Football Victoria short-lists bidders for national Home of the Matildas

Sam Kerr and Caitlin Foord

In a statement made this week, Football Victoria announced the short list of bidders to secure the rights to be the national home of Australia’s senior women’s squad, the Matildas.

The Matildas, now tearing it up in the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France, have been in need of a permanent base for some time.

The short list includes La Trobe University’s Bundoora campus as well as the municipalities of Darebin, Casey, Brimbank and Maroondah.

The press release can be found below in full:

The establishment of the proposed national Home of the Matildas has moved a step closer with Football Victoria nominating five locations as the potential base for the state-of-the-art facility.

The short-list comprises the municipalities of Brimbank, Casey, Darebin, and Maroondah, along with La Trobe University as part of redevelopment plans at its Bundoora campus.

The process now moves into the next stage of discussions with the respective municipalities and/or landowners, as part of a feasibility study underway to determine the preferred location for what will also serve as the State Home of Football. Concept plans and cost estimates will be developed once a preferred site has been identified.

Football Victoria received $200,000 from the Victorian Government for the feasibility study, along with a $15 million commitment from the Federal Government towards construction.

Football Victoria CEO, Peter Filopoulos, said the sport would continue to work closely with governments at all levels to create a dedicated, world-class facility that would be a “game-changer for women’s football in Australia and across the Asia region”.

“Just as the Matildas are doing Australia proud on the world stage, it’s incumbent on us as a nation to provide them the high-performance home base that will help them stay at the forefront of international football and ensure the game keeps developing the stars of tomorrow”, he said.

Among a range of features, it is proposed that the Home of the Matildas would include elite training facilities to cater for the senior and emerging Matildas programs, including leading-edge medical and sports science facilities, strength and conditioning areas, an aquatic zone, indoor futsal facilities, and offices for FFA/FV technical staff. It is also proposed that the facility would house a training and education hub for non-playing roles including specialist programs for girls and women as coaches, referees and club administrators.

“The creation of a national Home of the Matildas will go a long way towards helping the game in Victoria meet our stated objective of 50:50 gender participation by 2027.”

Today’s announcement comes as the Westfield Matildas move to the knock-out stage of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in France. Football Federation Australia, with the support of the Commonwealth Government, is bidding to host the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

*ENDS*

Where would you like to see the Matildas call home/base of operations?

Feel free to discuss this on social media, it’s an interesting scenario, that’s for sure.

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Football Victoria and VicHealth partner on anti-racism program as community sport data reveals systemic problem

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Football Victoria has partnered with the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation to roll out the Set The Standard initiative across the state’s football clubs, in a collaboration that signals a significant shift in how Australia’s most popular club-based sport is approaching racism and cultural exclusion at the grassroots level.

The partnership brings together the state’s peak football governing body and its primary health promotion agency around a shared finding that can no longer be treated as incidental. According to the 2025 report Enhancing the Capacity of Victorian Community Sport to Tackle Racism, 56 per cent of surveyed participants had experienced or witnessed racism in community sport. In a state where football draws participants from some of the most culturally diverse communities in the country, that figure represents a systemic failure the sport can no longer address through conduct policies alone.

Clubs that subscribe to the Set The Standard newsletter will be entered into a draw to win one of three $1,000 vouchers, available for equipment, facility improvements, events or other community initiatives. The incentive is designed to drive early engagement with a program whose ambitions extend well beyond a newsletter subscription.

What the Partnership Signals

Racism in sport has historically been treated as a conduct and governance issue, managed through complaints mechanisms that require incidents to be formally reported and tend to significantly undercount the actual prevalence of harm. VicHealth’s framing of racism as a public health problem repositions the entire conversation.

Experiences of racism are associated with measurable negative health outcomes including anxiety, depression and social withdrawal. When community sport, which governments and health agencies actively promote as a vehicle for physical and mental wellbeing, becomes a source of those same harms, the public health cost is direct and quantifiable.

Resources, not Rhetoric

For Football Victoria, the partnership brings something the governing body cannot provide on its own. VicHealth’s credibility, resources and public health framework give the initiative a foundation that a sporting organisation working alone would struggle to establish. Set The Standard offers clubs practical tools and guidance built around progress rather than perfection, which reflects a realistic understanding of how cultural change works inside volunteer-run community organisations.

The $1,000 vouchers are not a side note. Most community clubs operate on tight margins, depend on volunteer administrators and are already stretched managing growing participation demands. Finding room to invest in cultural development programs on top of everything else is difficult. Providing tangible resources directly addresses that constraint at the point where clubs are most likely to disengage.

The program also arrives at a consequential moment. Football in Victoria is absorbing significant participation growth following the AFC Women’s Asian Cup and sustained increases in junior registrations, bringing new communities into the game in large numbers. The 2025 data suggests the environments those communities are entering are not consistently safe or welcoming. Participation growth and cultural safety work need to move together. A sport that grows larger without becoming more inclusive has not actually improved the experience of the people playing it.

The Man Who Built a Women’s Football Program from Nothing is now an Award-Winning Gender Equity Leader

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Image Credit: Football Victoria

Eight years ago, Spring Hills Football Club did not have a girls’ team. Today it has one of the most recognised women’s programs in Melbourne’s west, a senior NPLW side, and a head coach who has just been named Gender Equity Leader of the Year at the Melton City Council Volunteer Achievement Awards.

Tom Markovski, Spring Hills’ NPLW Head Coach, received the award at a ceremony coinciding with National Volunteer Week, recognised for his community leadership, promotion of gender equality and commitment to advancing the status of women and people of all genders in sport. The recognition comes from outside the football community entirely, awarded by a local council celebrating volunteers across every sector of civic life in one of Melbourne’s fastest-growing regions.

Building from scratch

When Markovski arrived at Spring Hills, women’s football at the club did not exist. His first act was to champion the establishment of the club’s first all-girls team, a process that required persuading a club culture built around men’s football that the investment was worth making.

Women’s football in community clubs has historically struggled to access the same facilities, scheduling priority, coaching resources and institutional support as the men’s game. Clubs have been slow to invest in programs whose return is less immediately visible than a senior men’s premiership, and in a growing outer-suburban community like Melton, where volunteer capacity is finite and demand across every program is high, the case for building something new always has to compete with the urgency of maintaining what already exists.

Markovski made the case anyway, and kept making it across eight years of coaching senior and junior NPL teams while simultaneously building the structural foundations of a women’s program designed to outlast any individual’s involvement. The club’s first all-girls team became multiple junior girls teams. Those junior teams created the pipeline for a senior women’s side. The senior women’s side created visible pathways for younger players to see where the game could take them within their own club.

The outcome is a program that Spring Hills now holds up as central to its identity rather than supplementary to it. The club has become a leader in female participation in Melbourne’s west, and recently made history within the NPLW Victoria structure by fielding junior teams coached entirely by female coaches, a milestone that reflects the depth of the program Markovski helped build.

What the Award Recognises

The Melton City Council’s decision to name Markovski its Gender Equity Leader of the Year places his work in a frame that extends beyond football. Melton is one of the fastest-growing local government areas in Australia, a diverse and rapidly expanding community where the institutions that bring people together, like schools, councils, sporting clubs, carry an outsized responsibility for social cohesion.

Mayor Cr. Lara Carli, speaking at the awards ceremony, reflected on the role volunteers play in communities like Melton’s. “Volunteering creates friendships, strengthens communities and builds a sense of belonging,” she said. “It helps people feel connected, supported and valued, and those things are more important than ever in a growing and diverse community like ours.”

For the girls now playing football at Spring Hills who were not playing anywhere eight years ago, Markovski’s contribution is not abstract. It is the specific and concrete fact of having somewhere to play, someone to coach them, and a pathway that leads somewhere.

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