What the 2023 Women's World Cup Did to Australian Football
A verified account of the 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia: the crowds, the record television audiences, the money, and what legacy actually held.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished National teams19 min read
- Tournament attendance
- 1,978,274 across 64 matches, a Women's World Cup record
- Average crowd
- 30,911 per match, up from 21,756 in 2019
- Peak Australian audience
- 7.13 million average, 11.15 million reach for the England semi-final
- Television record
- Most-watched programme in Australia since OzTAM measurement began in 2001
- Australian venues
- Six stadiums across five cities, from Sydney to Perth
- Matildas finish
- Fourth, their best World Cup result in nine appearances
- Facilities funding
- Federal Play Our Way fund of 200 million dollars for women's and girls' sport
- Participation after
- Women and girls up 16 per cent to 221,436 in 2024
For one month in July and August 2023, Australia hosted a World Cup that broke the sport's attendance record, produced the highest-rating television programme measured in the country this century, and ended with the national team in a semi-final for the first time. Almost two million people went to matches across the two host nations. Seven's coverage of the England semi-final averaged 7.13 million viewers and reached 11.15 million Australians. Football Australia then recorded two consecutive record participation years.
That is the case for 2023 as the most consequential month in the history of the code in this country. There is also a case against, and it is worth stating early: the domestic women's league had one enormous season and then lost about a quarter of its crowd; the facilities the new players needed did not appear; and the governance problems that existed before the tournament were still there afterwards. Both accounts are supported by the numbers.
This page separates what is documented from what is asserted. For the team's own record before and after that month, see the Matildas' history and records. For the confederation change that made Australia eligible for Asian qualification in the first place, see why Australia left Oceania for the AFC. The wider Australian sport guide sets football against the other codes.
What Australia actually hosted
The 2023 tournament was the first Women's World Cup with 32 teams, expanded from 24, the first co-hosted across two confederations, and the first held in the southern hemisphere. Australia sits in the Asian Football Confederation and New Zealand in Oceania, so the joint bid crossed a boundary FIFA had never crossed before.
Australia used six stadiums in five cities. Stadium Australia and Sydney Football Stadium in Sydney, Lang Park in Brisbane, Melbourne Rectangular Stadium, Perth Rectangular Stadium and Hindmarsh Stadium in Adelaide. New Zealand used four more. Every Australian venue was rectangular, which sounds trivial and is not: the country's largest grounds are ovals built for cricket and Australian rules, and the shortage of big rectangular stadiums is a standing constraint on football here that the tournament made visible to a general audience.
Sixty-four matches were played in total. The prize pool was 110 million US dollars, up from 30 million in 2019. Spain beat England 1-0 in the final at Stadium Australia in front of 75,784 people, and Sweden finished third.
The Matildas' run, match by match
Australia's tournament was not a smooth ascent. It nearly ended in the group stage.
| Stage | Opponent | Result | Venue | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group B | Republic of Ireland | Won 1-0 | Stadium Australia, Sydney | 75,784 |
| Group B | Nigeria | Lost 2-3 | Lang Park, Brisbane | 49,156 |
| Group B | Canada | Won 4-0 | Melbourne Rectangular Stadium | 27,706 |
| Round of 16 | Denmark | Won 2-0 | Stadium Australia, Sydney | 75,784 |
| Quarter-final | France | Drew 0-0, won 7-6 on penalties | Lang Park, Brisbane | 49,461 |
| Semi-final | England | Lost 1-3 | Stadium Australia, Sydney | 75,784 |
| Third place | Sweden | Lost 0-2 | Lang Park, Brisbane | Brisbane sell-out |
The loss to Nigeria on 27 July left Australia needing to beat Canada, the reigning Olympic champions, to survive. They won 4-0 in Melbourne. The quarter-final against France on 12 August went to a twenty-kick shootout in which goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold saved three penalties, missed one of her own, and Cortnee Vine scored the winner. It is the single most-replayed passage of play in Australian football.
Sam Kerr, the country's record goalscorer, missed the first three matches with a calf injury and came off the bench against Denmark. Her long-range goal against England in the semi-final briefly levelled a match Australia then lost 3-1.
- 1978274Total attendance
- 30911Average crowd
- 7130000Semi-final average audience
- 11150000Semi-final national reach
Tournament totals cover both host nations across 64 matches. Television figures are Australian, sourced from OzTAM-based reporting by the Seven Network in August 2023.
The television numbers, and what they mean
The semi-final against England is the number everyone quotes, and it deserves care because two different measures get mixed up. The average audience, the figure comparable to any other rating, was 7.13 million across Seven and 7plus. The national reach, meaning the number of people who watched any part of the broadcast, was 11.15 million. Both are records. They are not the same statistic, and using reach where a rating is meant inflates the comparison.
On the average-audience measure the semi-final is the highest-rating programme in Australia since OzTAM began measuring in 2001. That includes Olympic ceremonies, State of Origin, and every AFL grand final in the period. The quarter-final against France had already taken the 2023 title with roughly 4.17 million before the semi-final passed it a few days later.
Across the whole tournament, Seven reported that 18.6 million Australians watched some part of its coverage. Australia's population at the time was around 26.5 million. That figure is a cumulative reach across a month rather than a simultaneous audience, but even discounted heavily it describes something close to universal exposure.
Attendance, and what a record crowd costs
The tournament total of 1,978,274 beat the previous Women's World Cup record by more than half a million. The average of 30,911 per match compares with 21,756 in France in 2019.
Two caveats belong with those figures. First, several venues operated at reduced tournament capacity because of FIFA's requirements for broadcast positions, hospitality and sponsor space, so the crowds are not the same as the grounds' full domestic configurations. Second, the expansion to 32 teams added matches, so the total and the average moved for different reasons and should be read separately.
What matters more for the legacy argument is the composition. Australia's own matches at Stadium Australia all reached tournament capacity, and so did the non-Australian final. Matches without a host nation involved also drew well in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne's rectangular ground, which is the harder test and the one 2023 passed.
How the demand actually behaved
Ticketing tells a more interesting story than the headline total. Demand for the Australian matches was effectively unbounded from the moment the group draw was made, and the New South Wales government released an additional forty thousand Sydney tickets in the months before kick-off because the initial allocation cleared far faster than the sales model anticipated.
Demand for the rest of the tournament was patchy in a way that is normal for a first-time host market and was mostly ignored in the coverage. Matches between two teams with no Australian diaspora connection, played in the smaller venues, did not fill. Matches involving England, Japan, Brazil or a country with a substantial Australian community did. Adelaide's Hindmarsh Stadium, the smallest Australian venue, was the most consistently full because its capacity matched realistic demand.
That pattern is the reason the average of 30,911 is a more honest number than any single sell-out. It reflects a schedule that mixed guaranteed sell-outs with genuine risk, and the tournament came out ahead across both.
The free screening sites and the public moment
The semi-final produced something Australian sport rarely manufactures deliberately: a synchronised national audience with a physical location. The New South Wales government opened Western Sydney Stadium and Sydney Football Stadium as free screening venues, both filled, and comparable sites operated in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
This matters for the legacy question because it changed who counted as a football audience. Free screenings drew people who would not have bought a ticket to an A-League match and had no prior relationship with the code. Some of them registered a child the following season, which is the participation number, and some of them did not, which is the attendance number that fell in 2024-25.
Public screening infrastructure is also cheap relative to stadium construction and is one of the few tournament costs that scales down cleanly. It is the part of the 2023 delivery model most likely to be copied by the next host.
Legacy '23: the plan that existed first
The most useful thing Football Australia did was publish its legacy targets before the tournament rather than claiming them afterwards. Legacy '23 set out what the governing body wanted the World Cup to leave behind across participation, facilities, coaching, officiating, high performance and commercial development.
The headline target is gender parity in community participation by 2027, meaning a 50-50 split of registered players. When the plan was written, women and girls made up roughly 26 per cent of participants. Football Australia also set a facilities target of 60 per cent of changerooms being suitable for female players, against a national baseline it put at 41 per cent.
Publishing numbers in advance makes an organisation auditable, and it is why the 2023 legacy can be assessed at all. Most Australian major-event legacy claims are made retrospectively, with the goalposts set after the ball has been kicked.
Government money, before and after
Federal and state governments committed a combined figure in the region of 398 million dollars to Legacy '23 and related initiatives, of which Football Australia reported that about 269 million went directly to football and roughly a third produced benefits shared across other sports. That covers facility grants, high-performance investment and programme funding rather than the cost of staging the matches themselves.
The single largest post-tournament commitment was the federal Play Our Way programme, 200 million dollars aimed at facilities and equipment for women and girls across community sport. It was announced in direct response to the Matildas' run and was open to every code, not football alone.
Individual states also spent on venue works, transport and free public screening sites. New South Wales opened Western Sydney Stadium and Sydney Football Stadium as free screening venues for the semi-final, which is the kind of decision that only makes sense when a government has already concluded the audience is real.
What happened to participation
This is where the legacy is strongest, and it is measured rather than asserted.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Total participants | 1,911,539 | about 1.93 million |
| Women and girls | 221,436 | 231,435 |
| Annual change, women and girls | Up 16 per cent | Continued growth |
| Registered coaches | Up 19 per cent | Not separately published |
| Volunteers | Up 26 per cent | Not separately published |
The 2024 report was the first full season after the tournament and recorded an 11 per cent rise in total participation, with women and girls up 16 per cent. The 2025 report confirmed continued growth to about 1.93 million total and 231,435 women and girls. Two consecutive record years is a materially different result from a single post-event spike, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for a durable legacy.
The coaching and volunteer figures matter as much as the player numbers. A club can only absorb new players if it can find adults to run teams, and the 2024 rise of 19 per cent in registered coaches and 26 per cent in volunteers is what made the participation growth deliverable rather than notional. The detail behind those numbers is covered in women's football participation in Australia.
The A-League Women problem
The domestic league is where the legacy argument is weakest, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours.
The 2023-24 A-League Women season, played immediately after the World Cup, drew 312,199 spectators in total at an average of 2,246 per match. That was the best-attended season of any women's competition in Australian history by a clear margin. The following season, 2024-25, fell to 216,884 in total and an average of 1,583, a drop of about 26 per cent. The season's best single crowd was 8,582 for Adelaide United against Central Coast Mariners in March 2025.
Several explanations are offered and more than one is probably true. The novelty of the post-tournament season faded. Many Matildas play in Europe or the United States and are not in the domestic league, so the players people watched in August 2023 are largely not the ones on offer in December. Scheduling put a number of matches in small suburban grounds at inconvenient times. And the marketing spend that accompanied the first post-World Cup season was not sustained.
The lesson is narrow but important: a national-team event transfers attention to the national team far more efficiently than to the club competition beneath it. Nothing about hosting a World Cup automatically fixes a domestic league.
- Women and girls participation 2024221436
Comparison of the two clearest measured outcomes after 2023. Participation is Football Australia's annual census. A-League Women attendance is season totals for 2023-24 and 2024-25.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value | |
|---|---|---|
| Women and girls participation 2024 | 221436 | 2025 |
Schools, coaches and the workforce nobody photographs
The participation report contains a category most coverage skipped. Football Australia's schools and community programmes rose 13 per cent in 2024, and its Sporting Schools programme reached 158,700 students nationally, up 21 per cent. Social football, meaning the informal five-a-side and walking-football formats that sit outside club registration, grew 13 per cent to 174,846 participants.
Those numbers matter because they describe the entry point rather than the destination. A child who plays football in a school programme has not joined a club, but the school programme is where most club members are recruited from, and its growth is the leading indicator for club registrations two and three seasons later.
The workforce numbers are the constraint. Registered coaches up 19 per cent and volunteers up 26 per cent in a single year is a remarkable result, and it is also the ceiling: a club with eighty new registrations and no additional adults cannot field the teams. Every participation figure in the 2024 and 2025 reports is downstream of whether enough parents said yes.
What it did for the men's game
Very little directly, and that is the point worth making. The Socceroos' fixture list, broadcast value and qualification path were largely unaffected by the women's tournament, and the men's team's own commercial position continued to rest on World Cup qualification cycles.
The indirect effect was on the code's political standing. A federation that has just delivered a record-breaking global event has a materially better case when it asks governments for facilities money, and the Play Our Way fund and the subsequent infrastructure campaign are both downstream of that credibility. The men's game benefits from any grant that lights a community pitch, because the same pitch carries both.
The comparison worth holding is with 2015, when Australia hosted and won the men's Asian Cup. That tournament produced a trophy and a good month of crowds, and it did not shift participation in any measurable way. Something about 2023 was categorically different, and the most plausible explanation is that it reached an audience the code had never previously converted. The Socceroos' own record sits largely outside this story.
The facilities gap the tournament exposed
Recruiting players is easy after a World Cup. Housing them is not. Football Australia's subsequent policy platform put the community infrastructure gap at about 2.8 billion dollars and asked governments for a coordinated 3 billion dollar programme, itemised rather than left as a round number: roughly 1.56 billion from the federal government over ten years for equitable changerooms, about 851 million from states and territories for pitch lighting, about 391 million over five years for drainage and weather resilience, and 50 million for a national football headquarters.
The changeroom item is the one that connects directly to 2023. A club that signs a girls' team and has one unlockable shed with a single entrance cannot reasonably ask fourteen-year-olds to use it. The lighting item is less obvious and arguably more limiting: a floodlit pitch delivers several extra training hours a week through a southern winter, so lighting is effectively a multiplier on how many teams a single ground can carry.
Drainage is the climate item. A ground that closes for a fortnight after heavy rain loses those fixtures permanently, because there is nowhere to reschedule them in a full winter season.
What changed for the Matildas themselves
Before 2023, a Matildas home crowd above 30,000 was exceptional and the record stood at 36,109. Since 2023, matches at Stadium Australia have repeatedly drawn crowds in the seventy-thousand range. The ceiling did not rise gradually; it doubled inside a month and then stayed there.
The clearest post-tournament test came in March 2026, when Australia hosted the AFC Women's Asian Cup across Perth, the Gold Coast and Sydney. Australia reached the final, lost 1-0 to Japan at Stadium Australia, and the crowd was 74,397 - a tournament record and within a few hundred of the biggest 2023 nights, nearly three years later. That result is covered in Australia's Asian Cup record.
Commercially, the team moved from a supporting property to the anchor of Football Australia's rights portfolio. Broadcast, sponsorship and ticketing all reset upward, and the practical consequence is that the governing body's revenue now depends heavily on one national team's fixture list.
What the tournament did not change
It did not change the shape of Australian football. The A-League remained a closed competition with no promotion or relegation. The long-argued national second division was not in operation during the tournament. The relationship between Football Australia and the professional leagues, unbundled in 2020, stayed contested. The state federations still ran the registration system that most families interact with, and its costs stayed where they were.
It also did not change the stadium problem. Australia hosted a World Cup by using six rectangular grounds, several of which are shared with rugby league and rugby union and none of which is owned by a football club. Nothing about 2023 added a football-controlled venue, and comparisons with the code's use of shared grounds such as Lang Park in Brisbane and Sydney's Allianz Stadium are the same after the tournament as before it.
Anyone who expected a month of full houses to resolve fifteen years of structural argument was always going to be disappointed. That is a reasonable expectation to have had and an unreasonable standard to judge the tournament against.
How 2023 compares with other Australian women's sport
The Matildas now sit at or near the top of Australian women's sport on audience, alongside the Australian women's cricket team, which has the far stronger trophy record. Cricket's advantage is silverware and a settled domestic competition; football's advantage is a global tournament calendar with opponents Australians recognise.
The domestic comparison is less flattering. The Women's Big Bash League established itself over a decade of consistent scheduling and free-to-air exposure rather than on one event, and AFLW and NRLW have both grown through club infrastructure that already existed. A-League Women has neither a long broadcast history nor a deep club base, which is part of why its post-World Cup bounce was harder to hold.
The instructive contrast is Australia's women's cricket dominance, built over twenty years of pathway investment with no single defining home tournament. Events accelerate. They do not substitute for structure.
The honest scorecard
Three categories, judged separately.
Audience: durable and large. Matildas crowds and television numbers remain at levels that would have been implausible before 2023, and the 2026 Asian Cup final crowd confirms it nearly three years on.
Participation: durable and growing. Two consecutive record years, with the growth concentrated in exactly the demographic the tournament was expected to reach. The parity target for 2027 looks unlikely on current trajectory, but the direction is not in question.
Domestic club football: a one-season spike followed by a partial reversal. The A-League Women's record season in 2023-24 was real and the 26 per cent drop the following year was also real.
Infrastructure: the gap widened, because participation grew faster than facilities. The 200 million dollar Play Our Way fund was significant and is roughly a fourteenth of the investment Football Australia says the community game needs.
The regional picture
National figures hide the interesting variation. The tournament's Australian footprint covered five cities, and the four states that hosted matches did not all respond the same way. New South Wales carried the largest share, with Stadium Australia staging the opening Australian match, the semi-final and the final, and it published the strongest post-event claims accordingly. Queensland hosted three Matildas matches at Lang Park, including the quarter-final shootout. Victoria hosted the Canada match at its rectangular ground and a substantial share of the non-host fixtures.
Western Australia and South Australia hosted at the smallest venues and had the least visible tournament, and both subsequently reported strong participation growth off smaller bases. Perth in particular has a structural problem the tournament did not touch: it is the most isolated host city in world football by travel time, and its clubs carry costs no eastern-seaboard club faces.
The states without matches saw participation growth too, which is the finding that most supports a genuine broadcast effect rather than a proximity effect. Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory did not host a minute of football in 2023 and still recorded registration increases the following season.
Claims about 2023 that do not survive checking
That the semi-final was watched by 11 million people simultaneously. It reached 11.15 million and averaged 7.13 million; those are different measures.
That the tournament sold out every match. It did not. Several non-host fixtures in smaller markets had visible empty seating, and the record total was built on volume as much as on uniform demand.
That participation doubled. It did not. Women and girls rose 16 per cent in 2024 from an already growing base, which is a strong result and not a doubling.
That the World Cup made football the biggest sport in Australia. Football was already the most participated team sport before the tournament, by Football Australia's own census, and that census counts school and social programmes that other codes count differently. Participation leadership and broadcast or attendance leadership are separate arguments, and football wins the first and not the second.
The 2027 test
The next checkpoint is Football Australia's own: gender parity in community participation by 2027, and the World Cup in Brazil in the same year, for which Australia qualified through the 2026 Asian Cup. If the parity target is missed, which on current growth rates it probably will be, the interesting question is by how much and in which states, because the national figure conceals wide regional variation.
The second test is whether Australia bids for another major women's tournament. Hosting is the mechanism that produced the 2023 result, and a country that has run one successful tournament and one continental championship inside three years has a plausible case for the next one.
What to re-check before relying on this page
Participation figures are published annually by Football Australia in the first months of the following year, and the current-year numbers here will be superseded. Attendance figures for 2023 are settled and unlikely to move. Television figures are OzTAM-based and reported by the broadcaster, so cross-check the measure being quoted before comparing them to anything else. Government funding totals differ between announcements depending on what each counts, so treat any single figure as one accounting convention rather than the accounting convention.
For the team behind all of this, and how its record book looked before and after August 2023, continue to the Matildas' full record or browse the football section for coverage beyond Australia.