This story doesn’t have an ending yet.
The 2026 Women’s Asian Cup could prove to be its glittering, legacy-cementing high point. It could be another gut-wrenching disappointment, a “so close but so far away” moment. It could just be another tournament with a few more chapters to be written following its conclusion.
Right now, the story of Sam Kerr‘s Matildas career isn’t complete. But we’ve reached a fascinating point in the tale.
All we know for certain is that the next chapter is taking place on the shores of Australia over the next three weeks. In some ways, the narrative has been built expertly for a happy ending. Or at the very least one final moment of pure joy. The crescendo. The summit. The climax.
We’re back at the tournament where she got her first international goal. We’re back at the only major international tournament that Kerr has won with Australia — and she’s the only remaining member of that title-winning squad who is in this year’s 26-player squad.
And it would be fitting if the early exits, injuries, missed chances, and capitulations could give way to Kerr and the Matildas having their moment together. A trophy for a group of players who have already changed the game in Australia, even without the silverware.
Although we do not know where this story is heading, we can look back and find out how we got here.
It’s been 16 years since the Matildas won their first and only Asian Cup. It was redemption after falling short in 2006, when they hosted the tournament for the first time, fresh off Australia’s switch from the Oceania Football Confederation to the Asian Football Confederation.
Looking back at that 2010 tournament, you can’t help but feel like a lot of time has passed. Partly because of the quality of the vision of highlights. Partly because of the players’ hairstyles, which were no doubt cool at the time. Partly because the names on the teamsheet are familiar not just for their playing careers but their current work in coaching, administration, and media, among other fields.
But one name stands out head-and-shoulders above the rest: Samantha Kerr. Sixteen years old. The second-youngest member of the team. She looks like the Kerr we all know, just with slight adjustments. A baby face. A headband holding back her unruly hair. The No. 22 on her shirt rather than the now-familiar No. 20.
When she took to the park for the Matildas’ opening game of the tournament — as a substitute in a 2-0 win over Vietnam — Kerr was taking part in only her fifth game for the national team. She debuted in February 2009, played two games in February 2010, and then took part in one of the team’s two games against North Korea in March that same year.
She couldn’t have been much more of a novice. The teenager only had 12 games of W-League football in her locker, but her prodigious talent could not be ignored.
In a documentary about the Matildas’ 2010 Women’s Asian Cup triumph, she spoke of how fresh she was to soccer, the naivety of youth and that “kid” mentality. “I was just so happy to be there,” Kerr said. But that tournament was the beginning of the Kerr we know now.
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A true attacker, Kerr was disappointed she came on in that first game against Vietnam and didn’t score or make an impact. She wouldn’t have to wait long to rectify that, scoring her first goal for the national team in a 3-1 win over South Korea in the following game.
It’s not the best goal Kerr’s ever scored. Chaos following a corner kick saw the ball ping-pong around the box. Kerr stuck her body in front of an attempted clearance only a few metres out from goal, and the ball ricocheted off her. She barely knew anything about it, but who cares? The ball was in the goal and Kerr had been the last player who touched it.
Off Kerr ran, doing a backflip in celebration. It would be the first of many.
Much like the goal, the backflip wasn’t the best of her career. You can see the excitement practically radiate out of her. The cartoon version would have squiggly golden lines jumping out from every angle. Kerr looks like she might burst as she runs and does her flip. There’s no denying she doesn’t stick the landing, with Kerr reflecting on how embarrassed and happy she was in the moment.
“You can’t replicate that first-goal feeling,” Kerr said.
But you can chase it.
She scored her second goal for the Matildas in the 2010 Asian Cup final. Injuries to more senior players had allowed her to start this crucial match. An honest Kerr spoke of her nerves before the game and how she tried to mask them at 16, with giggles and smirks.
In the age of social media, her goal in the final would have been scrutinised to death. If the game had been played now, in the age of VAR, it might not have even stood.
But this was 2010. There was barely any money going to the players, let alone to fancy technology. So Kerr is only at the mercy of the assistant referee as she latches on to a through ball and places it just inside the far post, beyond the reach of the goalkeeper.
In the documentary, Kerr admits she thought she was offside, but you have to play to the whistle. The game would finish 1-1 after extra time, Kerr subbed out in the 90. At 16, she admits she didn’t have the fitness to run out 120 minutes or the maturity to handle a penalty shootout. But her teammates would do the job. On a muddy, choppy, rain-soaked field in Chengdu, China, the Matildas would raise their first Asian Cup. And as of now, their only piece of major silverware.
There have been three Asian Cups since 2010, and the Matildas have come close to adding a second trophy to the cabinet. Back-to-back 1-0 losses in the 2014 and 2018 finals to Japan stung. For now, the 2010 triumph stands alone, growing all the more impressive because the victory hasn’t yet been replicated.
But the Matildas are hoping to change that, and Kerr will be in the thick of it this time.
There was a chance that Kerr’s football story could have read very differently. Literally. It could have been about an entirely different football.
It’s no secret how much she loves Australian Rules football. And just like any other sport-loving kid growing up in Western Australia, Kerr grew up playing the game.
Of course, her connection to the sport goes beyond that, with her brother, Daniel, playing AFL for the West Coast Eagles between 2001 and 2013.
In her book “My Journey to the World Cup,” Kerr describes Aussie Rules as her first love. It’s a love that runs deep.
She describes sitting in the cheer squad at West Coast games and crying for three days straight after the team lost the Grand Final in 2005. When she could no longer play with the boys — there was no professional women’s competition in Australia in the early 2000s — Kerr picked up soccer … and absolutely hated the game. All she wanted to do was keep playing Aussie Rules. She didn’t want to learn new rules. She wanted to use her hands.
Despite describing herself as “totally crap” in the beginning, Kerr’s persistence and willingness to learn paid off. Her appreciation for soccer grew. And, obviously, she loves the game now. You just don’t play for as long as Kerr has, under the conditions she has, if you don’t. The long stints away from home, the hundreds of thousands of kilometres she’s travelled to play the game she loves and represent her country.
And it has been a long playing career. In 2008, at 15 years old, she would make her W-League debut playing for Perth Glory.
Bobby Despotovski, Glory’s coach from 2015 to 2020, remembers seeing a teenage Kerr training while he was playing for the men’s team, noting she stood out even at a young age.
“It’s hard not to notice when somebody is that explosive and fast,” he said in her book.
Immediately, 15-year-old Kerr would start breaking league records. First the W-League’s youngest debutant, she then became the youngest goalscorer, achieving both feats within three months of her 15th birthday. Those records stood for nearly two decades, until this year, when Sydney FC‘s Willa Pearson broke them both.
But the W-League seasons were short, and pay was minimal to non-existent.
So, to make a living, Kerr did what many women’s footballers did across the 2010s. She would spend Australian summers playing in the W-League and then spend Australian winter playing in the NWSL. From 2013 to 2019, she would swap hemispheres and teams, chasing the equivalent of a full-time season. It was never-ending summer soccer, with Matildas camps and games sprinkled around the globe in and around the two.
The grind is hard, even when you love your job. But Kerr was slowly growing into the kind of player people thought she could be.
Her rise can be charted through a run of seven Golden Boots across eight seasons of football in six years across three countries.
In the NWSL in 2017, she led the league in goals with Sky Blue FC, a breakout year for her in the U.S despite the abysmal conditions players were subjected to at the club. She came home and topped the 2017-18 W-League scoring charts for the first time with Perth.
Then it was back to the NWSL for the 2018 season, this time with Chicago, but still with a Golden Boot. Then back to Perth for the 2018-19 season … and yes, another Golden Boot.
In 2019, Kerr was the NWSL’s leading scorer for the third straight year before her high-profile move to Chelsea post-Women’s World Cup. Signing in November 2019 but joining in the midseason transfer window in January 2020, her first half season came with growing pains and Covid interruptions.
But in her first full season with Chelsea, Kerr got straight back to scoring goals with consecutive Women’s Super League Golden Boots in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
She wasn’t just excelling in club football either.
Kerr scored her first World Cup goal in 2019 and became the first Australian to score a hat trick at a World Cup, finishing with four goals in a game against Jamaica in Grenoble, France.
Her move to Chelsea wasn’t just a source of pride for Australian football. It kick-started an exodus of Matildas from the grind of the W-League-NWSL season cycling. Kerr’s success was proof that Australian footballers were good enough to mix it with the world’s best, and it legitimised her claim as one of the world’s best players.
In 2022, Kerr became Australia’s all-time leading international goal scorer, surpassing her Socceroos counterpart Tim Cahill. She then became the first woman to grace the cover of a global edition of the FIFA video game, starring alongside Kylian Mbappé for the on the cover of FIFA 23.
The world and Australia could not get enough of Kerr, and as each milestone was reached, and record shattered, the feeling grew that it was all building to something big: the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
The Women’s World Cup in 2023 was always going to be a special moment for the Matildas. A home World Cup is a once-in-a-lifetime event. And for many, it felt like it was meant to be Kerr’s World Cup. The face of the team, at the peak of her powers, ready to lead her nation deep into the tournament.
“Where were you when…” was a question that would get a workout across the month-long tournament, but the first, and arguably most shocking, version of it came mere hours before kick-off in Australia’s opening game against the Republic of Ireland.
“Where were you when you found out Sam Kerr wasn’t playing?”
Some were already inside the stadium, others on the concourse, more still at pubs and on trains heading towards Stadium Australia.
In the media centre, the conversation surrounded her pregame press conference appearance the day before. She seemed fine. Neither she nor Matildas coach Tony Gustavsson gave any indication that something was amiss.
Whether you saw Kerr’s Instagram post of the Matildas starting line-up, you stopped and did a double-take. Maybe you were the friend who had to be the bearer of bad news. Even people who knew nothing about soccer knew that this was a big deal. It felt like a gut punch. How could Kerr not feature at Australia’s first World Cup match on home soil?
While the Matildas would win the game 1-0 thanks to a Steph Catley penalty, Kerr’s injury became the dominant narrative of the group stage. Every media availability, every press conference, the first question was an update on the captain’s calf. Media outlets that had never covered women’s football were calling on experts to diagnose her calf issues from afar, to present reassurances to the nation. The people were ravenous for information.
Kerr herself approached her first media availability after revealing the injury with trademark humour.
“It’s hilarious because I have the biggest calves in the world so I’m not sure why it decided to play up the day before the World Cup,” Kerr said.
“But that’s football, isn’t it? I’m going to be there. I’m going to be ready. And, like we said at the very start of [the injury], the plan was to miss the first two games and reassess and that’s where we are now.”
She wouldn’t play in the Matildas’ third group-stage game against Canada either — thanks to a memorable 4-0 victory — before coming off the bench in Australia’s round-of-16 clash against Denmark.
The positive of her absence was that the nation fell in love with the rest of the team, turning the Matildas into proper household names. The other 22 members of the squad were given the chance to show they could handle the spotlight and they did. They dispelled the myth that Matildas were only Kerr by playing much of the tournament without her.
But from a footballing perspective, a number of “what ifs” still linger. There’s no knowing if, in an alternative universe where Kerr isn’t injured, the Matildas run to the semifinal pans out the way it did. Would they have fallen at an earlier hurdle? Would they have gone all the way?
One thing is for certain: while Kerr didn’t get the tournament she deserved, she still got her moments.
Her penalty in the 7-6 quarterfinal shootout win over France isn’t the one people remember. But it was personal redemption for her miss four years prior, in Nice against Norway in the round of 16.
Then there was Kerr’s goal against England in the semifinal — another one of those “where were you?” moments.
The run. The strike. The celebrations. For a moment, the possibilities were endless. All the adversity was there to make the ending sweeter. How short and sweet it was. Australia’s fairytale run at their home World Cup didn’t have a fairytale finish, as they eventually lost 3-1 to the Lionesses.
But there was a renewed hope and belief that the 2024 Olympics would be better. This would be the moment.
Of course, we know now that the Paris Olympics couldn’t have gone worse for the Matildas. A win and two losses. A group-stage exit. And no Kerr after she did her ACL at a training camp with Chelsea in January 2024.
An injury is hard enough in its own right, and Kerr was no stranger to them, having suffered an ACL tear previously as well as overcoming a Lisfranc injury. But in the span of a year, amid her rehab, her character was put under an intense microscope after it was revealed she had been charged with racially aggravated harassment against a police officer in London.
Kerr was found not guilty of the charges, but had already been subjected to the stress and strain of a trial following months of judgment on social media.
“I can finally put this challenging period behind me,” she said in a statement following the verdict. “While I apologise for expressing myself poorly on what was a traumatic evening, I have always maintained that I did not intend to insult or harm anyone and I am thankful the jury unanimously agreed.”
Kerr remained in the headlines once the reaction to the trial passed. There was hope she would take part in the Matildas’ friendlies against South Korea in April 2024 that never eventuated. So, too, a series against Argentina across May and June where she also didn’t play. There were happy headlines, with Kerr and her partner, United States international Kristie Mewis, welcoming their son, Jagger in May. And even more hope that Kerr would return to the pitch, this time for a four-game series in her home state in the middle of 2025.
However, despite always being in and around the news, it had been months since Kerr’s performances on the soccer field were the headline grabber. In fact, for the last two-and-a-half years — ever since that news about her calf dropped prior to opening game of the Women’s World Cup — Kerr’s football felt like a secondary story to injury, to off-field drama, to life updates.
Since the start of the World Cup in July 2023, the skipper has played six games for her country. Australia have played 28 games in that time. Kerr has played 90 minutes just once in the league for Chelsea since she returned from her latest injury — logging most of her minutes via cameos off the bench.
But the narrative is slowly bending back towards soccer. The story is building once again towards talk on on-pitch glory, set to take place over the next three weeks across Australia. While this story still has no ending, there’s no denying this chapter carries an air of finality to it, for Kerr and for this generation of Matildas. And after everything that has happened up until this point — the World Cups, the Olympics, the Golden Boots, the heartbreaking losses, the on-field triumphs, and the off-field dramas — this chapter begins earnest in Perth on March 1.
Australia’s greatest soccer player is ready to lead her nation at a major tournament on home soil one last time.
