The Matildas have secured a deal which will see them receive equal pay with their male counterparts in what has been lauded as a “landmark” deal. But amid the headlines, the wider history and context of the fight for equal pay in women’s football has largely been ignored.

This is a fight that the Matildas have been in for almost half a decade. In 2015, the players went on strike after Football Federation Australia and Professional Footballers Australia, the players’ union, failed to reach a new and improved collective bargaining agreement that would have seen the Matildas’ salaries almost double. As a result of the strike, a friendly game against the US – a huge revenue-raiser at the time – was cancelled. A new collective bargaining agreement was eventually agreed by all parties.

Gender pay gap closed as parity confirmed in new Matildas deal Read more

This collective push for improvements in Australian women’s football in recent years has also extended to the W-League. In 2017, a CBA was negotiated that guaranteed minimum payments for players in the domestic league alongside various other benefits such as an increased salary cap and minimum medical standards. This CBA was renewed in 2019, with the addition of a “same base pay for same base work” gender equality principle, which will see W-League players earn the same minimum hourly rate as A-League players starting from this season.

Internationally, similar collective action has become more frequent as women’s sport has been taken more seriously by competitions, federations and the public.

In 2017, Norway – home to reigning Ballon d’Or winner Ada Hegerberg – announced a genuine world-first equal pay agreement, which came in the form of male players forgoing certain commercial payments that would be given to female players instead to bring their overall salaries up to the same level.

In 2018, New Zealand’s football federation negotiated a new CBA to ensure equality in four areas of its senior national team set-up including pay parity, equal prize money, equal rights for image use and parity across travel while on national team duty. And during and after the World Cup earlier this year, the football associations of both the Netherlands and Finland announced their intentions to ensure equal pay between national teams over the coming years.

These latter two announcements came within the whirlwind of the US team’s lawsuit against US Soccer over unequal player payments despite a growing gulf between the teams’ respective international performances; a lawsuit that does not appear to be ending any time soon.

The news that the Matildas will receive equal pay with the Socceroos matters. But what matters more is how this decision fits into and reflects the wider global shift women’s football is currently experiencing towards full professionalism, greater exposure and fairer treatment as a result of collective action; action started and fuelled by the players themselves.

From Republic of Ireland players threatening to strike over poor conditions that saw them forced to share tracksuits and change in airport toilets, Denmark forfeiting a World Cup qualifier and Nigeria players holding a sit-in at their team hotel in France to protest lack of player payments, to almost 200 women in Spain’s top league agreeing to an indefinite strike over inadequate compensation and support, women footballers around the world are finally recognising the power of solidarity and collective action to force change in their industry.

It is easy to forget in the glamorous and lucrative world of football that, at their core, players are still workers who want the same rights and support from their employers and workplaces as anybody else.

“Equal pay for equal work” has always been about more than a few extra dollars on a pay-slip; it has become a metaphor for the myriad contributions women have made to the world we live in. The phrase challenges the way many of us have been taught to define the very concepts of value and of work, and asks us to question who decides what they mean.

Women’s sport provides one of the most fertile spaces for this conversation to happen because it provides the most extreme and most visible example of how our socio-economic world can so fiercely warp our understandings of how women’s work is or isn’t valued. The Matildas’ equal pay announcement is the most recent step in women’s football’s current global reckoning, but it will certainly not be the last.

It is important now to not get swept up in the symbolism: the devil – as always – will be in the detail. A domino effect is occurring as various national federations begin to redress a decades-long handicap that has kept women’s football on the periphery. It is imperative that players, unions, the media and the public continues the conversation around why equal pay matters, as well as what more can and should be done.