The third and final webinar hosted by Football Australia in celebration of Female Football Week 2024 was held on Sunday night, focusing on the range and depth of different roles women and girls can aspire to in football.
The panellists for the Working in Football webinar included Samantha Lewis, a women’s football journalist at the ABC; Jaclyn Lee-Joe, Deputy Chair at Football Australia; and Kimberley Conte, the Head of Women’s World Cup Legacy for Football South Australia.
It was hosted by Delfina Moresco, Business Development Executive at Football Australia.
The panellists began by explaining how they began their roles in football.
“I never set out to be a journalist,” Lewis recalled. “I didn’t know that football journalism was something that women could be.”
After liveblogging NSW NPLW matches, and writing for The Women’s Game – started by the now Media & PR Manager at Football Australia, Ann Odong – she decided to take a leap of faith after travelling to the FIFA Women’s World Cup France 2019™ and pursue journalism full time.
“I just scatter gunned it,” she explained, “I just went everywhere possible. And then within six months, I was writing for all these different places pretty regularly to the point where I could quit my PhD [in literature] and start to freelance full time… then I ended up at the ABC, and now here I am.”
Lee-Joe’s career has taken a different path to football, having worked for over 20 years in marketing, digital disruption and transformation across media, tech, communications and financial services. She has worked with brands such as Apple, Netflix and Skype.
“The red thread of my career has been where there has been digital disruption and transformation,” she said. “There are a lot of dimensions that Football Australia has to cover that sit in direct parallel to stuff I’ve done in the past.”
Conte’s career path was different again, having had designs on studying medicine and eventually getting a communications degree. A passion for cycling from a background as a triathlete led to event management, including 17 years travelling the world and working on different cycling events. Then – in the lead-up to the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™ - an opportunity in football emerged.
“My football experience actually came back to when I had my first child… and I was determined that she would get the chance to play soccer, because I didn’t get to,” Conte recalled. “I became that mum on the sidelines who volunteered for whatever it took, and became a team manager, and I started running tournaments – you just do it because you love your kids who are in love with the sport.
“Then I saw this job opportunity and I thought oh, there’s a chance to come back into football and to see the World Cup, and see if we can make a difference here in South Australia.
“We have a great responsibility as a male-dominated sport to ensure that we are really reaching out to all of those that we’re involved with, and our young people. So I’ve really tried to leverage off the back of that and continue to advocate for our players, our females and the women who are involved in the game.”
Starting in the game as a volunteer emerged as a key theme during discussions.
“Not only is it good for us, and it’s good for our well-being and mental health – particularly coming out of COVID where we were isolated, the impact that can have on individuals is huge – but I also think it’s a great opportunity to try things out, as a volunteer,” Conte continued.
Lewis agreed, adding that even though she is now a paid professional as a journalist, she volunteers her time to the game in other ways.
“I’m volunteering at my local club where I’m on the committee and we’re helping to organise stuff behind the scenes which, as Kim said, is a really valuable environment to be in because you come up against lots of different people with lots of different skills, lots of different experience, lots of different ways of tackling the same problem,” she said.
“To be a successful person in football, you really do need to be quite a holistic person. In organisations where you’re hiring someone, they want to be able to see somebody who’s very dynamic, who can think on their feet and who’s got a good skill set, a well-rounded skill set, they can help with lots of different things, and they understand football from a lot of different perspectives.
“Especially if you’re wanting to get into a space like mine, which is media, being able to take a step back and see all of the different approaches – I call it a shattered mirror approach, all the different shards that make up one image – is really valuable.
“It’s kind of a cliché, that football is who you know – but it really is who you know, and those that tend to rise to the top are those that have been around for a long time. They’ve been doing a lot of stuff, they know a lot of people, and if you’re doing good work, people know who you are. So if you invest your energy and you’re always there and you know what you’re doing, word spreads.”
As Lee-Joe’s career attests, you don’t always have to be a traditional ‘football person’ in order to get a foothold in working in the game. A varied skillset is immensely helpful, and the panellists agreed that companies can and should be looking outside the box in order to hire a more diverse range of people, including women.
“As we’re going into the digital world and digital data – whether it’s health or performance data, there’s a raft of data attached to players and clubs and associations – being able to process that, being able to analyse that, being able to project where that leads to… that’s where the world is going professionally, and there’ll be a lot more of that,” Lee-Joe said.
“It’s a double whammy of tech and football. It does take encouraging a lot of women to lean in across a raft of those things. In fact, if you go down the route where you’re not wholly in and of sports – some of those dimensions are going to be extremely powerful and extremely attractive to where we will want to be going, and where we need to be going.”
This webinar concluded the three-part series, and came on the final day of Female Football Week 2024. You can access resources that have been made available by Football Australia via Our Game to find out how you can learn more about the week.