"Arsenal are one of the world’s biggest clubs and the challenge of playing in England at the highest level is going to provide me with the ultimate test at this stage of my career." Foord and Logarzo will link up with their respective clubs after Australia's Olympic qualifiers next month, joining Sam Kerr (Chelsea), Hayley Raso (Everton), Jacynta Galabadaarachchi (West Ham), Lisa De Vanna (Fiorentina), Emily Gielnik (Bayern Munich) and Alex Chidiac (Atletico Madrid) as part of a growing contingent of Matildas in Europe. Caitlin Foord has sealed a transfer from Sydney FC to Arsenal. Credit:Getty Images Their departures are a sign that the vast improvements in European women's football will present the W-League with precisely the same challenges as the A-League around quality player drain. But competition chief Greg O'Rourke is not alarmed, saying it was a validation of the W-League as a professional pathway and that clubs were fully prepared to deal with the implications.

"It's not unforeseen," said O'Rourke. "The opportunity for those players to leave our league and go to what is probably going to evolve to be the biggest female league in the world is something we want to celebrate. "When we spoke about this very thing a couple of CEO meetings ago, we asked,' What can we do to improve our product if we are going to lose half a dozen Matildas?'" Sam Kerr after scoring for Chelsea on Sunday. Credit:Getty Images Clubs have already made a significant financial investment in the W-League, with O'Rourke claiming total player payments for this season were $4 million - roughly double what they were last season. The next step is to add more teams to the W-League. O'Rourke said the four A-League clubs without a women's division - Central Coast Mariners, Wellington Phoenix, Western United and Macarthur FC - will soon be invited to submit bids to join an expanded 10-team W-League in 2020-21.

The Mariners, who had a W-League team between 2008 and 2009 but shuttered it due to funding concerns, have recently called for expressions of interest for potential sponsors for a new women's team, but O'Rourke said they were not necessarily the frontrunners. Loading "We will put a proper criteria in place to judge who would be the best team for the league - geography, quality, investment, all that stuff," he said. "All four of those teams, through their owners, have indicated that they will enter that process." O'Rourke did not rule out the possibility of an immediate expansion to 12 teams, if three high-quality bids were tendered and the local football economy could sustain it. But he said it was "most likely" that only one team would be added next season. The question of when the W-League will move to a full home-and-away season, however, remains unresolved. Like the A-League, the W-League draw is imbalanced, with some teams playing each other once and some twice across the current 14 rounds.

Players have long called for that to change but O'Rourke said doing so would put the W-League's partnership with the US National Women's Soccer League in peril by creating more overlap of the two seasons, while also placing further demands upon the many players who still juggle full-time work with their semi-professional football careers. "It's a really finely-balanced conversation," he said. Loading Scheduling conflicts between the W-League and NWSL appear inevitable as both competitions expand - as does the risk of physical and mental burnout for players who hop from one competition to the other, with no substantial break in between. But for now, O'Rourke believes the link-up is the best move for both parties to combat the rise of Europe. O'Rourke, who helped initiate the alliance last year, said it was designed to provide a "pipeline" of import players like Western Sydney Wanderers stars Lynn Williams and Kristen Hamilton to offset the loss of established Matildas to Europe.