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The A-League Women (ALW) becoming a full-time competition should be a major priority to improve the Australian game and ensure a lasting legacy from the 2023 Women's World Cup.
This was an urgent call sounded by players last month during a two-day women's football congress hosted by the players' union, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA).
Around 30 delegates from every ALW club gathered for the forum which was built upon the major findings of a player survey conducted at the end of the 2022/23 season.
Last year's survey revealed most players in Australia's top-tier women's club competition are struggling to support themselves solely through football, with most having to work or study to supplement their part-time income.
At the forum, players again urged the Australian Professional Leagues (APL) to accelerate the development of the ALW becoming a full-time competition.
"We can create a really great league here in Australia," said former Matilda and PFA executive member Elise Kellond-Knight.
"We need aspirational leaders. We don't need a long-term, 10-year strategy to get to full-time professionalism. Like, this is 2024. We need it tomorrow. We needed it yesterday.
"It's important that the girls understand where we've come from and how much hard work we've had to do. Things don't get handed to female athletes … you have to stand up, you have to ask for it, you have to fight for it.
"It's really important that we embed that philosophy in the next generation to come."
According to the PFA most players "earned at or close to the minimum" last season, with three in five players having worked second jobs.
Almost half of those working players put in more than 20 hours per week elsewhere, with dozens of anonymous athletes saying their work commitments affected their dedication to and improvements within football.
By contrast, only 15 per cent of A-League Men players were doing some kind of work outside of football, and 93 per cent of those worked less than 10 hours per week.
This season, the minimum remuneration for ALW players increased to $25,000 by virtue of the extended season, which went to a full home-and-away schedule for the first time. Current players are contracted for 35 weeks for a 22-round regular season, with four extra weeks for finals.
However, concerns remain that players are still not provided with the appropriate support for this extended season and increased physical demands.
Last year's survey found that all but three clubs "mostly failed to provide players with the required two-month advance training schedule and seven days' notice of any changes," making it even more difficult for those juggling other jobs to plan ahead.
Alarmingly, a longitudinal analysis of the PFA's own player feedback surveys since 2017 has found that the percentage of players who are satisfied with their football/work/life balance has declined.
"As demands on players increase ... evidently there is a side-effect of more players feeling stretched thin," the PFA report said.
"Nowadays, well more than half are either 'not at all' or only 'slightly' satisfied with their life balance.
"Life-balance dissatisfaction is not about being busy per se, but about being forced to spend time doing things they don't want to do, like working [other jobs]."
Adelaide United midfielder Dylan Holmes said that making the ALW full-time, with 12-month contracts, should be a priority for the APL: the first major step in capitalising in a structural way on the investment and popularity drawn to football thanks to the Matildas and the World Cup.
"We're at a really pivotal moment in Australian women's football where the league has the potential to really grow," she said.
"We've seen that with the Women's Super League [in England] and the NWSL [in the USA], how they've gone about it in different ways, which I think has been really interesting [with] different models.
"That's something we've tried to look at and figure out what could work for us here and how we could take advantage of some of those lessons through those leagues.
"Definitely full-time professionalism and a 12-month contract. Once that happens, the possibilities that are available through that are pretty amazing.
"And then, across the board, things like facilities, infrastructure, investment, marketing: those are all points that we talked about as well.
"The potential is huge. We just need to tap into it."
The forum took place ahead of the A-Leagues' second ever Pride Round, another initiative driven internally by the players, and comes just a few weeks before the competition's inaugural "Green Games" — a climate-focused initiative proposed by a coalition of A-Leagues and national team players, which aims to use football to address issues around climate change.
Canberra United and Brisbane Roar will use their respective ALW and ALM home games on Sunday, March 24 and Saturday, April 13 to "focus on reducing carbon pollution, off-setting unavoidable emissions, introducing new sustainable practices at clubs, and … raise awareness about the relationship between climate change and football."
In practical terms, this means reducing the presence of single-use plastics at games, providing more sustainable food options, and the APL off-setting the emissions produced by the flights of the travelling teams.