Ten years ago, the A-League Women was on a steep and exciting trajectory. New teams were being added, senior Matildas and other top international players were being signed, crowds were growing and media coverage was increasing. It was, for a moment, one of the destination leagues in the world.
But over the past few years, the ALW has stagnated. Despite the golden opportunity of hosting a Women’s World Cup, the competition has failed to keep pace globally, and a new report by the players’ union has highlighted grave and urgent concerns about whether the ALW can ever return to its former glories.
According to the report, the ALW is now “by far” the lowest-paid professional women’s competition in Australia, with an average league salary of just over $30,000. As a result, 76% of players reported that their financial situation was “not at all” or only “slightly” secure, with 62% having to work outside of football during the 2024-25 season.
This lack of support is having an impact on players’ mental health, with an audit finding that 67% experienced increased sport-related psychological distress including disordered eating and alcohol abuse.
“It’s a compilation of the stresses that we’ve been put under with the extension of home-and-away to being sort of full-time yet still part-time and having other jobs,” Matildas veteran Tameka Yallop said. “You’re meant to be playing all the time now. This is meant to be your sole focus, when in reality, it isn’t.
“That’s what this report is all about: not just saying that we’re full-time professionals by the league, but the league showing we are full-time professionals by stepping up in other ways and actually giving us the full-time wages and programmes.”
Due to this lack of support and investment from owners and sponsors, A-Leagues clubs are increasingly losing top players – particularly Matildas – to overseas leagues, while drawing international players from second, third, or even fourth-tier competitions elsewhere. The report notes that the ALW is now the “least preferred” competition globally among its own players.
That player drain has also resulted in the average age of the ALW skewing further towards youth, with players aged 21 and under accounting for 32% of all the minutes played last season, an increase on 28% the season before.
The share of minutes played by teenagers has also increased from 15% to 18%, arguably affecting the overall quality of competition, fan engagement, and commercial opportunities. Average crowds for the league fell by 26% in 2024-25 as the Women’s World Cup halo faded.
“The A-League Women has reached a tipping point,” PFA chief executive Beau Busch said. “Without urgent investment and a plan to transition to full-time professionalism by next season, the league risks losing more talent, continuing the damaging cycle of part-time commitments on players and compromising its connection with fans.
“This report is an urgent call to action for an industry that is failing to recognise the scale of the opportunity before it. Importantly, it is not too late to do so.
The chronic under-investment from the APL into the women’s competition has sparked a bigger conversation about whether the ALW should separate from its governing body to have its own independent commission to focus exclusively on the women’s league.
Sixty-one per cent of players agreed that an independent body to govern, commercialise, and run the competition would allow the ALW to truly capitalise on the boom of investment women’s football is currently experiencing.
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This data comes as two in five ALW players have expressed dissatisfaction with the Australian Professional Leagues (APL), the governing body which currently owns and operates the women’s league.
“The reality is that there just isn’t that focus on the A-League Women that it needs and deserves at the moment,” Adelaide United midfielder Dylan Holmes said. “There’s a very genuine belief through the players that this league has so much potential, and it has the potential to be one of the best leagues in the world, if not the best league in Asia.
“But the consensus among the players is that there’s not enough being done to realise that potential when the opportunities are clearly there.”
As the report identifies, there are major opportunities for growth in women’s football, with the women’s transfer market alone expected to exceed $200m by 2027.
However, just 15% of ALW players are currently on multi-year contracts, meaning clubs aren’t able to capture a greater share of a growing market that could raise as much as $10m annually in transfer fees alone.
Combined with the increase to prize money in women’s competitions such as the AFC Women’s Champions League and new Fifa Women’s Club World Cup, and the soaring amounts being secured in stand-alone commercial sponsorships and broadcast deals for women’s leagues abroad, there are additional revenue streams now emerging that the ALW can capitalise upon to aid the transition to full-time professionalism.
In the absence of an ambitious public strategy from the APL regarding the women’s league, the PFA will be releasing its own vision for the competition in the coming weeks which lays out a player-built strategy around governance, fan engagement, a reformed football economy and matchday infrastructure.
