PFA Co-Chief Executive Kathryn Gill on the discussions leading up to Collective Bargaining Agreement

Liam Watson
Kathryn Gill
Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

The Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between Football Australia and Professional Footballers Australia (PFA) was recently formed for 2023-2027, bolstering the future for the Socceroos and Matildas.

The CBA will put a number of key changes and initiatives in place – namely payments, commercial partnerships, gender equality, work-life balance and life after football.

As a former Matildas captain, PFA Co-Chief Executive Kathryn Gill has been the perfect role model for those rising up through the ranks, and also in her leadership to turn this CBA into reality.

She spoke with Soccerscene to outline the key milestones achieved for the new CBA and what we can look forward to over the four-year duration.

The path towards the 50:50 payments and the key conversations that made it happen:

Kathryn Gill: Women’s football has undergone a global explosion over the past four to five years. When we signed the previous collective bargaining agreement in 2019, the women’s game was threatening to reach new heights, and our gender equal model reflected that trend.

In 2023, we needed the new agreement to reflect this new reality, and most players were comfortable moving away from a centralised contract structure to a meritocratic payment model, mirroring the Socceroos’ match payments.

Players provided direct feedback in player meetings, steering committee meetings, and in the negotiations with FA to share their views.

The outcome was that the players now have a payment model that incentivises performances, creates competitive tension within the team, and is a fit-for-purpose gender-equal payment structure in line with the Socceroos.

There is still work to do to increase player salaries in club football, but we are hopeful that it will continue to grow in line with global trends.

How revenues will benefit the Australian football community with programs for current and former players:

Kathryn Gill: Under the CBA, a percentage of the players’ share of revenue is redirected into player development support programs and services, which are vital to the ongoing support of players and ensure that football remains a sport of choice for Australian athletes. That money is to support the current national team players. However, for the first time, the CBA guarantees investment in our past players via legacy funding from the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

That funding will ensure our players can stay in their careers longer, help them to prepare for life after football, and enable the PFA and FA to invest in areas that will allow us to support our retired and former professional players better.

The importance of giving back towards the PFA Footballers’ Trust:

Kathryn Gill: Players are deeply passionate about many issues within football and society, from reducing the cost of football to climate change and human rights. Their aim is to make the Footballers’ Trust the most impactful sports charity in Australia. The CBA is a great vehicle to foster the players’ commitment by building a deeper level of impact on many existing and new initiatives across the next four years of the agreement.

There were 40 players in the negotiation process, was there anyone in particular that stood out in discussions?

Kathryn Gill: The CBA is the players’ agreement, so as many players as possible in and around the national teams provided their input into their deal.

The players were constantly at the table and in the negotiations, even though many had to join from overseas at various hours of the morning or evening.

Our Executive Committee Members in particular – Andrew Redmayne, Lydia Williams, Tameka Yallop, Elise Kellond-Knight, Jackson Irvine and Mat Ryan – were deeply involved given their representative roles with the union.

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Mizuno’s Australian gamble: can a 120-year-old brand break through?

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Image Credit: Mizuno

When Mizuno unveiled a mural of Socceroos captain Harry Souttar on a Richmond wall during the 2026 World Cup, the company’s name did not appear on the artwork. The artist, Rory Ledge, painted Souttar as the “Minister of Defence” behind a brick wall. Channel 7 and Channel 9 turned up. The Herald Sun ran it in their Saturday edition. Mizuno’s brand director called it “mainstream awareness” without paid media.

The mural sat within a broader push by the Osaka-based company to expand in Oceania. For the fiscal year ending March 2026, Mizuno reported sales of ¥259 billion, up 7.8 per cent year-on-year, with net income of ¥18.4 billion representing 20.5 per cent growth . Operating profit rose to ¥22.6 billion. The Asia and Oceania segment is central to the company’s medium-term plan, which targets net sales of ¥290 billion by fiscal 2027.

The growth imperative

Australian football has not historically been kind to specialist boot brands. Nike, Adidas and Puma dominate retail shelves. A-Leagues collective bargaining agreements and club deals have locked in incumbents. For a brand without the marketing budgets of its competitors, the path to relevance runs through the players.

Mizuno has grown its Australian ambassador base from one athlete to around 20 across the A-Leagues in recent seasons. Melbourne City’s Tolgay Arslan, who played in the Bundesliga and Serie A before arriving in Australia, told Front Page Football: “If I discovered these boots ten years ago, I would wear these boots overseas in my career.” Western United midfielder Angus Thurgate called them “the comfiest boots I’ve ever worn”.

The mural moment

Richmond was chosen for the mural because of its location. The suburb sits at the centre of Melbourne’s sporting precinct, five minutes’ walk from the MCG and AAMI Park. It is already home to murals of AFL players. Rowena Corner Store owner Con, who agreed to host the artwork, had previously welcomed murals of Dusty Martin and an AFLW player.

“We didn’t have access to Harry because he was in the US competing,” brand director Rishi said. “We couldn’t do a photoshoot. So we had to be clever. The best ideas come from real time, aligned with what the public discourse looks like. Once we saw his Wikipedia page updated to refer to him as the Minister of Defence, we knew we could play into this.”

Ledge incorporated an existing window into the design to create a net behind Souttar’s figure. The mural appeared the morning of the Paraguay match, when Australia’s clean sheet sent them into the knockout phase.

The World Cup provided a massive backdrop. The Socceroos’ run captivated the nation: 4.84 million Australians tuned in to the Paraguay match, making it the most-watched World Cup match in SBS history at the time, with an average audience of 3.086 million . The final reached 5.26 million viewers, and cumulative tournament reach hit 18.04 million— 64 per cent of Australia’s population. SBS director of sport Ken Shipp said: “We’ve never seen engagement at this level.” Mizuno spent comparatively little and had Channel 7 and Channel 9 on site.

The commercial question

For a brand with limited marketing firepower, organic PR coverage is the prize. The question for the company’s Oceania division, still in growth mode, is whether a mural and a handful of player endorsements can convert into sustained commercial traction. Retail partnerships with Ultra Football, which has created a dedicated Mizuno space at its Melbourne store, suggest the company is thinking beyond campaigns.

Mizuno’s European expansion has taken a different path. The company signed a five-year deal to become AS Monaco’s technical equipment partner from the 2025-26 season, its first entry into Ligue 1. It already has a presence in Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A. In Australia, institutional partnerships are harder to secure. The approach has been slower: build through athletes, then through community, then through culture.

The Queensland government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Mizuno in March 2026 to explore the Japan-Australia Sports & Health Innovation Exchange (JASHIE), a two-year partnership focused on sport and health innovation . The agreement supports Queensland’s preparations for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The mural campaign reflected a broader trend in sporting brand marketing, where IP restrictions and athlete availability increasingly demand creative solutions. “I love what Levi’s did because they were able to lean into their brand codes and tell what I believe to be the most memorable advertising story from the World Cup,” Rishi said. “This is a different page out of fundamentally the same playbook.”

Mizuno’s boots are not cheap. The Made-in-Japan models retail well above competitors’ offerings. The brand’s pitch rests on quality and heritage, not price or volume. That is a harder sell in a country where discounting dominates and cost-of-living pressures are squeezing households.

The Souttar mural will eventually fade or be painted over. Mizuno is betting that by the time it does, enough Australian football fans will have noticed the three stripes’ quieter rival.

Football Australia Expands Mental Skills Program for Match Officials Amid Sustained Focus on Referee Retention

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Image Credit: Football NSW

Football Australia has confirmed a second national webinar for match officials, led by sports psychologist Dr Liam Slack, extending a referee development series introduced after strong engagement with an initial session on managing match-day pressure.

The upcoming session, themed “parking with purpose,” will focus on decision-making strategies designed to help referees process on-field calls and reset attention quickly across a match that can present hundreds of individual decisions. Dr Slack, who also consults with The Football Association and the AFC Referee Academy and previously spent over a decade as a performance psychologist with the Professional Game Match Officials Limited in England, brings substantial elite-level experience to a program open to officials at every level, from grassroots to professional.

The theme builds on work Dr Slack has already delivered within Australian officiating. He recently led a session with Football Australia’s National Referee Academy on the same concept, framing the ability to consciously park a decision and refocus on the next phase of play as a trainable skill rather than an innate trait, one that separates officials who reset quickly under pressure from those who don’t. He has also addressed more than 100 Football Australia elite match officials and staff on developing a stronger match-day mentality, an indication of how embedded this psychological framework has become across the officiating pathway rather than remaining a one-off intervention.

The expansion of the webinar series reflects a broader shift in how football administrators are approaching referee attrition. Rather than treating retention purely as a recruitment or pay problem, the program signals an institutional acknowledgment that the psychological demands of officiating, particularly the compounding pressure of split-second decisions under public scrutiny, are a material factor in whether officials remain in the game.

It rests alongside other measures adopted across Australian football in recent years, including visible identification programs for junior referees and structural reviews of referee departments at state federation level, all aimed at the same underlying issue: a shrinking pool of match officials relative to demand.

Football Australia has not detailed metrics for assessing the program’s impact on referee numbers, though the recurring engagement of an internationally credentialed specialist across multiple tiers of the officiating pathway suggests sustained institutional investment in the approach.

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