Women’s World Cup 2023: FIFA taps into multicultural communities to sell out matches in Australia, New Zealand

Aug 21, 2023

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Close your eyes and feel the vibes at a given FIFA Women’s World Cup venue, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Bogota. Or Sao Paulo. Or Amsterdam. Or Manila.

The crowds for matches not involving co-hosts Australia and New Zealand have been stunningly high, with most stadia at close to full capacity, blowing away even FIFA’s loftiest expectations.

Colombian fans have come out in force for the World Cup.Credit: Getty

While it’s been a pleasant surprise, it has also been no accident.

With 55,000 overseas visitors forecast to have travelled to Australia for the tournament, the vast majority of the 1.7 million tickets sold so far have been bought by locals – many of whom have either adopted one of the 30 other teams as their own, or used the World Cup as an opportunity to connect with their heritage or homeland.

Who knew there were this many Colombians in Australia?

They haven’t just shown up – it is the result of a multi-faceted strategy by FIFA and tournament organisers to leverage Australia and New Zealand’s multiculturalism, unlock the potential of the many thousands of football fans in migrant, diaspora or student communities, and encourage them to bring their all their noise and colour to the games.

Fans of the 30 nations other than the two co-hosts have added colour, noise and excitement to the tournament.Credit: Getty

“What it takes is a concerted strategic approach,” said FIFA’s chief women’s football officer Sarai Bareman.

“We’ve been meeting with the different embassies, the high commissioners from all the different countries that are competing in the tournament, we’ve engaged with an agency who is specifically there going into the different ethnic communities to engage them.

“If you look, for example, at the Filipino community in Auckland – absolutely incredible, showing up in numbers at Eden Park. It’s not by coincidence; we’ve made a clear push for that.

“We know that this is the world’s most popular sport, and it was just a matter of digging out and finding those fans and engaging them and getting them involved and making them understand that they can be part of this incredible event.”

A giant screen shows the attendance for Portugal v United States in Auckland.Credit: AP

One of the biggest driving forces has been Cultural Pulse, a Sydney-based agency specialising in reaching into “micro-communities”, who were engaged by FIFA to help tap into people often missed by typical marketing efforts.

Previously known as Red Elephant, the company was the secret behind the success of the 2015 AFC Asian Cup in Australia, where fans again came out in big numbers to support matches between relatively obscure teams that, on paper, would not appear to be of great interest – defying predictions from the likes of Eddie McGuire, who tipped the tournament would turn out to be a “lemon”.

Since rebranding as Cultural Pulse, they have worked on similar projects with the 2017 Rugby League World Cup, 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, and the ICC T20 Women’s World Cup in 2020.

For the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Cultural Pulse helped launch a “community champions” initiative in which about 150 community and business leaders and media or social media figures were chosen to help build awareness and stimulate grassroots support for the diaspora of the full field of teams, while also deploying their own extensive and intricate database of people and communities which has been built over time.

Beyond that, efforts are tailored for the needs and cultures of each specific community. For example, to speak directly to the growing number of Colombians in Sydney, Cultural Pulse went to where they are: community Facebook pages, Latin and Reggaeton events and local influencers. Other ethnic or migrant groups have their own foreign-language newspapers or media outlets, which have been specifically targeted.

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