The inside story of Australia's favourite team by the coach with a front row seat, with a foreword by Sam Kerr

This is the thrilling inside story of how the Matildas were built - the extraordinary journey from invisible amateurs to Australia's favourite football team - told by the coach who founded women's football in this country and led it to the pinnacle of the sport over three decades.

Tom Sermanni is the most successful and influential coach in Matildas history. Across three separate spells and 151 games, from his first appointment in 1994 to his last in 2024, he led Australia to three World Cups and its only piece of major silverware, the 2010 Asian Cup. Along the way he spotted and nurtured some of the finest players the country has produced, including Sam Kerr, Caitlin Foord, Steph Catley and Clare Polkinghorne - decades ahead of his time in how he coached elite female athletes.

Written with football journalist Tom Smithies, Sermanni recounts firsthand the sacrifices, resilience and sheer will-to-win that transformed a team of 'Female Socceroos' - amateurs who once had to pay for the privilege of playing for their country - into a world-class phenomenon and nationally beloved team. He tells of the World Cup hero who cleaned toilets to make ends meet, the teenager who sat her Maths HSC mid-flight after facing the world's best team, and the 12-year-old striker he spotted on a freezing pitch in Coffs Harbour and marked down as one to watch - Samantha Kerr.

From the grinding lows of a thousand-kilometre European crossing in a bus and a rickety Cold War military jet to their first game, to the euphoria of Asian Cup glory and the fervour of the fans who now fill stadiums for them, Sermanni reflects on a team revered as elite athletes who have blazed a trail for women's football. He speaks candidly too about the fight to carve a national women's league out of nothing and his ongoing campaign for the resources the Matildas need to keep succeeding.

As captain Sam Kerr writes in her foreword, 'Nobody has done more to build the modern Matildas than Tom Sermanni.' This is his story - and theirs.

The Matildas and Me

The Matildas and Me