Matildas Fixtures and Tickets: A Supporters Guide
Buying Matildas tickets in the sold-out era: how the fixture calendar is built, why venues keep growing, how the presales work and what seats cost.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Fixtures19 min read
- Entry price, Mexico series June 2026
- From A$20 adult and A$50 family
- FA+ presale length for that series
- Two days ahead of free account holders
- Record Matildas home crowd
- 76,798 against China at Accor Stadium, June 2024
- AFC Womens Asian Cup 2026 total attendance
- 355,528 across 21 days
- Asian Cup final crowd
- 74,397, sold out at Stadium Australia
- Asian Cup host cities
- Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast
- Confirmed home fixture
- Colombia at GIO Stadium Canberra, 28 November 2026
- Next World Cup
- Brazil 2027, tickets sold by FIFA
Australian women's football has a problem most sports would take gratefully: too many people want to come. Since August 2023 the Matildas have been the hardest ticket in the country to price, because the audience that arrived during the home World Cup did not go away, and Football Australia has spent three years discovering that the stadiums it used to book are the wrong size.
This page is about how that plays out at the point of purchase. When the fixtures appear, where they are staged and why the venues keep growing, how the presale ladder is built, what a ticket actually costs, and how a family of four with a modest budget gets four seats together at a match that sells out. The team's history and records sit on the Matildas guide, and what the 2023 tournament did to the sport is covered on the World Cup legacy page. This is the buying manual.
Why the fixture calendar looks the way it does
The Matildas, like every national team, can only play when clubs are obliged to release players, and that obligation is set by the FIFA women's international match calendar. It works in windows, and the windows differ from the men's calendar — the women's game has historically clustered around February, April, June, October and late November or early December, with the exact pattern revised across four-year cycles.
That gives a normal year something like five windows, each usually allowing two matches. Home and away combined, that is up to ten fixtures. Split between touring Europe, playing in Asia and hosting, a typical year delivers three or four home matches — sometimes fewer.
Two things then compress the calendar further. Olympic years consume a large block of mid-year availability, because the football tournament sits inside the Games rather than inside a FIFA window, and Australia's qualification pathway runs through the AFC. Continental tournaments take a whole month, and for Asian nations they now double as World Cup qualifying, which raises the stakes on every match in them.
So the supply side is fixed and small. The demand side, since 2023, is not. That mismatch is the whole story.
Where the calendar stands right now
The defining recent event was a home tournament. Australia hosted the AFC Women's Asian Cup from 1 to 21 March 2026 across Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast, and the tournament doubled as Asia's qualifying pathway to the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup. The Matildas reached the final and lost 1-0 to Japan in front of a sold-out Stadium Australia.
Since then: a two-match home series against Mexico in June 2026, at McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle on 6 June and at CommBank Stadium in western Sydney on 9 June. An away friendly against Germany at BBBank Wildpark in Karlsruhe on 9 October 2026, ticketed by the German federation with Football Australia running an expression-of-interest process for travel packages. And a home fixture against Colombia at GIO Stadium in Canberra on Saturday 28 November 2026, kicking off at 7:35pm and selling through Ticketek.
Ahead of that sits the 2027 FIFA Women's World Cup in Brazil, for which Australia qualified through the Asian Cup. That tournament is sold by FIFA through its own platform, with a federation allocation and endorsed travel partners handling packages, and it will dominate the Matildas' 2027 calendar the way the 2026 Asian Cup dominated this one.
The 2026 Asian Cup, and what it proved about demand
The Asian Cup is the single best dataset anyone has on how Australians buy women's football tickets, because it ran twenty-one days of matches across three cities at every level of demand from a group-stage neutral fixture to a home final.
The headline numbers: 355,528 total attendance, the most-attended edition in the tournament's history. The opening night, Australia against the Philippines, drew 44,379. The group match against Korea Republic drew 60,279. The final against Japan at Stadium Australia sold out at 74,397. Matches away from the Matildas — including an Australia fixture staged on the Gold Coast against Iran — also sold out, which is the number that surprised the organisers most, because a sold-out regional venue was not the base case.
Read that chart as a ticket buyer rather than as a marketer. Three of those four crowds are above 44,000, and the top two are above 74,000. Australia has exactly two stadiums that can hold 74,000 for a football match in a workable configuration — Accor Stadium in Sydney and the MCG — and neither is a rectangular ground. Every venue decision Football Australia makes for the Matildas now runs into that fact.
Why the venues keep getting bigger, and what it costs you
Before 2023, a Matildas home friendly was a 15,000 to 25,000-seat proposition, staged in a rectangular stadium where every seat is close to the touchline. After 2023, the same fixture can draw three times that.
The response has been to move the biggest matches into oval-configured stadiums, because those are the only buildings in the country with the capacity. That solves the supply problem and creates a viewing problem. A football pitch inside an oval bowl sits inside a ring of dead ground where the cricket outfield or the athletics track used to be, which pushes the front row back and every subsequent row further still. Ten thousand more people get to attend; everybody sits further away.
- McDonald Jones Stadium, Newcastle33000
- Accor Stadium, Sydney83500
Approximate football-configuration capacities. McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle is a purpose-built rectangular stadium used for the June 2026 Mexico fixture. Accor Stadium in Sydney is an oval-bowl venue configured for rectangular sport, used for the biggest Matildas fixtures including the 2026 Asian Cup final. The gap is the entire argument about where to stage a sold-out Matildas match.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| McDonald Jones Stadium, Newcastle | 33000 |
| Accor Stadium, Sydney | 83500 |
For a buyer, the practical rule is: at a rectangular stadium, buy the cheapest seat you like the angle of; at an oval-configured stadium, pay up for the lower side-on tiers or accept that you are watching from a distance. The price difference between the cheapest and best categories buys much more at Accor Stadium than it does at AAMI Park. Venue detail sits on the Accor Stadium guide, the AAMI Park guide and the Suncorp Stadium guide, and the wider structural shortage is covered on Australian football's rectangular stadium problem.
The presale ladder
Football Australia sells national team tickets through the same three-tier structure for both teams, but the Matildas windows have run tighter than the Socceroos ones, which makes the ladder matter more.
For the June 2026 Mexico series the sequence for the Newcastle match was: FA+ members from midday on Monday 4 May, free Football Account holders from midday on Wednesday 6 May, general public from 4pm on Wednesday 6 May. Two days for paid members, four hours for free account holders, then everyone.
- Fixture announcedFootball Australia confirms opponent, venue and date, typically six to twelve weeks out, and names the ticketing platform for that match at the same time.
- FA+ presaleTwo to three exclusive days for paid members at A$99 a year, with member price bands attached - halfway seating was offered at A$50 for the Mexico series, well below the general-sale equivalent.
- Football Account presaleThe free tier's window, historically opening at midday. It costs nothing and it is the highest-value free action in Australian football ticketing.
- General publicUsually four hours after the free-account window opens. For a fixture that will sell out, the good categories are already gone by this point.
- Late allocation releasesProduction holds, broadcast positions and unreleased hospitality convert back to general sale in the final fortnight. Announced on official channels, not trailed in advance.
- Official resale, where offeredThe selling platform's own resale function is the only sanctioned secondhand route. Unauthorised resale is prohibited under the conditions of sale and barcodes can be cancelled.
Based on the published sequence for the June 2026 Mexico series and comparable 2026 fixtures. Window lengths are set per match and have varied between two and three days for FA+; the free Football Account window has typically opened at midday with general sale following the same afternoon. Treat this as the shape of the process rather than a fixed calendar.
The advice follows directly and costs nothing: create the free Football Account today. Not when a fixture is announced — today. The people who miss out are consistently the ones who try to register during the on-sale, discover an email verification step, and come back to a sold-out category.
What FA+ buys a Matildas supporter specifically
FA+ is Football Australia's paid membership tier, A$99 including GST for twelve months, sitting above the free Football Account that has existed for more than a decade. It was launched with the World Cup in mind and it was controversial for that reason, but for a Matildas supporter the case is more prosaic and more favourable.
The published benefits, and how each one reads for a women's national team fan:
- The exclusive presale window. Two to three days ahead of everyone else. For a fixture at a rectangular stadium against a name opponent, this is the difference between choosing a bay and choosing whatever is left.
- 15 per cent off home tickets for both the Matildas and the Socceroos. Note that Football Australia has applied per-series exclusions — the September 2026 Socceroos Brazil series limited the discount to the presale window — so read the fixture's own ticketing note rather than assuming.
- Discounted premium seating during the presale. For the June 2026 Mexico series this appeared as halfway seats at A$50. That is not a percentage shaved off a cheap ticket; it is access to a category most supporters would otherwise never buy.
- A A$20 merchandise voucher, which returns a fifth of the fee immediately if you were buying anything at all.
- Open training session access, with reserved member bays at selected sessions. For a supporter with children, an open training session is frequently a better experience than a match — closer, quieter, and with a realistic chance of an autograph.
- Discounts on Australia Cup finals and Australian Championship semi-finals and finals.
- Ballot eligibility for Football Australia's allocations at major tournaments, including the World Cup.
- A cap of eight tickets per member per match.
The honest arithmetic: if you attend two national team matches a year in any combination of Matildas and Socceroos, and you buy a shirt, FA+ roughly pays for itself. If you use the discounted halfway seating once, it pays for itself in a single transaction. If your interest is a World Cup ballot, understand that a ballot is a random draw against a fixed allocation — paying the fee buys a chance, not a seat, and Football Australia has said so plainly.
What the tickets actually cost
The Matildas are priced to fill stadiums, not to ration them, and the entry point is remarkably low for a national team at this level.
The June 2026 Mexico series started from A$20 for an adult and A$50 for a family. FA+ members were offered halfway seats at A$50, which is a category discount rather than a percentage discount and is the single most valuable thing in the membership for anyone who wants a good seat.
| Fixture | Date | Venue | City | Platform | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v Philippines, Asian Cup | 1 March 2026 | Stadium Australia | Sydney | Tournament ticketing | Opening night, 44,379 |
| v Korea Republic, Asian Cup | March 2026 | Stadium Australia | Sydney | Tournament ticketing | 60,279 |
| v Japan, Asian Cup final | 21 March 2026 | Stadium Australia | Sydney | Tournament ticketing | Sold out, 74,397 |
| v Mexico | 6 June 2026 | McDonald Jones Stadium | Newcastle | Ticketmaster | From A$20 adult, A$50 family |
| v Mexico | 9 June 2026 | CommBank Stadium | Sydney | Ticketmaster | FA+ presale from 8 May |
| v Germany, away | 9 October 2026 | BBBank Wildpark | Karlsruhe | German federation | Expression of interest for travel packages |
| v Colombia | 28 November 2026 | GIO Stadium | Canberra | Ticketek | 7:35pm kick-off, Network 10 and Paramount+ |
Two patterns in that table. First, the ticketing platform is not stable — Ticketmaster for one series, Ticketek for the next, tournament ticketing for the Asian Cup. Second, the venue rotates hard, including to Canberra and Newcastle, which is a deliberate distribution policy rather than an accident.
The family question, and why it changes the maths
The Matildas crowd is demographically different from any other elite sporting audience in Australia. It skews younger, it skews heavily towards family groups, and a large share of it is buying three or four seats at once rather than one or two.
That has three consequences a buyer should plan around.
Inventory disappears in blocks. When a family of four buys, four adjacent seats leave the map. A fixture with 8,000 tickets left can have almost no groups of four left in the same row. If you need seats together, buy in the earliest window you can access, not the cheapest.
The family product is not a marketing gimmick. A family ticket at A$50 against an adult ticket at A$20 is genuinely cheaper than four singles and, crucially, allocates you together. Buying four individual tickets in the same transaction does not guarantee adjacency in every stadium's system.
Kick-off times are the real risk. Football Australia has scheduled more Matildas matches in the afternoon and early evening than it does for the men, which suits families. But broadcast still pulls some fixtures to 7:35pm or later — the November 2026 Canberra match is one — and a late-November evening in Canberra is cold as well as late. Check the time before the price.
- 76798Record home crowd, v China 2024
- 355528Asian Cup 2026 total attendance
- 20Entry adult ticket, Mexico series, A$
- 99FA+ annual membership, A$
Attendance and tournament figures are the official published crowds. The entry price is the lowest published adult price for the June 2026 Mexico series in Australian dollars. The FA+ fee is the published annual membership price including GST. All figures describe a specific moment and are reset per fixture and per season.
Choosing a seat
Four decisions, in the order they matter.
Side or end. Behind the goal is cheaper and noisier; side-on lets you read the shape of the match. Women's international football at this level is a technical, positional game, and the tactical detail — how the wide players hold width, how the press is triggered, where the goalkeeper starts her distribution — is close to invisible from behind the goal. If it is your first live international, pay for side-on.
Height. In rectangular stadiums the lower tier is the best seat in the house. In oval-configured stadiums it frequently is not: the front rows sit behind a wide run of dead ground and look across it at an angle, and the mid-tier gives a better view of the whole pitch for less money. This inverts the instinct most people bring from other sports.
Sun and weather. Australian stadium roofs cover some stands and not others, and the coverage is rarely symmetrical. An afternoon fixture in Perth, Brisbane or the Gold Coast can put one whole side of the ground in direct sun for the entire first half. Check the orientation on the relevant venue guide, because the seat map will not tell you.
Proximity to the active bay. Adjacent to the drums is a different experience from three bays away. Some people want it and some people want to be nowhere near it, and both are legitimate; the mistake is not knowing which bay you bought.
The regional touring model
One thing Football Australia does with the Matildas that it does far less often with the Socceroos is take the team to places that do not otherwise get national team football.
Newcastle, Canberra, the Gold Coast, Townsville, Geelong and Launceston have all hosted women's national team matches in recent cycles, and the 2026 Asian Cup put a full slate of tournament football on the Gold Coast and in Perth alongside Sydney. The logic is partly commercial — regional state and local governments pay hosting fees, and a regional stadium is cheaper to hire than a capital-city one — and partly developmental, because the participation growth the sport is banking on comes from children who have seen the team in person.
For a supporter, the regional model has three practical effects.
The cheapest seats in the country are at regional fixtures. A smaller stadium with a state-funded hosting deal is priced to fill, and the entry bands go lower than they do in Sydney or Melbourne.
Regional matches sell out more easily than the capacity suggests. A 25,000 or 33,000-seat stadium in a city that gets one national team fixture every few years is a genuinely scarce ticket, and the local market absorbs a large share of it before anyone outside the region notices. The Asian Cup's sold-out Gold Coast fixture is the case in point.
Travel is the real cost. A A$20 ticket in Townsville with a A$400 flight is not a A$20 day out. If you are travelling to a regional fixture, book the flight when the fixture is announced rather than when the tickets go on sale, because the six-to-twelve-week lead time is exactly when domestic airfares to regional Australia start climbing.
Sellouts, and how to handle one
A Matildas sellout is now a normal event rather than a headline, and there is a correct sequence for dealing with it.
First, check for late releases. Every large stadium holds back seats for broadcast cameras, production, sponsor obligations and contingency, and a meaningful share of that comes back to general sale in the last two weeks. These releases are announced when they happen, usually through the official social channels and the ticketing platform, and they are not trailed in advance because the venue does not know how many it will have until the production plan is locked.
Second, check the official resale. Where the selling platform runs a resale function for that fixture, it reissues the barcode to the buyer and the ticket works. Prices are set by sellers and may exceed face value.
Third, do not buy from a general marketplace. Australian conditions of sale prohibit unauthorised resale, the enforcement mechanism is barcode cancellation, and the failure happens at the turnstile. The pattern is identical across Australian sport and is covered in more detail on buying cricket tickets in Australia and State of Origin tickets.
Fourth, consider the other match in the series. The Matildas usually play twice in a window, in two different cities. When the Sydney match sells out, the Newcastle or Canberra match frequently has not.
Active support and where the noise is
Matildas matches allocate an active support bay, generally behind one goal, where the organised supporter groups run the drums, the flags and the songbook. It is smaller and less confrontational than the club equivalent — there is no away end to sing at — and it is the source of most of the atmosphere at a full stadium.
If you want that, buy into it on purpose. If you have a pram, a nervous child or a preference for watching the game seated, buy a different bay. The culture the national team bay draws on is the same one described on active support in the A-League and in the Red and Black Bloc guide, softened for a national-team context.
Accessible ticketing
Accessible seating is controlled by the venue rather than by Football Australia, which means the booking channel changes with the stadium. In practice that means finding the specific stadium's accessible ticketing page rather than expecting a single national process.
Provision across major Australian venues generally includes wheelchair spaces with adjacent companion seating, ambulant accessible seating for patrons who can walk but cannot manage stairs or long distances, assistance animal accommodation, and hearing augmentation in designated areas. The quality varies enormously with the age of the building, which is worth checking rather than assuming.
Book in the earliest available window. Accessible allocations are small in absolute terms, and unlike general seating they are not restocked from late releases.
Following the Matildas away
Three distinct processes, and confusing them is expensive.
European friendlies are hosted and ticketed by the home federation. Australia's October 2026 fixture against Germany in Karlsruhe was ticketed in Germany, with Football Australia running an expression-of-interest process for supporters wanting tickets or travel packages rather than selling seats itself. Register the interest; do not wait for a general sale that will not come.
AFC competition matches away carry an away allocation negotiated between the federations, distributed by Football Australia to account holders with FA+ members prioritised. Allocations are small, seating is in a segregated away section, and flag and banner restrictions apply.
The 2027 World Cup in Brazil is a FIFA sale. The overwhelming majority of tickets go through FIFA's own platform in phased sales and random-selection draws, with a federation allocation distributed by ballot to eligible Football Australia members. Endorsed travel partners are named on Football Australia's own site — Keith Prowse Travel has held that endorsement for the 2027 tournament — and any operator not named there is selling a package without an allocation behind it.
Mistakes that cost people seats
A short list, all of them common since 2023.
- Registering an account during the on-sale. Verification takes minutes you do not have. Register months ahead.
- Buying four singles instead of a family ticket. More expensive, and no guarantee the four seats are together.
- Assuming the Sydney fixture is the only one. The Matildas almost always play twice in a window, and the second city is usually the easier ticket.
- Waiting for a general sale that never comes. Away friendlies in Europe are ticketed by the host federation, and Football Australia's expression-of-interest process is the route, not a preliminary to one.
- Buying a package from an operator not named on Football Australia's site. For World Cup travel especially, an unendorsed operator has no allocation behind the tickets it is advertising.
- Ignoring the kick-off time. The most regretted Matildas purchase is not an expensive seat, it is a late one with a tired child in it.
- Treating a sold-out screen as final. Late releases in the last fortnight are routine, and they are not announced in advance.
What to check before you buy
Five things, all of which change per fixture.
The venue. No home ground, no default, and the choice between a rectangular stadium and an oval one changes the value of every price category.
The platform. Ticketmaster, Ticketek or a tournament system. Start at the official Matildas ticketing page.
The presale dates. Three separate windows with three separate opening times, set per match.
The kick-off time. The single most common regret is not the price, it is a 7:35pm start with a seven-year-old and a two-hour drive home.
The family product. Almost always cheaper than the equivalent singles, and it seats you together.
Related reading on this site: the Matildas history and records guide covers the team, what the 2023 World Cup did to Australian football covers the demand shift behind everything on this page, and women's football participation in Australia covers what happened underneath it. For the men's team see Socceroos fixtures and tickets; for the club game see A-League tickets and memberships and A-League Women explained. Venue detail sits on the AAMI Park guide, the Accor Stadium guide and the Suncorp Stadium guide. The wider set of guides sits on the Australia hub and the sports index.