“Winning the women’s world cup”: gender, branding, and the Australia/New Zealand As One 2023 social media strategy for the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™

Abstract

In this article we critically explore the social media strategy of the successful Australia-New Zealand ‘As One’ joint bid for the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023™. We explore how the As One bid harnessed Twitter to communicate a hosting vision that appealed to multiple audiences while strategically, and successfully, resonating with contemporary FIFA politics. We adopt quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods to develop the constructed presence and narrative patterns from the As One bid’s Twitter activity. Our findings suggest content relied on two primary ‘legacy’ narratives which both conformed to current FIFA strategy and broader social and regional politics: growing football participation among women and girls and strengthening cultural, economic, and political relations in the Asia-Pacific. Ultimately, we argue the use of Twitter was strategic and targeted, deliberately appropriating popular FIFA narratives to build an emotive ‘legacy’ vision to gain support from voting members of the FIFA Council.

Keywords:

• As One bid
• FIFA Women’s World Cup™
• women’s football
• Australia
• New Zealand
• joint hosting
• sport mega-events

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. Aotearoa/New Zealand is often used in combination to signify the country’s official commitment to biculturalism and the bicultural nature of the country’s identity. We have chosen to use simply ‘New Zealand’ throughout for the purposes of clarity and in keeping with the predominant conventions of the As One bid; however, we recognize the cultural politics of using or not using te reo (the Māori language) and suggest this itself is worthy of exploring in future analyses of FWWC 2023™.

2 FFA was officially rebranded as Football Australia (FA) in December, 2020, a change first mooted in principle two, “Reset the Australian football narrative” of the FFA ‘XI Principles’ document (see: Rugari 2020).

3 The Matildas is the nickname given to the Australian Women’s national football team.

4 The Football Ferns is the nickname given to the New Zealand women’s national football team.

5 This timeline was later revised due to the COVID-19 pandemic.