There is a particular kind of electricity that descends on a football city when the Matildas come to town. Perth felt it keenly in November 2023, when fans lined the footpaths outside the team hotel for hours, phones raised, hoping for a glimpse of Sam Kerr or Mary Fowler. Optus Stadium sold out in record time. Broadcasters reached for superlatives. The city, the country, could not get enough.
That version of Perth is not the one waiting to greet the Women's Asian Cup. Two days before Australia's opening match against the Philippines at Optus Stadium, the streets of the CBD carry no Matildas banners. There are no replica jerseys spotted on the morning commute, no stalls or signs signalling that something significant is about to begin. The tournament is here, but the city has not quite noticed yet.
As first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Optus Stadium is sold out for the opening fixture, but tickets remain available for Australia's group games on the Gold Coast and in Sydney. Asian Cup organisers have moved to discount tickets for other matches, including two-for-one deals, to lift attendance. The contrast with the 16 consecutive sellouts the team enjoyed at their peak is stark.
Several factors explain the drop-off. A continental tournament naturally carries less global weight than a World Cup, and Australia hosted that showpiece just three years ago. Adidas has not this time wrapped Fowler and Caitlin Foord across the sides of city high-rises. The promotional machinery has been quieter. And, frankly, the results have not helped.
The Paris 2024 Olympics campaign, which many in Australian football circles privately expected to challenge for a medal, ended in a group-stage exit. Coach Tony Gustavsson departed, and Football Australia took ten months to appoint a permanent replacement. During that period, the team's FIFA ranking slid to a record low of 16th. They now sit 15th, well behind Asian Cup favourites Japan (eighth) and North Korea (ninth), though ahead of defending champions China (17th) and group opponents South Korea (21st).
Sam Kerr's reputation has also taken a hit. Her court case in London, contested and unresolved in the public mind, has complicated the clean heroic narrative the sport rode so successfully in 2023. These are real-world events that pull at the fabric of any sporting cult of personality, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Still, dismissing this tournament as a missed opportunity would be premature. The build-up to the 2023 World Cup was similarly low-key until the football itself ignited public imagination. The 2025 men's Asian Cup offers an even more instructive lesson: it began under minimal fanfare and grew organically into something that genuinely moved Australian sport. Critically, much of that energy came not from mainstream sports fans but from Australia's Asian diaspora communities, who brought colour, noise, and belonging to stadiums around the country.
The diaspora dimension is genuinely significant for this tournament. Australia is home to 1.1 million people of Indian heritage, and India's women will make their Asian Cup debut here. The 1.4 million Australians of Chinese background have every reason to follow China's attempt to defend their 2022 title. The Bangladeshi community, numbering around 48,000, will welcome the first Bangladeshi women's national team to qualify for an Asian Cup. These are not hypothetical audiences; they are people for whom this tournament carries real cultural weight.
As for the Matildas themselves, there is a compelling argument that the relative quiet suits them. Hundreds of children turned out for Wednesday's open training session in Perth on a school day, proof that the rusted-on faithful have not gone anywhere. But the weight of mass expectation, the kind that accompanied Paris 2024, is absent. That expectation contributed to some of the pressure that has historically undone Australian campaigns when the team's global ranking did not match the national mood.
Hayley Raso put it plainly this week: "We're probably our harshest critics. We want ourselves to do well." The squad has also quietly scaled back pre-tournament media commitments, choosing preparation over profile. There will be no attention-drawing political statements as there were before the 2023 World Cup, when the team publicly challenged FIFA over prize money inequality. The focus, for now, is simply football.
This is, for many in the squad, their last genuine opportunity to win a major trophy on home soil. The golden generation knows it. Whether the broader Australian public rediscovers its passion will depend, as it always does, on what happens on the pitch. If the football delivers, the noise will follow. And if it does not, then no amount of billboard advertising was ever going to save the tournament anyway.
The AFC Women's Asian Cup may yet surprise everyone. It has done it before.