Under Armour and Sydney FC forge an exciting new partnership and the kit looks impressive

Staff Writer

Football kit is big business. With hundreds of millions of units sold each and every year, it is no wonder that sports clothing and accessory brands align themselves with teams; seeking mutually beneficial partnerships across the globe.

In fact, total sports sponsorship looks likely to surpass US$65 billion in 2019, with football accounting for a significant piece of that pie.

The corporate investment is considerable, yet the return lucrative. Presenting and marketing a fashionable, successful and elite face to a sporting public craving connection and relationship with its sports stars is marketing 101.

For the sportswear industries’ heaviest hitters, football teams are an important arm of their corporate strategy and vision.

Despite its relatively innocuous size when compared to major football leagues around the world, there is still much value in forging corporate partnerships with Australia’s A-League franchises.

That fact has not escaped the U.S based footwear, apparel and accessory giant Under Armour. From humble origins, the company has become an industry leader and its iconic corporate symbol will now adorn the kit of one of Australia’s most successful clubs.

Reigning A-League and W-League champion Sydney FC launched its 2019/20 kit in style last week and for the first time, the designs are provided by Under Armour; a new player on the A-League scene.

The deal is a major coup for the Sky Blues yet also a clear statement of intention from Under Armour; obviously looking to broaden its reach internationally.

The launch took place with all the glitz and glamour that Australia’s biggest City usually provides and its most successful football club celebrated the new association with a cruise on Sydney Harbour.

Players, club staff, partners and an array of guests attended, with Sydney midfielder Milos Ninkovic and W-League captain Teresa Polias given the honour of modelling the new home design.

The away and alternate strips were also showcased and all contain an indelible symbol that clearly connects the club to both fans and the local environment.

Senior design manger on Under Armour’s Global Football Team Karen Patterson explained.

“Using sky blue as the focal point, conceptually we designed the three kits to incorporate the club’s traditional colours while also giving a nod to the Sydney Opera House – an iconic symbol for the club and for supporters around the world.”

The strips are visually stunning and using state of the art material technology, also provide Sydney’s teams with the best chance of success in what will be demanding and competitive seasons in both the A and W Leagues in 2019/20.

The four-year deal sets up a relationship based on successful branding and imaging, a quality that both parties pursue. It is something Sydney FC achieved last season when it raised both the men’s and women’s championship trophies and also what Under Armour aim to achieve by producing bold and innovative designs in their development of football kit.

Certainly in the case of Sydney FC, they appear to have hit the mark.

With Puma, Umbro, Macron, Adidas, Nike and Kappa already in the A-League kit arena, the new player enters a competitive and challenging local market and Sydney FC becomes the 18th club backed by the brand across the globe.

The medium term vision for the company must surely include forging a deal with a European powerhouse club that will ingrain their name even more deeply into the world game.

Thanks to the ever-increasing importance of global branding and corporate involvement in all sport, clubs benefit considerably from both the product provided and the associated aesthetics that permeate in a world of impression and reputation.

This new arrangement is an exciting development for the league and Sydney FC will look stunning on the pitch in spite of any disappointing results. It will be interesting to see the competitors’ offerings as we move nearer to season kick-off in October and wonderful if more and more young kids begin wearing the colours of their favourite A-League team instead of far-flung international clubs.

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Football West’s NAIDOC ball competition turns Indigenous art into a road safety message, and a rare form of representation

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Image Credit: Football West

Football West has opened its 2027 NAIDOC Ball Design competition, inviting members of Western Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to submit artwork that will end up printed on 500 footballs and distributed to schools, clubs and communities across the state. It is a small competition with a modest prize, a $1,000 voucher and a set of ten footballs for the winner. But what it is actually doing sits somewhere more significant than a design contest.

The 2027 edition is a joint initiative between Football West, the Insurance Commission of Western Australia and, for the first time, Football Futures Foundation. The winning design will carry the Insurance Commission’s Belt Up road safety message alongside the artwork, with the footballs distributed during NAIDOC Week, which runs from 4 to 11 July next year.

Football Futures Foundation CEO Michael Kerr framed the partnership as an extension of work the Foundation already runs across the state.

“Through programs such as Dreamtime Spirit and Yilkari, supported by former Matildas goalkeeper Lydia Williams, we are working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to create football opportunities that are culturally safe, community-led and built around genuine belonging,” Kerr said.

A message that travels further in a football

Road trauma in Australia isn’t evenly distributed. Indigenous Australians are consistently found in national research to be two to three times more likely to be killed in a road transport crash than non-Indigenous Australians, a disparity driven in part by higher rates of pedestrian and passenger injury and compounded by the realities of remote and regional life, longer travel distances, older vehicles, and limited access to emergency care when something goes wrong. Seatbelt non-use remains one of the most consistent contributing factors in that gap.

The Insurance Commission has invested more than 2 million dollars in the Belt Up campaign over its seven years, and its Chief Investment Officer, Steve McKenna, has been explicit about who the message is aimed at.

“About 170 people die on the road each year in Western Australia,” McKenna said. “About 60 per cent of those are male. Of that total, 17 per cent aren’t wearing seatbelts when they die.”

Generic road safety advertising struggles to reach communities where trust in government messaging is not automatic and where the delivery channel matters as much as the message itself. A football, carrying artwork made by a member of the community it is meant to reach, distributed through a sport that already has deep informal roots in many Aboriginal communities, moves in a way a billboard cannot. That is not incidental to the campaign. It is the entire design logic.

Whose stories get told

Jarnda Councillor-Barns, the Ellenbrook artist who won the 2026 competition, used the colours of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in her design, with circular patterns representing gatherings and connecting pathways representing the journeys, knowledge and skills each player carries.

“I really wanted to amplify the stories that are in the Football West community, whether you’re based metro or rural like I was, and how everyone in a team comes with their own stories,” Councillor-Barns said.

Her own football story reflects exactly the kind of informal, community-rooted participation the competition is built to recognise. She grew up in Broome playing social games whenever she could, and has family connections to the Jambinu team, a regional Indigenous women’s side based in Geraldton, despite never being formally registered with a club herself.

“Soccer is a sport that brings people from all walks of life together, creating a larger family built on respect, teamwork and shared passion,” she said.

Football West’s David Williams, a former Socceroo who now heads the National Indigenous Boys Under-16s program, said initiatives like this had value beyond the artwork itself.

“For the creativity of artists to be involved with sport goes a long way,” Williams said. “The more initiatives we have with this kind of stuff, the better.”

That is a modest way of describing what is, functionally, a form of representation that Indigenous communities in Australian sport have not always had. Governing bodies commission Indigenous rounds, jerseys and acknowledgements regularly. Fewer hand the creative authorship, and a public platform for it, directly to community members with no requirement that they already hold a formal position within the sport.

Insurance Commission Chief Investment Officer Steve McKenna, reflecting on the 2026 winning design at its unveiling, saw something in it that spoke to the broader purpose of the exercise.

“You see the Socceroos playing, and look across the team, and a ball like this, the designs, it reflects what Australia’s all about,” McKenna said.

In the meantime, five hundred footballs carrying a community-made design and a road safety message will reach further into regional and remote Western Australia than most government campaigns manage on their own. Whether that message changes behaviour on the roads that data suggests still needs the most attention is the harder, longer question the competition cannot answer by itself.

Northern NSW Football’s Leadership Program Reaches 98 Graduates as Sport Moves Toward 2027 Gender Parity Targets

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Image Credit: Football Northern NSW

Northern NSW Football has concluded its 2026 Women’s Leadership Program, with 13 participants taking the total number of graduates to 98 women across the region since the program launched in 2023. The five-week program combined online modules with a two-day conference at Rydges Resort in the Hunter Valley, bringing together club volunteers, committee members, administrators and NNSWF staff from Newcastle, Macquarie, Northern Inland and Football Mid North Coast zones.

The program’s growth has been uneven year to year. It launched with two intakes in 2023, drew 25 scholarship recipients in 2024,then settled to 12 in 2025, which brought the cumulative total to 85 before this year’s cohort of 13.

The program was facilitated by Ann Odong, who founded The Women’s Game, Australia’s first dedicated women’s football website, in 2008,and later spent six years as Football Australia’s Media and PR Manager steering the Matildas’ program through multiple World Cups and Olympic Games,before moving into independent consulting work.

A pipeline built against a 2027 deadline

The program fits within a wider set of national targets football and the broader sport sector have committed to reaching within the next twelve months. Football Australia’s Our Game initiative, launched in 2021, set a goal of 50:50 gender parity across players, coaches, administrators and referees by 2027.Separately, the federally backed National Gender Equity in Sport Governance Policy requires all funded national and state sporting bodies to reach 50 per cent women or gender-diverse board directors by 1 July 2027, with funding to be withheld from organisations that fall short.As of the most recent Australian Sports Commission data, 22 per cent of chief executives and 25 per cent of board chairs across 65 federally funded national sporting organisations were women.

Programs built around confidence, networking and committee-level skills, the model NNSWF has run since 2023, are the mechanism most sporting bodies are relying on to close that gap, since board and executive vacancies typically draw from an organisation’s existing pool of committee members, volunteers and administrators rather than external recruitment.

This year’s cohort

University of Newcastle FC’s Charlotte Carey, one of this year’s participants, said the program had given her the confidence to pursue a career in football while developing skills applicable across other areas of her life. Fellow participants included representatives from Cooks Hill United, Westlakes Wildcats, Newcastle Olympic, Lake Macquarie City FC, Western Wolves, Gunnedah and District Soccer Association, Wauchope FC and Stockton Sharks, alongside three NNSWF staff members.

NNSWF Participation and Women’s Football Officer Jamie Bressan said the program had continued to provide women across the game with an opportunity to connect and build leadership skills, with topics covering effective communication, personality styles and team dynamics. Bressan pointed to the network the program builds among participants, drawn from clubs and committees across the region, as one of its central functions rather than the training content alone.

The 2026 cohort’s spread across four zones, Newcastle, Macquarie, Northern Inland and Football Mid North Coast, continues a pattern of the program drawing participants from outside the Hunter region’s largest population centres, consistent with its original design to make the conference and online components accessible to women in regional and remote parts of northern NSW through funded travel and accommodation.

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