She scored four goals at a World Cup, was named in FIFA's team of the tournament, was shortlisted for World Player of the Year — and then came home to a shift behind the counter of a Perth service station. One hundred and fifty caps, forty-seven goals, and not one farewell match. This is the life of Lisa De Vanna, the most combustible footballer Australia has produced, and the one we owe the most.
Consider the service station. It is not, as a rule, where sporting legends are made. It has fluorescent tubes and a pie warmer and a bloke out on pump three who wants to argue about the price of unleaded. And in October 2007, it is where you would have found a 22-year-old from Fremantle who had just spent a month in China terrorising the best defenders on earth.
Lisa De Vanna had scored four goals at the World Cup. She had been named in FIFA's All-Star Team for the tournament. She had been shortlisted for World Player of the Year, an honour that at the time felt roughly as plausible for an Australian as being shortlisted for the papacy. Then she flew home and went back to work.1
I've thought about that a lot, and the thing that gets me isn't the injustice of it, exactly. It's that nobody at the time thought it was strange. That was simply the arrangement. You played for your country, you came fourth-best-in-the-world at something, and then you sorted out your own rent. Australian women's football didn't have a golden age to look back on. It had a roster of women who kept turning up anyway.
De Vanna turned up for fifteen years.
- 150Caps 2004–2019
- 47International goals
- 4World Cups
- 2Olympic Games
OneA ball, a brother, and a street in Fremantle
She was born in Perth on 14 November 1984 and raised in Fremantle, the salt-stained port town half an hour southwest of the city, to a Portuguese mother and an Italian father. She grew up speaking Portuguese, playing on the street with her brother and the neighbourhood kids, and — this is the detail that tells you everything — sleeping with her football.2
Every football memoir contains a version of that line and most of them are sentimental rubbish. This one isn't, because it explains the player. De Vanna at full pelt never looked like someone executing a coaching instruction. She looked like someone who had learned the game in a place with no offside rule, no substitutions and no adults, where the only way to get the ball back was to go and take it off somebody bigger than you.
She was 1.56 metres tall. In a sport that has spent a century quietly mistaking height for authority, she spent hers making tall people look slow.
TwoEighteen, and already the best in the country
The competition was called the Women's National Soccer League. Her club was Adelaide Sensation. In the 2002–03 season she won both the Julie Dolan Medal as the league's best player and the Golden Boot as its leading scorer, which is a sentence that would trigger a documentary series today and at the time earned her a paragraph and, if she was lucky, a photograph.3
She made her senior Matildas debut in 2004 against New Zealand and was on the plane to the Athens Olympics that same year, aged 19, where she played four matches.4 Three years later came the tournament that changed everything and cost her more than any of it was worth.
ThreeChina 2007: four goals for a man who never saw them
Her father died three months before the World Cup began. She dedicated every goal she scored in China to him.1
There were four. Two against Ghana in a 4–1 win — Australia's first ever victory at a World Cup. One against Brazil in a 3–2 quarter-final defeat, when the Matildas went out swinging against a side containing Marta at the height of her powers. And, best of all, the equaliser against Norway in a 1–1 draw: on as a substitute, she took on two defenders in a solo run and buried it in the top right corner. It was nominated for goal of the tournament and it remains one of the great goals scored by an Australian at any World Cup, in any division, of any gender.5
She ran on jet fuel, Craig Foster wrote — “burning up twice as fast, but with incredible impact.”
Craig Foster, Sydney Morning Herald, 2007Foster nailed something there that took the rest of us years to understand. De Vanna was not a metronome. She was not a system player. She was a controlled detonation, and you accepted the terms or you didn't get the goals.
She was named Western Australian Sportswoman of the Year for 2007. Then she went back to the servo.1
FourThe wandering years
Read her club career out loud and it sounds less like a CV than a departures board. Doncaster Rovers Belles. AIK in Sweden. Perth Glory. Washington Freedom. Brisbane Roar. magicJack — an actual professional football club named after an internet telephone product, which is the single most 2011 fact in this entire article. Newcastle Jets. Linköping. Sky Blue FC. Melbourne Victory. Boston Breakers. Washington Spirit. Melbourne City, whose very first signing she was. Orlando Pride. Canberra United. South Melbourne. Sydney FC. Fiorentina.2
That is not restlessness. That is what a career looked like when no single league on earth would pay a woman enough to stay in one place for a decade. She chased seasons across hemispheres the way seasonal fruit pickers chase harvests, and she kept scoring wherever she landed: 15 goals in a single Swedish season with AIK; a hat-trick for Linköping against Piteå; and, in 2017, 18 goals in 16 games for South Melbourne in the NPL, including four in one afternoon in a 7–0 win over Bulleen Lions.2
Then there was the bicycle kick. June 2013, playing for Sky Blue in the inaugural NWSL season, she hooked one over her shoulder that went round the world in about nine hours. NWSL Player of the Week, a nomination for the FIFA Puskás Award, and the FFA Female Footballer of the Year gong to close out the year.2 For a generation of Australian kids, that clip was the first time women's football arrived in their feed unaccompanied by an apology.
FiveThe temper
We should be honest, because she always was. De Vanna was difficult. In September 2010 she was censured by the federation and told to take down photographs from her Facebook page. In May 2011, weeks out from a World Cup, coach Tom Sermanni sent her home from a training camp for what he described as an unacceptable standard of behaviour.2
Told to explain herself years later, she offered the only defence that ever really made sense: “I am a completely different person on the field.” Passionate. Feisty. Wanting to win more than she wanted to be liked.6
Australian sport has a well-worn tradition of forgiving exactly this personality in men and pathologising it in women. We built statues to blokes who threw punches in the change rooms and called it mongrel. When De Vanna did a fraction of it, the word was “temperamental”, and it followed her around like a stray dog for a decade.
SixCaptain
In 2010, in a rain-wrecked Chengdu, the Matildas beat North Korea on penalties to win the AFC Women's Asian Cup — still, to this day, the only major trophy the team has won. De Vanna was part of that squad, having already scored in the group stage against South Korea.7
Five years later, Alen Stajcic named her co-captain for the 2015 World Cup alongside Clare Polkinghorne. She cried when he told her, and said afterwards that she'd never imagined anyone would look at her and see a leader.6 That is not false modesty. That is a woman who had spent a decade being told she was a problem finally being told she was the answer.
On 8 June 2015 she captained Australia in her 100th international, against the United States, and scored the goal in a 3–1 defeat.8 That tournament, the Matildas won their first ever World Cup knockout match. She made the FIFA All-Star Team again — eight years after the first one.2
She co-captained the side at Rio 2016, too. And it is entirely typical of her career that one of the most-shared moments from those Olympics is a clip of her absent-mindedly trying to drink from the wrong end of a water bottle before Elise Kellond-Knight quietly spun it round for her.2 Bonafide football icons contain multitudes.
Wear it
The Matildas didn't start in 2023. Browse the Matildas collection — including The Miracle of Montpellier, from the 2019 World Cup that turned out to be De Vanna's last.
SevenThe ending nobody wrote for her
France 2019 was her fourth consecutive World Cup and it delivered her 150th cap.9 There was no ceremonial farewell, no lap of a full stadium, no montage. She simply stopped being picked.
By December 2020 she was back in the A-League Women with Melbourne Victory, one appearance short of Cheryl Salisbury's then-record 151 caps, insisting she wasn't finished with the green and gold.10 She made the PFA Team of the Season that year.2 In June 2021, Tony Gustavsson left her out of the squad for friendlies against Denmark and Sweden, which effectively ended any hope of Tokyo. Her response, down the phone to ESPN, was four sentences long and about as ambiguous as a car alarm: “I've been cut. That's it. I'm done.”11
One cap short of the record, and nobody sent her out to get it.
She announced her retirement in September 2021. Weeks later she went public with allegations of bullying, sexual harassment and grooming within Australian women's football, describing behaviour she said began when she was 17 and in the Young Matildas set-up. Her account was supported publicly by a former teammate and a former manager, and another retired player, Rhali Dobson, described a similar culture.12
Football Australia said it had not previously been made aware of the specific allegations, and worked with Sport Integrity Australia to establish an independent complaints framework, open to submissions from 1 November 2021 to 31 January 2022, with the National Sports Tribunal to hear any disputes. The process was deliberately confidential, and it remains so.13
What is not in dispute is what happened next, and it is the most De Vanna thing imaginable. In November 2021 she unretired and signed for Perth Glory, back where she started, citing the environment that coach Alex Epakis and chairman Tony Sage had built at the club.2 She played one more season and then, in 2022, she was done.
EightWhat she left behind
Forty-seven goals in 150 games. When she walked away she was the leading scorer in Matildas history. Sam Kerr has since gone past her, as Kerr has gone past everyone, and that is exactly as it should be — records exist to be broken by the kids who watched.14
But get the causation right. Kerr's first Matildas goals came in a team where De Vanna was already the danger. The 2010 Asian Cup squad that Kerr broke into at 16 was De Vanna's squad. The 2015 side that finally won a World Cup knockout match had De Vanna's armband on it. When 75,000 people filled Stadium Australia in 2023 and half the country learned what Tillie voice felt like, they were standing on a foundation laid by women who played in front of a few hundred and paid for their own physio.
From Sandra Brentnall, who scored Australia's first ever international goal in 1979, to Cheryl Salisbury, to De Vanna, to Kerr, to whoever is currently nine years old and kicking a ball against a fence in Fremantle: it's one continuous line, and the middle section of it is the hardest bit, because that's the part where you're good enough to be famous and the country hasn't decided to look yet.
De Vanna played the whole of that middle section. Four World Cups, two Olympics, eighteen clubs, one Asian Cup, one Golden Boot, one Julie Dolan Medal, one bicycle kick that went round the world, one water bottle held the wrong way up, and a temper that cost her friends and probably a dozen caps.
And four goals in China for a father who never got to see a single one.
Off the pitch she divided opinion, and probably always will. On it she was mesmerising — fifteen years of a footballer you could not look away from, and nobody who saw her at full flight has ever needed persuading.
Lisa De Vanna: the questions people ask
How many caps and goals did Lisa De Vanna have for the Matildas?
She played 150 matches for Australia between her debut in 2004 and her final appearance in 2019, scoring 47 international goals. She was the Matildas' all-time leading goalscorer when she retired from international football.
How many World Cups and Olympics did she play in?
Four consecutive FIFA Women's World Cups — China 2007, Germany 2011, Canada 2015 and France 2019 — and two Olympic Games, Athens 2004 and Rio 2016. She co-captained Australia at both the 2015 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
What is Lisa De Vanna's most famous goal?
Two contenders. Her solo equaliser against Norway at the 2007 World Cup, where she came off the bench, beat two defenders and found the top corner, was nominated for goal of the tournament. Her overhead kick for Sky Blue FC in the 2013 NWSL season went viral worldwide and was nominated for the FIFA Puskás Award.
Why did she dedicate her 2007 World Cup goals to her father?
Her father died three months before the tournament began. She scored four goals in China — two against Ghana, one against Norway and one against Brazil — and dedicated each of them to him.
Did Lisa De Vanna ever win a major trophy with Australia?
Yes. She was part of the squad that won the 2010 AFC Women's Asian Cup in Chengdu, beating North Korea on penalties after a 1–1 draw. It remains the Matildas' only major title.
Why didn't she get a farewell match?
She was never formally given one. Her 150th and final cap came at the 2019 World Cup, and she was simply not selected again. She was left out of squads under Ante Milicic and then Tony Gustavsson, ending her hopes of a third Olympics and leaving her one appearance short of Cheryl Salisbury's then-record 151 caps.
What did she allege about Australian women's football in 2021?
In October 2021 she publicly alleged bullying, sexual harassment and grooming within the women's game, describing conduct she said began when she was a teenager in the Young Matildas set-up. Football Australia said it had not previously been made aware of the specific allegations and, with Sport Integrity Australia, established an independent complaints process open from 1 November 2021 to 31 January 2022. That process was confidential.
Is she still the Matildas' record goalscorer?
No. Sam Kerr has since overtaken her. De Vanna's 47 goals leave her second on the Matildas' all-time scoring list.
Sources
- Tom Smithies, “De Vanna pays tribute to father”, Fox Sports, 26 September 2007; Jessica Halloran, “Touch of Maradonas about Matildas”, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 2007; Gene Stephan, The West Australian, 24 November 2007.
- Lisa De Vanna, Wikipedia (club career, honours, biographical detail, 2010–11 disciplinary matters, Perth Glory return).
- Julie Dolan Medal and Women's National Soccer League Golden Boot records, 2002–03 season.
- Australian Olympic Committee athlete record: Lisa De Vanna, Athens 2004.
- “Five memorable Lisa De Vanna moments”, matildas.com.au; FIFA player statistics, 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup.
- Lucy Zelic, “There's something about Lisa”, SBS, 2 June 2015.
- “Matildas win Asian Cup”, Professional Footballers Australia; 2010 AFC Women's Asian Cup tournament records.
- “100 Cap Family”, matildas.com.au.
- “Lisa De Vanna signs for Fiorentina Women's FC”, matildas.com.au, 9 August 2019.
- Michael Cain, “Matildas striker Lisa De Vanna returns to Melbourne Victory”, ESPN, 2 December 2020.
- Michael Cain, “'Heartbroken' Lisa De Vanna walks away from football”, ESPN, 24 September 2021.
- “Football Australia to investigate abuse allegations by Matildas players”, BBC News, October 2021; original interview published by The Daily Telegraph.
- “Independent complaints process for football finalised”, Football Australia, October 2021.
- Australia women's national soccer team, Wikipedia (all-time caps and goalscoring records).
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