Indigenous Football Week to focus on next level gender equality in the game

Liam Watson
The sixth annual Indigenous Football Week 2021 will unlock the potential of Indigenous girls and women and improve gender equality.

The sixth annual Indigenous Football Week 2021 (IFW21) will be held on November 22 to 27. A week-long program of events will shine a spotlight on the power of football to unlock the potential of Indigenous girls and women and improve gender equality, from grassroots to elite.

IFW21 is a John Moriarty Football (JMF) initiative in partnership with Australian Professional Leagues (A-League), Professional Footballers Australia (PFA), Football Coaches Australia (FCA), SBS, NITV, and FOX Sports.

The week will see some of football’s best take a deep dive into gender equality issues of women in football leadership and specific intersectional challenges and opportunities in football for Indigenous girls and women.

Events for IFW21 will include community gala days across JMF hubs in NT, Queensland and NSW, a Facebook Live interview series, an expert online panel, an online workshop for young female footballers throughout the country, and special announcements across the week.

IFW21 will feature a line-up of top Australian football experts, identities and IFW21 Ambassadors, including:

  • Marra woman Shadeene (Shay) Evans – IFW21 Ambassador, JMF Inaugural Scholar, Young Matilda and Adelaide United A-League Women player
  • Yorta Yorta/Wiradjuri woman Jada Whyman – IFW21 Ambassador, JMF Scholarship Mentor, Matilda and Sydney FC A-League Women player
  • Wiradjuri woman Tiffany Stanley – IFW21 Ambassador and JMF Dubbo Community Coach
  • Wurumungu man Patrick Coleman – IFW21 Ambassador and JMF Tennant Creek Community Coach
  • Kanulu/Gangulu woman Allira Toby – Canberra United A-League Women player
  • Craig Foster AM – former Socceroo, football analyst, JMF Board Member and human rights activist
  • Tal Karp – Olympian, former Matilda and former Melbourne Victory Women captain
  • Kathryn Gill – Former Matildas Captain and Co-CEO of Professional Footballers Association
  • Glenn Warry – CEO of Football Coaches Australia
  • Leah Blayney – Head Coach of the Future Matildas and Young Matildas

John Moriarty AM, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of JMF and the first Indigenous footballer selected for Australia, said:

“Indigenous Football Week is about the power of football to create change for good. It is a chance to bring the football community together to support inclusion, cultural recognition and diversity.”

“Women’s and girl’s football is the fastest growing area of Australian football and we are certainly seeing this in JMF.

“JMF is committed to taking a leadership role on gender equality. Currently, 50 percent of our participants are girls, 40 percent of our coaches are female, 75 percent of our board are women, and we are always striving for improvement and creating best practice for gender and social equality in football.”

Outgoing inaugural FA Women’s Football Council Chair and Co-Chair of JMF, Ros Moriarty said:

“Over the past months we’ve undertaken a significant gender equality project to build on our own organisation’s best practice when it comes to diversity, equality and inclusion. The entire JMF team has collaborated on this project. We commissioned former Matilda, Olympian and leading sport and innovation strategy expert, Tal Karp, to help us create diversity tools and commitments that will be embedded into business as usual at JMF.”

Based on a three-level approach, JMF is implementing:

  1. A holistic training and development program to fast track more women into leadership.
  2. Flexible, safe and supportive work environments to drive equal opportunity for mothers.
  3. Awareness and culturally safe channels for proactive gender equality communications and respect.

According to Football Coaches Australia, only three percent of all accredited female football coaches have obtained a C Licence or above. IFW21 Ambassador and JMF Dubbo Community Coach and Wiradjuri woman, Tiffany Stanley, is among a very small cohort of Indigenous female football coaches to obtain a C Licence.

“Being a female player and coach, I see how differently women in football get treated. I believe it is time we come together as a nation to find better solutions to support women in the game and become leaders and role models for our upcoming generations,” Ms Stanley said.

PFA Co-Chief Executive Kathryn Gill said the PFA remains a proud partner of JMF and Indigenous Football Week.

“Indigenous players have made a rich contribution to our sport, from Charlie Perkins to John Moriarty and Karen Menzies. However, there remains much more to be done to better engage and increase access for Indigenous communities to our beautiful game,” she said.

“We now have many visible Indigenous role models, from Tate Russell to Lydia Williams and Jada Whyman, and by identifying intersectional barriers and solutions, we will hopefully ensure our game’s structures encourage more stars to emerge from communities into the A-Leagues and National Teams.”

IFW21 partner Football Coaches Australia CEO Glenn Warry says it is imperative that we build a world-class coaching culture within Australia to be more inclusive of all coaches developing and progressing their coaching careers within community and elite football environments.

“Football Coaches Australia is extremely proud to partner with John Moriarty Football to celebrate Indigenous Football Week 2021 (IFW21), 22-27 November, and its theme of ‘gender equality in football’,” he said.

“Since its inception FCA’s values, policies, strategies and programs have demonstrated that our Association fully supports working with the football community and stakeholders to support inclusion, cultural recognition and diversity. Indigenous coaching role models and ‘heroes’ such as Tanya Oxtoby, provide a career pathway goal for our upcoming JMF women coaching stars of the future.”

The A-Leagues celebrates IFW21 and is a proud partner of JMF. A-Leagues Managing Director Danny Townsend commented:

“Football is the most inclusive sport, with the most diverse fanbase in Australia and we are committed to providing culturally safe and inclusive Leagues for our professional footballers. Representation of Indigenous communities in football is increasing, from grassroots to the A-Leagues, and we fully support programs and activities that increase engagement and access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

“We celebrate the Indigenous A-League / women footballers who are emerging as the future stars of our Leagues, including the IFW21 Ambassadors, and we remain committed to creating, supporting and increasing player pathways for First Nations women to the A-Leagues.”

For more information visit www.indigenousfootballweek.org.au.

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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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