THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · NEW ZEALAND
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
New Zealand arrive at the final matchday of the men’s World Cup with only one option: win.
The draw against Iran gave the All Whites their first point at this World Cup and made Elijah Just the first New Zealander to score two goals in a single World Cup match. Then came a 3–1 defeat to Egypt, despite having gone ahead. Now they must beat Belgium to keep alive any hope of reaching the knockout stage of a World Cup for the first time.
On the other side of the same fern, there is a team that already knows what it means to give New Zealand its first win at an absolute World Cup.
It also knows what it is to travel with nobody expecting anything and come home with a trophy.
In fact, that was the very first thing it did.
An invitation before a team
In 1975, New Zealand received an invitation to take part in the first edition of an international tournament held in Hong Kong, known as the Women’s Asian Cup.
There was a small problem: the country still had no national association capable of formally accepting the proposal and organising a squad.
Women’s football had only begun to rebuild a few years earlier. Regional competitions existed in Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury, after decades in which women had played isolated matches, faced restrictions on using pitches, and had virtually disappeared from the official structure.
The invitation forced history to accelerate.
The northern associations and Christchurch formed the New Zealand Women’s Football Association, with Wellington provisionally attached. Its creation made it possible to field the country’s first representative women’s team and send it to the tournament.
It was not a federation that created a team and then looked for somewhere to play. It was the opportunity to play that forced the creation of the structure.
Fifteen players were selected from the three regions with organised leagues. Dave Farrington was appointed head coach and Barbara Cox captain. Part of the money needed to cover travel and accommodation had to be raised by the players themselves.
New Zealand did not go to Hong Kong to confirm a tradition.
They went to find out what kind of team they could be.
The answer came quickly.
Four matches to become champions
The team’s first international match ended in a 2–0 win over Hong Kong. Marilyn Marshall also scored the first goal in the history of the New Zealand women’s national team.
Next came a 3–0 win over Malaysia. In the semi-finals, Australia waited — the nearest rival and the only one that could represent anything resembling a benchmark.
New Zealand won 3–2.
On 2 September 1975, they faced Thailand in the final.
They won 3–1.
The team that had been created simply to accept an invitation finished its first tournament as champions. Marshall scored six goals and was the competition’s top scorer. Their first four international matches had produced four victories.
The victory lap was not exactly a celebration.
Thailand’s unexpected defeat had enraged some local gamblers. Rubbish was thrown from the stands at the champions and, as the bus left the stadium, it was pelted with stones and bottles. One player was slightly injured.
The first New Zealand internationals had raised money to get to Hong Kong. They left the stadium shielding themselves from those who had never considered they might win.
They came home with the trophy.
The title had proved they could compete. It did not guarantee they would always be given the chance to do so.
Existing was no guarantee of competing
The 1975 title did not turn what followed into a straight line.
New Zealand won the first OFC Women’s Championship in 1983, beating Australia in the final. During that decade they also took part in the invitation world tournaments held in Taiwan, forerunners of the future World Cup, and in 1987 they recorded their only victory against the United States.
In 1991 they were in China for the first official FIFA Women’s World Cup. They did not get through the group stage and then missed the following three editions.
But the episode that best explains the fragility of what had been built came in 2004.
The New Zealand federation decided not to enter its women’s teams in either the qualifying tournament for the Olympic Games or the Women’s Under-19 World Championship.
At the same time, it backed the men’s Olympic campaign.
The New Zealand Women’s Football Association filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. As a result of the dispute, New Zealand Soccer reinstated the women’s advisory committee it had dissolved three years earlier.
Nearly thirty years after fifteen women had helped pay for their own trip to represent their country, the problem was the same as ever: the question was not whether they were good enough, but whether it was worth letting them compete.
Equality on paper and in reality
Things began to change more clearly in the twenty-first century.
Australia’s move to the Asian Football Confederation made it easier for New Zealand to dominate in Oceania. The Football Ferns returned to the World Cup in 2007 and have not missed one since.
They also strung together Olympic appearances and reached the quarter-finals at London 2012, after beating Cameroon in their first ever Olympic victory.
In 2018, New Zealand Football announced a collective agreement that brought the conditions of its men’s and women’s senior national teams into line.
The agreement covered parity in pay, bonuses and commercial and image rights, as well as equal conditions for international travel.
It was a significant step forward.
Not a final solution.
That same year, twelve internationals filed complaints about the conduct of head coach Andreas Heraf. An independent investigation concluded that he had breached the federation’s code of conduct and the national guidelines on workplace harassment.
Heraf and executive director Andy Martin both resigned, and the federation apologised to the players.
Equality could be written into a contract.
It still had to be learned inside a training camp.
The night New Zealand won
On 20 July 2023, the Football Ferns walked out at Eden Park to open the World Cup that New Zealand and Australia were co-hosting.
Waiting for them was Norway, 1995 world champions and ranked fourteen places above the hosts.
New Zealand had taken part in five World Cups, played fifteen matches and won none of them.
In the 48th minute, Jacqui Hand came in from the right and sent the ball into the area. Hannah Wilkinson arrived to finish it.
The rest was resilience.
When the match ended, the scoreboard read 1–0 and the Eden Park stands held 42,137 people. It was then the largest attendance ever recorded at a football match — men’s or women’s — in New Zealand.
It was also something more.
No New Zealand senior team — men’s or women’s — had ever won a match at a World Cup finals before.
They were the first.
The victory seemed to open the door the team had spent decades searching for. However, the Football Ferns lost 1–0 to the Philippines and drew goalless against Switzerland.
They finished third in their group and were eliminated.
New Zealand had hosted a World Cup, broken attendance records and achieved the greatest win in their history.
They still had not played a knockout match.
The ticket is booked
The next opportunity will come in Brazil.
The Football Ferns secured their place at the 2027 World Cup in April 2026. They dominated the Oceanian qualifying phase with 25 goals scored and none conceded, though they needed a second-half header from Katie Kitching to beat Papua New Guinea 1–0 in the final.
It will be their seventh World Cup appearance and their sixth in succession.
The team has been managed since 2025 by Michael Mayne, the first New Zealand-born head coach to hold the post in more than twenty years.
Mayne knows the set-up from the inside. He was an assistant with the Football Ferns during the 2023 World Cup and the Paris Olympics, and had been part of the technical staff with the youth teams, including the one that won bronze at the 2018 Under-17 World Cup — the best result a New Zealand team has achieved at a global FIFA tournament.
The challenge now is to carry the dominance they show in Oceania into far more demanding surroundings.
New Zealand are ranked 33rd in the world. After scoring 25 goals without conceding a single one during qualifying, their first matches against teams from other confederations ended in a 2–1 defeat to Haiti and a goalless draw with Morocco.
Within their own region, they remain the team to beat.
Outside it, they still need to show they can compete consistently — not just produce one unforgettable night.
The next frontier
More than fifty years will have passed between Hong Kong and Brazil.
For the first New Zealand internationals to be able to compete at all, an association had to be created. Then they raised part of the money themselves and travelled thousands of miles to play the first tournament of their history.
Today’s squad already have their place at the biggest championship in the world guaranteed.
Between those two generations came titles, disappearances, exclusions, protests, equal-pay agreements and a win that no New Zealand senior team had ever managed before.
They do not need to prove they can win.
They did it in their first tournament.
They did it against Australia when almost nobody knew they existed. They did it against Norway when an entire country was watching.
The frontier that remains is a different one: to win again when victory is no longer an exception, and to use it, at last, to go further.
New Zealand were born champions.
Now they want to stop saying goodbye in the group stage.
