What the Major Facility Investments mean beyond the Upcoming AFC Women’s Asian Cup

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Image Credit: Football West

As anticipation builds for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup 2026, Western Australia is witnessing a transformation not just in readiness for a global sporting event, but in how public sporting spaces are funded, developed, and shared. This week’s announcement of major facility investments across Perth is being defined equally by politics and policy as it is by sport, with leaders openly discussing the long-term implications for equity, access, and participation in football.

On Wednesday morning at E&D Litis Stadium, Football West (FW) CEO, Jamie Harnwell, and FW Manager Female Football & Advocacy, Sarah Carroll, joined WA Sport and Recreation Minister Rita Saffioti to announce the latest round of State Government investment into football infrastructure. Floreat Athena’s home ground received $800,000 to upgrade lighting and facilities. In the city’s north, the Sam Kerr Football Centre is set for a $4 million injection to add two new turf pitches, upgraded lighting, shade structures, fencing, and landscaping. Kingsway Reserve, home of Olympic Kingsway, will benefit from $750,000 for new audio equipment, an electronic scoreboard, and expanded seating.

While each announcement drew applause, the underlying message was unmistakable. Public money is being leveraged not just to stage another successful event, but to tackle historical shortfalls in local sporting infrastructure and move the system toward more equitable access, particularly for women, girls, and multicultural communities.

Public Investment: A New Political Standard for Equity

WA Sport & Recreation Minister Rita Saffioti made the stakes clear that “these upgrades ensure Perth is ready to host a world-class football tournament while leaving a lasting legacy for community sport in Western Australia.”

It means “Delivering these upgrades [gives] more training opportunities, more matches, and more women and girls able to participate in football at the local level.”

“I look forward to seeing clubs, players and families enjoy the new facilities and encourage all Western Australians to support the AFC Women’s Asian Cup 2026 in Perth by heading to a game and cheering on these amazing athletes.”

Equity, in this context, is about more than distributing funds. It’s about correcting the historic channeling of resources toward select sporting codes and regions. As well as making sure that the facilities built for world-class players last beyond the tournament and serve the local kids, families, and clubs year-round. It’s about ensuring that facilities meet the daily needs of the entire community, not just a handful of media moments.

Female Participation, Inclusion and the Policy Gap

For Carroll, the focus is explicit and urgent. “It’s great that we are so near another massive tournament in Australia. We saw the huge upturn the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup brought to the female game and it would be great to see a similar boost on the back of the AFC Women’s Asian Cup,” she said.

“The State Government funding for the three host venues is fantastic, and FW will work tirelessly to attract more investment, including for female-friendly facilities.”

“Longer term, the focus has to be on a lasting legacy for Australian football, driven by increased female participation through improved community and regional infrastructure.”

This approach represents a deliberate deviation from the past, where clubrooms, pitches, and lighting frequently lagged behind the numbers and ambitions of local girls wishing to play. By explicitly pledging “female-friendly” facilities and broader “community and regional infrastructure,” Carroll is naming the equity gap and positioning this public investment as part of a permanent structural shift in Western Australian sport.

Club Level: Access and Social Outcomes

For clubs, the benefits aren’t theoretical. Floreat Athena Life Member and former President Con Poulios said the club’s increased capacity and upgraded amenities are an outcome of determined advocacy and timing.

“It’s really exciting for the club. We were hoping to be a training venue in the Women’s World Cup but obviously the changerooms weren’t built at the time.”

“The amount of money that’s been spent in the last few years, every club would love that to happen to them, so we’re really grateful to both the Federal and the State Governments and the City of Vincent for their support. They were much-needed upgrades but we’re really, really grateful.”

At Olympic Kingsway, President Steve Nelkovski said the changes go well beyond elite sport:
“It’s exciting for the game of football in the northern corridor. What we’ve seen is record investment which is game-changing for the sport, but more importantly, it will inspire the next generation of boys and girls to play football.”

“All the training venues are open to all the nations that come to WA. Again, it’s exciting, having hosted Denmark during the FIFA Women’s World Cup, we have the opportunity to potentially host six different nations.”

“If you peel back the layers to the night against Melbourne Victory, what was the best part was seeing kids on the field celebrating, having the night of their lives. It’s about inspiring children. There’s pathways through Kingsway, there’s pathways through all the Football West programs (…) they can learn the sport, build great friendships and dream big.”

Notably, these words come after years when many suburban and regional clubs felt sidelined from major capital spending. Now, the “legacy” language is backed with real funding and facilities with lasting community value.

Beyond 2026: Ongoing Challenges, Enduring Impact

The investments being made now in lighting, amenities and accessible pitches are designed to outlast a single tournament. They embed equity in the built environment, ensuring that women, girls, new migrants, juniors, volunteers and everyone who makes football possible share in the benefits. Political and football leaders alike are setting a precedent: global events must serve local goals, and access must be for all, not just for the moment.

For many, the real scoreboard will be seen in growing registrations, full clubrooms, and sustained engagement across all parts of society. If the lessons of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup are any indication, this is one political legacy with the power to shape Western Australian sport, and community life, for decades to come.

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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.

Chelsea FC partners with Strava in landmark lifestyle partnership

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Image credit: Stock1987 / Shutterstock.com

The London-based giants announced the launch this week, marking a first-of-its-kind partnership for both the Premier League and Women’s Super League (WSL).

Connecting with fans

As clubs across the world look to find new and exciting ways of connecting with fans, Chelsea are showing that the answer – more often than not – already exists.

Strava is a running and fitness platform with over 195 million users across the globe. But the app represents more than just tracking speed – it is a social and lifestyle symbol through which users can connect.

And with presence in 185 countries, the app has the power to unite users from all over the world, making it a perfect fit for the globally-followed Blues.

“We are always looking at ways we can use our global brand to bring people together, often in unexpected ways,” said Brand Director for Chelsea Football Club, Scott Fenton.

“By working with Strava and becoming the first Premier League and BWSL teams to establish an official presence on Strava, we can lean into participation culture, understand where our fans are while offering new experiences for them and strengthen the bonds that unite our global community.”

Two brands with a huge international presence. One partnership which promises to encourage community, movement and healthy-living.

 

The intersection between sport and lifestyle

At first glance, Chelsea FC and Strava appear an unconventional partnership. Indeed, it is the first time a club has established an official presence on the app.

But at its core, the two organisations serve similar purposes: uniting people with a common passion for sport.

At its beginnings in 2009, Strava promised to replicate the feeling of team sports and unlocking new achievements, making a deal with Chelsea FC – one of the world’s most successful teams in recent years – a true full-circle moment.

“Chelsea FC joining Strava as the first Premier League and BWSL team to establish a global club on the platform is a powerful demonstration of how brands are engaging with their communities,” explained Director of Athlete and Community Partnerships at Strava, Mel Jarrett.

“We believe shared passion for movement creates real connections, and this collaboration brings that to life for Chelsea’s global fanbase.”

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