Perth International Football Cup: Manchester City women’s managing director Charlotte O’Neill lauds WA fans

One of the Women’s Super League’s most influential off-field executives has given Manchester City’s Perth trip the seal of approval before a ball has even been kicked. Last year’s WSL runners-up arrived in Perth mid-week ahead of their clash with Leicester City on Wednesday night at HBF Park. City’s game against Leicester will be the first of three matchdays at HBF Park, with French giants Paris Saint-Germain taking on West Ham United on Thursday night, before Sunday’s double-header which will see the winners of the first two games face off. With the kick-offs of the four sides’ domestic seasons less than a month away, the quartet have brought near full-strength squads to Perth. In City’s case, that includes Matildas stars Mary Fowler and Alanna Kennedy, all-time WSL leading goalscorer Vivianne Miedema, reigning golden boot winner Bunny Shaw and English star Lauren Hemp, while Australian World Cup players Katrina Gorry (West Ham) and Courtney Nevin (Leicester) are also making the trip. But all those big names would mean nothing if there was not a willing audience — and Manchester City women’s managing director Charlotte O’Neill told The West Australian Perth fit the bill perfectly for what they wanted in a pre-season tour. “We had a number of opportunities of where we could have taken the team on tour, and we chose this one, and it’s fantastic that tours are now helping us to continue to be financially sustainable businesses,” O’Neill said. With the roaring success of last year’s World Cup still fresh in the mind, O’Neill said Perth was the perfect spot to launch their pre-season, both on and off-field. “It’s, first of all, a women’s-football loving public. The thirst for women’s football in Australia is huge and growing,” she said. “Australia is the fastest-growing membership of our official supporter’s club, it grew like 50 per cent in the last year for Man City. “So our objectives from our tour is obviously to have an amazing experience and prepare from a performance point of view, for the season ahead, but also to grow our fan-base and take our team and our brand on the road to the people that want to see it.” Women’s sport has enjoyed a global boom in recent years, and football in particular has reaped the rewards of the surge in interest, luring a wave of new fans to the sport: girls and women with no previous affiliation to men’s teams. “That’s a big part of our strategy for growing our fan-base, is to get those undecideds to become Man City fans,” O’Neill said. “The growth of women’s football, everybody I think is aware of, but a huge part of it is winning over new fans, or those that are major eventers, sport eventers or day-outers, to get them to convert them to be regular City supporters.” Tickets for all three match-days are still available from Ticketek.