Women's World Cup: From hand

Jan 18, 2024

There are a couple of things Janine McPhee remembers about her first Matildas kit.

First, the colour. A deep emerald green with bright gold trim, a deep V-neck, and a wide pointy collar.

Second, the crest. A single panel with the Australian coat of arms stitched onto the fabric right on top of her heart.

Third, the shorts. Green and yellow versions, billowy and tied with a string.

But mostly she remembers that it never really felt like hers at all.

"My first tour was in 1987 in Taiwan, and one of the things that we struggled with was the sizes of the strips because, back then, football kits were made for men and boys," McPhee tells ABC Sport.

"There was a vast array of sizes. I'm five-foot-two, but then we had players like Annie Martin, who was a giraffe, or Tracey Wheeler or Anissa Tan, who were all really tall. We could never get strips to fit us.

"Also with our numbers. My number was always 13, but we often weren't able to get the numbers we wanted because it was more about what shirt or shorts would actually fit you.

"It was 'one size fits all', but when you're my height and you've got someone who's over six foot, they didn't end up fitting any of us.

"It was a small thing, but those were some of the battles we had."

Indeed, when it comes to inequality, the devil can often be in the details.

One of the most famous stories of the early Matildas is when, on the eve of an international tour, a last-minute squad scramble meant several players had to sew their own national team crests onto their tracksuit jackets with a needle and thread.

That was "a one-off," according to McPhee, yet it none the less symbolised the way in which women's football was treated at the time: a kind of DIY project, drawing upon the materials of the men's game in order to stitch together something for themselves.

But this was the 1980s. The Australian women's national team was less than a decade old, and the first Women's World Cup was still a couple years away.

To be able to play football internationally at all was a novelty, and for some of those early players, it almost didn't matter what they were wearing while they did it.

"We were just so proud to be wearing an Australian strip with the coat of arms on it," McPhee says.

"You're so excited and so happy to wear it, to represent your country, you didn't really worry about how baggy or tight it was. We just made it work.

"Back then, we also paid for our strips and our tracksuit pants. Or, in my case, my mum paid for it; most peoples' parents paid for things. But we always had to return them.

"When we went to China for the pilot World Cup in 1988, there were a couple shorts that went missing out of the kit bag because some players wanted to keep them as mementos. That caused a big fuss.

"I don't believe anyone was able to keep their kits, which was disappointing, especially now as you find all the Matildas have their own kids and it would have been nice to pass those down. But that wasn't the case back then."

For most athletes, a playing kit is not just a practicality.

It's also one of the most visible displays of individual and collective identity. Who they are, where they've come from, and what they represent is reflected in the style, the colours, the patterns, the features, and the symbols threaded into what they wear on the pitch.

v New Zealand, 1980.

A tour of Hawaii, 1983.

A tour of Taiwan, 1984.

A tour of New Zealand, 1986.

Oceania Cup, 1989.

1990.

v Japan, 1994.

1995 Women's World Cup squad.

v Finland, 1997.

v Brazil, 1999.

Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

v China, 2000.

v China, 2003.

v Ghana at the 2003 FIFA Women's World Cup.

v USA, 2006.

v Norway at the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup.

v Sweden at the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup.

v South Korea, 2011.

v New Zealand, 2013.

v Netherlands, 2015.

v Germany, 2016 Rio Olympics.

v Brazil, 2017.

v Chile, 2018.

2019 Women's World Cup squad.

v USA, 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

v USA, 2021.

v Scotland, 2023.

v England, 2023.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as women's football re-emerged in Australia following its 50-year 'shadow ban', the only playing kits available were those that had been donated or discarded by men's teams.

Photos from those years show women athletes in shirts and shorts designed for male bodies, baggy or tight or ill-fitting in all the wrong places.

"They were like wearing tents," McPhee says.

"For me, it was always about the fit. It was always too big or too small: not like now where the Matildas get it made-to-measure.

"We used to have a few giggles when we got our strips and you'd walk out looking like you had a tent on. Or for those whose kit was too tight, everyone would just try to swap so something would fit better.

"If that happened today, you'd be pretty embarrassed to put something on that was five sizes too big or small.

"But times have changed for the better, and they needed to change, because you should be able to represent your country and feel good about what you're wearing."

It wasn't until 1996 that the Matildas signed their very own kit sponsorship, thanks in part to McPhee herself.

When she was still in high school, McPhee's family home often acted as a half-way house for travelling footballers coming from the United Kingdom to play at Box Hill in Victoria.

One of those travellers was Lawrie McKinna, who'd travelled to Australia from Kilmarnock in Scotland in 1986. Along with his wife and two children, the McKinnas set up a caravan in the McPhee's driveway and would kick a ball around with Janine in their yard.

McKinna's passion for women's football began there. He would come to watch McPhee's Australia games after she made her debut at the age of 21, and would regularly support the local game from the grassroots to the national league level.

He was also close friends with fellow Scotsman Tom Sermanni, who was head coach of the Matildas in the mid-1990s.

Around that time, McKinna was working with emerging sportswear brand ASICS, first as a sales representative and then as a sponsorship and marketing manager.

Having already negotiated kit deals with Australian football clubs like Marconi, Adelaide City, and West Adelaide, a chance conversation between McKinna, Sermanni, and then-CEO of the Australian Women's Soccer Association, Peter Hugg, sparked the idea for the women's team — which had only ever floated between whatever brands the men's teams had — to sign their own kit partnership.

"I would safely bet the Matildas were the first national team that ASICS ever sponsored," McKinna says.

"There wasn't a money component; I don't think we paid any cash for it. But in those times, we did the training gear and the playing gear. It was a nice thing to work for a company who's sponsoring the national women's team.

"Back then, it was basically an amateur sport. The girls were losing money to be with the Matildas, even though they were right up there in the top ten in the world.

"When I sponsored the men's teams, because their academies would buy their gear of ASICS, we would make a little bit of money off it. So I would re-invest that into the Matildas. That's what paid for the Matildas' gear.

"I just think it was the right thing to do."

It was a small gesture, but it was one of the first times the women's team had been recognised as having their own value, brand, and identity.

Over time, especially after their new nickname had been chosen in 1994 and the famous nude calendar of 1999, the Matildas began to cement their public identity as something unto themselves.

Gradually, they moved away from being the 'little sisters' to the Socceroos — something most clearly symbolised in being given their hand-me-down kits — and towards the team they're known for today.

The first ASICS kit in 1996 was a joint effort between the brand and the Matildas' management team, and incorporated a new technology called "sublimation" where designs were heat-pressed into the material itself as opposed to being stitched together in individual panels.

This technology was lighter and more comfortable for players, reducing chafing and the general wear-and-tear of contact sport. They wore it during a tour in Florida where they played friendlies against the USA, China and Japan in the lead-up to the Atlanta Olympics.

"I was so proud of that sponsorship and I was pleased that I could help the women's game and give it the respect it deserved," McKinna says.

"I can't think of ASICS sponsoring any other national team at the time, and we did what we could for the Matildas. Probably the next national team we would have had was the Australian cricket team.

"People may think it's a small thing that women can get smaller sizes and kit that actually fits them, but it really matters. Most men wouldn't even think about it.

"And look how far we've come. I went to Rebel Sports last week, and out the front of the shop in the window was the Matildas' new strip. At the front, as you walk in the door, was racks of women's strips. You would never have seen that before; they didn't even stock women's shirts a few years ago."

It's arguably one of the most visible measures of the growth of women's football that playing kits are now being designed specifically for women athletes.

The past four years in particular has seen an explosion of women-specific kits, starting with the 2019 Women's World Cup, which saw almost every participating nation develop their own bespoke jersey design for the tournament.

Prior to that, national team players only ever wore women's cuts of jerseys that were also designed for the men's teams.

In a throw-back to the Socceroos' famous "spew kit" of the 1990s, the Matildas released a much-lauded graffiti-style jersey that almost instantly became a classic. It was so popular, in fact, that the jersey quickly ran out of stock — particularly, and ironically, in the men's sizes.

Indeed, beyond being worn by the athletes themselves, kits are now also becoming part of the wider culture of women's football off the pitch: collected and personalised by fans of clubs, nations, and individual players as a visible marker of their own identity, interests, and community.

Kits are increasingly able to be personalised with the names and numbers of specific players on the back, while there is a blossoming sub-set of fans tracking down old and retro jerseys worn by women's teams of the past.

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Earlier this year, the Matildas became the first Australian national team to participate in a Pride initiative during an international fixture, when they wore rainbow jerseys in their Cup of Nations match against Spain. A limited number of Pride jerseys were available for fans to purchase afterwards, with all the stock selling out within days.

Kits continue to be a key piece of the puzzle in growing women's and girls' participation in sport, with the colour and design of sports uniforms often cited as a reason why some end up leaving grassroots sport altogether.

"Issues around body image and the uniform is critical to girls' participation in sport," says Heather Reid, a former director of the AWSA and Football Federation Australia.

"Now we get uniforms that are made for the female athlete. They're not hand-me-downs where everything is baggy and shorts are down to their knees. It's completely different in terms of having kits designed for performance, and not for anything that might be there to sell the sexualisation of athletes like the bodysuits or skirts.

For decades netball has been associated with pleated skirts and short dresses, but changes to the uniform guidelines that will come into effect next year hope to create a more inclusive sport.

"It's similar to boots. Most women players had to buy boys' boots, or boots that didn't really fit them. You couldn't get them for women anywhere, and sports stores weren't prepared to import large quantities of women's boots because they weren't sure they'd get the sales.

"Now, of course, participation numbers have gone through the roof and they can do that. Now we get kits specifically for women. It's the evolution of the game that's so exciting in that regard."

The 2023 Women's World Cup takes the evolution of kits one step further.

In addition to creating unique jersey designs that pay homage to the identity and history of their women's teams, both Nike and adidas have moved away from white shorts and incorporated anti-leak technology into the fabric in order to alleviate period anxiety amongst players.

McPhee tells a story of a teammate who got their period in the middle of a game, bleeding all over her light-coloured shorts. She was so mortified that she ran into the change room, cleaned herself up, and immediately went home.

"We have certainly needed to improve in that area for a long time," she says.

"Some players actually wouldn't come to training for the time that they were on their menstrual cycles because they had to wear white shorts and had a period that was quite heavy.

"You can imagine the shame and embarrassment that happened back then when those situations did occur.

"Obviously the technology wasn't there back in the day, so now it's great to see players are confident enough when they put on that strip that they don't have to worry about those issues. It makes you walk 10 feet taller."

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The Matildas' most recent kit for the 2023 Women's World Cup is the most unique yet.

Each home jersey has its own individual pattern of gold swirls, symbolising the iconic bursts of Australian wattle in the outback, while the away jersey moves away from the traditional green to instead evoke the vivid blues of the country's surrounding oceans.

Inside the jersey is the phrase "For All", which encapsulates the Matildas' larger story and spirit of inclusivity and diversity.

Both the home and away shorts incorporate the period-proofing technology, designed using 3D modelling to create a 'built-in brief' shape with multiple layers of anti-leak material that fits the contours of the body.

It's a far cry from the kits McPhee played in all those years ago, and is one of the most powerful examples of just how far women's football has come since she did.

"It's just so much more professional now," she says.

"The game has evolved significantly and so has everything around it. Kits have suddenly benefited from that as well. There's so much more funding around and opportunities for young girls coming into our sport now, and the kits are part of that evolution.

"When you go to watch the Matildas now, you see young girls walking around with the current jersey on with the number 20 and 'Sam Kerr' on the back. I never thought we'd be at that stage.

"To see that, it makes you feel so proud of where you came from to where the game is now.

"That public presence and appreciation the Matildas have is awesome. It will only enhance the game even further down the track, because these young girls are really wanting to be part of our sport, which is fantastic."