around the same time. In soccer, the centre-forward usually wears the No 9 shirt and is regarded as the main goal scorer.
"We always felt that she was going to be a centre-forward," he said. "She had all those qualities."
The move didn't come without its challenges, though. She was so unused to being directly in front of goal that she had to re-train herself to move differently; to combine better, to react faster, to make smarter decisions, to finish more consistently and with different parts of her body.
"We exposed some weaknesses in her game, which was her finishing," Despotovski said.
"Not being a striker, we had to work on that, and that was the five-year period she was playing with [Perth Glory].
"Now she is striking the ball with the left and right [feet] equally as good. What I saw […] in the FA Cup, that goal she scored chipping the goalkeeper, that never used to be present in her game."
But just as she was just beginning to generate momentum, her whole career came to a stand-still. In December 2014, Kerr sustained her second major knee injury playing for Perth against Canberra in the W-League.
The wider women's game, like Kerr herself, was still navigating its own growing pains. Leagues and clubs were rising and falling around the world, investment and media attention was coming and going. But it was the persistence of the players, as well as the countless unseen support staff behind the scenes, that ensured it would continue.
A third major injury in 2015 – this time a ruptured ligament in her left foot – kept her out of the game for another significant stretch of time, as reflected by her lack of goals in this two-year period.
The break-out years
Having spent so long on the sidelines, Kerr roared into 2017 with a kind of vengeance, knowing she had to make up for the time she'd lost.
And according to Sermanni, there were few better places to rediscover her spark than America's NWSL: a league that maximised all her best natural abilities.
"That was her stepping-stone into the professional game and where she really started to develop into a more rounded player," he said.
"It helped her in a competitive sense and in the physical sense. The NWSL is very transitional, there's a lot of space, so the game slides from end to end. It's a game suited to Sam in many ways because she had those great physical qualities: the speed, the power, and ability in the air.
Her break-out season came with Sky Blue FC in the NWSL in 2017, the first full season in America that hadn't been plagued by injuries.
Kerr's goal-scoring took off: 17 goals in 22 games saw her take out her first NWSL Golden Boot and MVP award, while also becoming the league's all-time leading goal scorer (a record she still holds despite not playing there since 2020).
She carried that form into the 2017/18 W-League season, taking out her first domestic Golden Boot award and a second consecutive Julie Dolan medal for the league's best player after a 13-goal haul in just nine appearances.
Not only was she scoring more goals than she ever had before, but she was also scoring them from more areas of the field.
This field map shows the position of Sam Kerr's first career goal.
Based on video, audio and written accounts of her goals, we captured the field coordinates of where she scored from as well as where the ball crossed the line.
After a slow start, the number of goals she scored began to rise, as did the areas of the field in which she scored them.
She became more varied in the areas of the net she'd aim for.
In her breakout year of 2017, she began scoring more regularly with her left foot.
Headers became more of a feature of her goal-scoring repertoire.
By the time she reached Chelsea, she had fine-tuned her game.
"If I look at her game now, her ability and her decision-making and composure in the final third has gone to a different level. That's what's made her a complete player," Sermanni said.
Compared to previous years, her goal-scoring has become much more confined to inside the 18-yard box, with a handful of spectacular strikes just outside of it.
Her floating centre-forward position and her improved abilities with both feet meant she became deadlier from multiple angles in and around the 18-yard box, adding techniques like chips, volleys, and long-range strikes to her repertoire. She also began taking more penalties, honing her precision in the top and bottom corners of the net.
Further, the period between 2017 and 2019 was when she really became dangerous in the air. Of the 115 goals she scored in that time, more than a fifth were from headers.
She won two more Golden Boots for her performances across both leagues before returning to Chicago in 2019 to do it all again, scoring 18 regular-season goals in 23 games – all while taking a break in the middle to lead the Matildas at the 2019 Women's World Cup – to close the American chapter of her career.
Indeed, the years between 2016 and 2019 were where her performances for Australia began to be noticed by the rest of the world, too.
In July 2017, the Matildas won the inaugural Tournament of Nations friendly series in which they defeated three of the game's international powerhouses: Japan, Brazil, and the USA.
Kerr's first-half hat-trick and celebratory back-flip against their Asian rivals stands out as her "arrival" on the world stage; the moment that made the rest of the game sit up and pay attention to the plucky underdogs from Down Under and the dynamic, joy-filled striker spear-heading them.
She scored 11 goals in that calendar year for Australia – her equal-highest tally for the Matildas – with a ratio of a goal a game. She followed that up with eight goals in 2018 and 11 more in 2019; a burst of goal-scoring form that translated from club to country.
But due to the many variables of international football including coaching, style, tournaments, travel, and team-mates, that is where most of the similarities end.
"The international game is very different," Sermanni said.
"When you're in club football, you're training with the same players day-in and day-out. You're playing with the same team and the same system. You're playing many more games closer together, often week to week.
"But when you're coming together with the Matildas and you're playing one or two games, you literally get into camp, you have a little training session, and then you're out on the field, so the continuity isn't there.
"Also, while you get into a rhythm in terms of style with your club games, internationally you come up against lots of different opponents with different tactics and different styles of play. So it's more difficult to get that same consistency and continuity from one to the other."
Becoming the complete player
Despite being the deadliest goal-scorer on two different continents over multiple seasons, many felt that Kerr still hadn't reached her ceiling. She needed to be tested, to be challenged, to be in an environment where she could grow beyond what anyone thought was possible.
England.
"She was already a great player – already one of the best – but since she's gone to Chelsea, Sam has taken the football aspect of her game to another level," Sermanni said.
"She had the physicality. She had the innate ability. She had the confidence to believe in herself. But the polish that's come into her game in the last few years, that's been something else entirely."
Polish is the word: since joining Chelsea in 2020, Kerr has fine-tuned her game in a number of ways.
She no longer makes as many transitional runs as she used to when she played in Australia and America.
She's become even more dangerous in the air, faster in her movement in tight spaces, smarter in her link-up play with team-mates, and more precise in her one-touch finishing. She rarely aims for the top corners these days, preferring instead low, hard strikes into bottom pockets.
After the pandemic cut her first season with Chelsea short, she stormed back into the picture with her biggest ever single-season tally of 21 goals in 22 games to win the Women's Super League Golden Boot in 2020/21, in addition to winning the domestic quadruple of the league title, FA Cup, League Cup and Community Shield with the club.
She followed that up with 20 goals and a second Golden Boot in 2021/22, becoming the first player in the league's history to score more than 20 goals in consecutive seasons. Her ceiling, it seems, just keeps rising.
Moya Dodd, a former vice-captain of the Matildas who went on to become one of the first women to join the sport's governing body FIFA, said Kerr had developed a sixth sense in front of goal.
"It's just having that kind of bat sonar in the box, to know where the goal is and to be able to make a strike on it without having that little bit of doubt of 'should I pass or shoot'," Dodd said.
"She's now really honed her sense of when to go for goal and you've seen that with some of the goals, she scored from outlandish positions."
Having taken Australia and America by storm, Sam Kerr has now stamped her authority on football's historic heartland. As the data shows, Kerr has not just become one of the greatest goal-scorers in women's football currently, but one of the most multi-dimensional all-round centre-forwards in the sport.
And she's done it with the same joy and flair and love for the game as what she had when she began her professional career as a fiery 15-year-old in 2008.
It's that passion that has endeared her to so many Australians who've watched her career flourish.
"When you look up now and you say 'who's the most famous Australian footballer that you can think of?', I think 10 out of 10 people in the street would say Sam Kerr," Dodd said.
"That puts Australia on the map."
Credits
Reporting: Samantha Lewis, Mark Doman
Additional reporting and research: Stephen Hutcheon and Michael Workman
Design: Alex Palmer
Development: Katia Shatoba and Thomas Brettell
Backflip animation: Alex Palmer, Getty Images/Harriet Lander
Some notes about the data used in this story:
Data regarding when and how many goals Sam Kerr scored was sourced through FBref, ALeagueStats and through our own research.
We tried to find as many of Kerr's goals as possible, but fell a few short. If you know where we could find any vision of the goals we're missing feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter @markdoman
