25 Greatest Women's Footballers Since 2000

[Teen Wolf]

This is a thread dedicated to the 25 greatest women's footballers since the year 2000 (aka the BigFooty age) in my judgment.*

I'm planning to go so hard this NYE that it will likely result in severe memory loss, at the very least. So I figured I'd better publish all my definitive thoughts, regarding the best players of this wonderful branch of the sport throughout the past 25 years, within the next week or so.

In batches of five, I'll reveal my selections which will lineup old school style (18 on the field, 4 bench, 3 emergency).

The emphasis for the Top 25 is strictly on performance within the 2000-2024 timeframe, but I'll also do a 25 Honourable Mentions list at the end which will include some players who were stiff to miss out due to the rather arbitrary cut-off date (for instance, I'll just let it be known upfront that Debbie Lee doesn't make the team because she more strongly epitomises the '90s).

Comments, questions and similar attempts are welcome. But, indeed, one might first ask: why oh why does it come down to nobodies like me and you to lead the way with such a celebration? Would it be too hard for the AFL to put together a panel of esteemed judges? Further promote and enrich the game by embracing the pre-2017 history and entwining champions of yesteryear with stars of today?

Well, hopefully they still do. And hopefully they start using that^ silhouette more. But in the meantime, I'll help myself thaaaaankyoupp.

*Wait, isn't that just North Melbourne's extended squad for the Grand Final 3 weeks ago? Har har har.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Ally Anderson

With the introduction of televised games happening when it did, there hasn’t been a more thoroughly documented steady rise through the ranks of a senior player. There are late bloomers who burst onto the scene from obscurity, and down-on-form prodigies who quickly turn their fortunes around, but Anderson has been a slow burn from solid to good, from good to very good, and is still getting better since narrowly winning the AFLW Best & Fairest and giving a frankly awful acceptance speech. Her trend of continual improvement suggests she’ll win another one in a landslide and hit us with something rivalling the Gettysburg Address by age 33. Listed at 162cm, the only shorter player to make the Top 25 also proved to be something of an enigma to talent scouts early on.

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Emily Bates

Leaving a club that wouldn’t cough up a few bucks, and now helping Hawthorn snatch cheques out of the Lions’ mouths, is only bested as a wise career move by her choice as a late teen to stick to footy over competing with Beth Mooney for a state gig behind the stumps. Whatever club Bates plies her trade for seems to make no difference to the story of the million-dollar baby, and daughter of a Yeronga legend, who is ever threatening to elevate brave battling teams into unstoppable dynasties. I need not spend too long telling it to BigFooty, with this being the online forum which voted her Player of the Year (tied with skinny mirror image Daisy Pearce) in 2017, but suffice to say she’s jacked up her jack-of-all-trades game ever since.

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Ellie Blackburn

Always taking to the field with passion for the game as powerful and striking as each surging vastus lateralis, Blackburn is a champion vaguely from my old neck of the woods and was thus surrendered as a personal favourite long ago because it felt too obvious of a choice. Nowadays she could do with a little more love. Fortunately for the Western Bulldogs, the Casey-aligned Demons dissed the girl next door first by way of declining her inaugural marquee preference in 2016 when the signs of a heightened commitment to excellence had already manifested. Melbourne would quickly regret that decision, all due respect to Melissa Hickey. The underreported drawback of remaining loyal while others jump ship: pretty soon you’re surrounded by people who don’t care about what you’ve done for the club and don’t know what you’re capable of. If she’s looking for a place that’ll have her as an AFLW captain, I guarantee she’d be welcomed back to Arden Street in a heartbeat by Emma Kearney who, while accepting the 2018 Brownlow-equivalent, described her as the all-time Best & Fairest teammate.

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Jo Butland

The nickname FloJo might’ve been allocated in jest at first, but legend has it her mobility for a mountain of a thing made it stick. I can at least say I’ve seen everybody on this list play, though some not necessarily in their prime or even in person. So while I find it hard to believe Butland could cover the turf as well as Brea Moody, I know they don’t give out All-Australian captaincy for being a round-the-ground-blonk, no matter how much you hog the hitouts. The temptation for some might be to downgrade her mostly Cairns-based CV, except to do so would be to fail grasping the spirit of women’s footy wherein the odds these stalwarts had to overcome says almost everything about the players they were. Demerits for dirty players is a must, however, which makes the ruck selection a whole lot easier.

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Monique Conti

I want to keep these summary cards digestible and include only 3 or 4 highlights for each player, which will obviously omit some key moments, like a Grand Final BOG in Conti’s case. I’d have given that medal to a former teammate two paragraphs above anyway, but take nothing else away from this short and slight speedster whose decorated career probably hasn’t even reached the halfway point. Without the size and strength to bully contests and kick missiles, Conti is a master of exploiting the outstanding assets she does have: foremost blistering pace and spellbinding agility paired with a razor sharp football brain, which is why she is so effective in tight spaces (a modern-day virtuoso alongside Bontempelli and Pendlebury, I declared back when she had a mere 1 or 2 B&Fs in her trophy cabinet), even though I’ve got her named on the wing in this team where those twinkletoes literally do the most damage, as Nicola Barr’s hamstrings would attest.

 

[Cdog71]

Great idea.
Showing them in a lineup may squeeze you up a little when selecting one over the other.
I’d have thought ranking them would be a little more clear cut.

 

[Teen Wolf]

There is some hierarchy built in with the emergency/bench/on-field selections, and via one other method which will reveal itself in due course.

But mainly I just did what they always do with these things, which is pick the players I like and then find a way to Tetris them together.

 

[Cdog71]

Would’ve been interested to see who you rated higher
Vescio or Hope

 

[Teen Wolf]

Well you'll definitely find out who I rate higher than Vescio and Hope.

Not intentionally stringing this out either btw, I just haven't finished writing the blurbs yet.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Michelle Dench

It’s easier to find high-quality pictures of Sergeant Dench’s award-winning police dog (named Archer) than of DoD wearing a footy jumper. (That perhaps sounds as if the dog wears footy jumpers, but hopefully you get what I mean.) Named on the wing opposite Monique Conti, whose time spent with MUWFC is supported by plenty of accessible photographic evidence, Dame Michelle had the always-swooping-in-at-the-last-moment aerial ability you’d expect of somebody with the obligatory basketball background (something else in common with Conti… and maybe another famous father-daughter selection scheduled to appear later on) but also the 2000rpm wheels that would be sacrilegious to waste on a 28-metre court.

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Sarah Hammond

So many of these players had such distinguished “careers” over long periods to the degree that their lifespan extension plans (aka playing behind the ball in their twilight years) would’ve alone been enough to thrust them into contention for this team. Having already collected flags here and there as a midfielder, Hammond won a handful more while starring in Darebin’s backline, and it was only a knee injury during Round 1 of VFLW 2017—cruelly cutting her footy days short at age 41—which prevented her from claiming a 12th premiership in 17 years. The ultimate crowning moment came in 2009 involving a Grand Final and triumph over early injury. And I’m not going to flout football folklore convention by describing it as anything less than a broken hand, shattered into dozens of pieces, amputated and reattached in the quarter-time huddle.

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Tayla Harris

An icon in the truest sense of the word who achieved more in the game, and did more for the game, by age 17 than what the tall poppy choppers could ever manage in a million years. Losers who have never done anything but knock. And I’m delighted to announce there’s never been a monument erected to the memory of a critic. Juxtapose the snipes taken at her (some even by Bitter Bettys among the women’s football inner sanctum) in contrast to Matilda Scholz’s recent anecdote about receiving support from the AFLW-idol-to-many, and it’s clear Harris is not just a great athlete but also a great person. A fine footballer too with a sweet boot and a firm grasp on valuable overhead skills, and whose CHF position could only be taken by a few players named elsewhere in this team. Sure there are excluded full-forwards and flankers who are great in their own right, but nobody has held down the hardest patch of grass better for longer.

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Nikki Harwood

Once again there is something to be said for longevity and influence, and who doesn’t love a success story involving an epic journey across the Nullarbor. Not a mere premiership captain pfft, but a premiership playing coach for multiple West Australian state league clubs, Harwood has always been known as somebody who works hard, plays hard. Looks hard and even sounds hard. Her surname sounds hard, that is. Her commentary, however, is nowhere near as hard to listen to as that of fellow back pocket candidate Chyloe Kurdas.

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Anne Hatchard

The SANFLW B&F medal she retroactively won for North Adelaide was at a time well after state leagues ruled, hence excluded from the top highlights, but nevertheless deserves summoning in any compendium dedicated to quirky football yarns of the 21st century. I also got a chuckle from an interview Hatchard did on SA radio last year wherein, upon being asked about playing alongside Ebony Marinoff, she casually but earnestly noted the rarity of having “two stars in the same midfield”! What could be construed as a surprising lack of modesty in actuality serves as the same unfiltered introspective honesty which motivated her to, as quoted in another radio interview, “eat less crap” and get serious about living up to the name she made for herself as a junior. I suspect we aren’t getting the whole truth about her plantar fasciitis issues though, because even though she was handball happy back in 2019, her kicking nowadays looks immeasurably more painful.

 

[CURVE]

No Jasmine Garner?

 

[Teen Wolf]

Neither Nicole or any other brand of Garner is among the first 10 players called up to the daïs.

Monique Conti, whose time spent with MUWFC is supported by plenty of accessible photographic evidence,

This one where she's 14 but looks about 8 always seems funny to me for some reason:

 

[Teen Wolf]

Emma Kearney

Speaking of the Mugars, here comes their most successful AFLW product tearing up the inside rail to, I would submit, take an early lead in the Shinboner of the New Century stakes. And she loves the slop. Loves it. Eats it up.

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Louise Knitter

Another elusive stalwart in the way of recorded vision, the most high-res published photo of prime (or prime-adjacent) Knitter seems to be a close-up of her abdominal stapling (can be found in the book Play On! by Brunette Lenkić and Rob Hess), taken after she survived a type of injury more prominently associated with Leigh Colbert—a player she probably grew up rather fond of as a Geelong native. I recently re-watched the 2014 WAWFL Grand Final, her last game at the top (or top-adjacent) level, where she played full-back and the body was predictably well past it by then. But the signs of former greatness would occasionally shine through, particularly via a beautiful raking kick and the discipline to remain upright in the contest.

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Kate Lutkins

I like the idea of my footy team’s last bastion being not just a legit member of the Australian Defence Force, but also having the strength to be able to ragdoll Sarah Perkins and the speed to be able to rundown Jessica Sedunary. You wouldn’t really think of Lutkins as the high watermark of physical prowess ahead of countless others, except when the chips were down whereby she had the knack of hulking out and ascending to a new level of excellence—the long way of saying “ruthless competitor”.

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Ebony Marinoff

If it’s true that one is to be judged by the company one keeps, note well her unparalleled feat of having played in premiership teams with both Erin Phillips and Daisy Pearce in the same year. Some youngsters arrive on the scene with a palpable natural emotional maturity. Marinoff, who made her AFLW debut effectively as a second-year senior, was not one of them. But she clearly learned a thing or two about consistency and leadership along the way from those (and other) fellow Top 25ers and—as she made sure to point out in her W Awards speech this year—a few names who’ll feature in my honourable mentions, too.

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Karen “Paxy” Paxman

Closing out the junkyard dog lot of the list is a player who embodies the 10,000 hours theory. Claiming a Division 2 B&F in 2005 for Lalor Park, followed by 2 more in 2006 and 2008 for Hadfield and Heidelberg, Paxman then landed at St Albans to be guided by grandmasters Debbie Lee and Shannon McFerran, and end a Darebin dynasty which she would then go onto rebuild with Daisy & co… all before the first women’s exhibition game took place, with the then-more commonly called “Kaz” wearing Bulldogs colours. Only when she took a rusty blade to her hair, having already begun a descent from her peak, did the wider recognition seem to erupt.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Madison Prespakis

When all is said and done, her heart should be kept inside a glass box at the National Museum of Australia, and her shoulders—ever bearing the load of overachieving teams—melted down into sunscreen or whatever else titanium is used for. Prespakis attacks the ball, and distributes it, with courage wherein no needle is too small to thread (off either side of the body) and no bustling ball-carrier is too big to wrestle to the ground. Her ignorance of corporeal limitations is prone to eventually backfire in a straw-meets-camel’s-back fashion as seen with her hobbled exit from this year’s Elimination Final instigated by an ailment she had been unadvisably playing through since Round 1 of last year. Neither before nor since her 2019 arrival has an 18-year-old put together a better debut AFLW season, though her closest rival (age and output wise, not genetically) is also starting to take a hit from the AA selectors for the crime of setting high expectations.

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Chelsea Randall

Whereas many a great men’s footballer could be accused of being a bit nuts, a great women’s footballer has to be absolutely insane. And that distinction is never more salient in the case of Randall, whose story of extreme commitment defies rationality to anybody unwilling to spend 24 hours of their weekend alone in the car for a hobby which involves risking another pulverised ankle while being ridiculed for it.

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Michele Reid

Even if the same inaugural boost from WA imports isn’t a given, an SA-based team in an AFLW competition beginning in 2007 could’ve been a similar surprise packet as the one which eventuated in our timeline, assembling a 21-year-old prodigal daughter alongside a few would-be cricketers to join forces with heart-and-soul state leaguers destined to stay the course regardless. Reid, who played her last serious season of footy at age 38 for Norwood in that fateful year of 2017, would’ve been the first South Australian women’s football superstar to gain mainstream attention. Instead, she was the last to go without it.

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Ashleigh Riddell

While some short-legged accumulators are a slow burn, others are just the victims of slow recruiters. This pocket rocket proved the doubters wrong from game 1, and her injury in game 2 (caused by a hundred-metres-off-the-ball hit, which could only be condoned by clueless community football volunteers) swiftly undermined any vague threat the Crows might’ve encountered in 2019, much like the way Eloise Jones’ injury removed any suspense about the redemption Riddell and the Roos would romp away with this year.

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Jess Wuetschner

I don’t mean to diminish the unfavourable odds Elizabeth Skinner, Darcy Vescio, Cora Staunton and Danielle Ponter had to overcome in order to be thought of among the great 21st century goal sneaks. But at least in retrospect, their success stories make sense. Of the genuine contenders for this spot, only the height and frequency of Mo Hope’s hurdles aren’t dwarfed by the many cleared by our lethal left-footer. The difference is that when time, injuries and other misfortunes demanded the great marquee goalkicker become a great Tier 4 teammate, Hope instead chose to be a great reality TV star as was her right (and not necessarily the wrong choice) while Wuetschner halved 1-on-3 contests so Lauren Arnell could have a fairytale ending.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Positions to be filled are the centre, rover, full-forward, and the other HFF and forward pocket.

I'll do the first 3 members of the leadership group tomorrow, then close it out with the captain and vice-captain on Sunday along with the 25 honourable mentions.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Erin Phillips

Only being able to talk up her 66 matches by demonstrating NFI about Daisy’s 256 would be sufficiently shameful, but now I fear time spent at the two SA clubs has both supporter bases rewriting history to downplay Erin’s influence: Crows fans delusional enough to think they would even have a single flag without her; Port faithful unable to agree she would’ve made their cush-fixtured team more competitive this year. Softballs not worth entertaining. The lone tricky question is where to put her on the field? Answer: Anywhere but full-forward, i.e. the position which revealed her most glaring weakness (set shot kicking) and cost her teams a few of those 66 matches, whereas her work beyond the goal square won them premierships.

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Kiara Bowers

Two of the past five selections played for Western Australia in the 2015 state game which saw them defeat Victoria for the first time at senior level. Adding the appearance of Turbo makes it three of six. None of them would play for Fremantle in the opening two years of AFLW, and figuring out the science of the Dockers’ swift turnaround from laughingstock to finals lock requires little more than some straightforward arithmetic. I take no pleasure in pointing this out, given the many barren gameday threads spent professing nothing but love for Antonio, Hooker and Houghton. But if I must further push the case, keep in mind Bowers and also Phillips didn’t play for the Allies in the 2017 origin game which saw the Big V dish out an almighty revenge-based whopping.

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Jasmine Garner

Speaking of rep games, we might as well take this opportunity to remind ourselves of the best key forward from 2010s state footy—a far less adventurous claim about Garner than the one I made in 2019, which supposed her becoming a star goalkicking midfielder of 2020s club footy a mere formality. Adventurous or not, both turned out equally true.

 

[Teen Wolf]

Shannon McFerran

24 of these players should be inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame, starting from next year. The other one should’ve entered quite some time ago. Considering they’ve already waited too long to give Debbie Lee some company, I’m sick to the guts about the prospect of the AFL’s inaction forcing McFerran to miss out on the national stage yet again. She damn sure wasn’t going to miss out on this team, even though squeezing her into the pocket might make it seem as though it was a line ball decision. Nah. Just like the VWFL Silver Jubilee Team, why not put the best crumber that ever did crumb front and centre.

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Daisy Pearce

Right foot, left foot. Inside, outside. Above the shoulders, below the knees. Teenager, veteran. As a midwife, or as a mother. No matter the stage or situation of her football career, she was a picture of persistence and precision. To give birth to twins post-30 then come back to footy and still be good, let alone kick bags of 5 and win Club B&Fs, calls for a “didn’t need to go this hard”. Revisit two road games in her maternal seasons—a final vs GWS and a ladder-shaper vs Brisbane in which Mick Stinear threw the skipper into a faltering Melbourne midfield for one scenario and moved her into an under-siege backline for the other—to experience the How She Changed The Game starter pack.

Note: As with other Victorian players, I’ve grouped Pearce's state league performance in 2016 and 2017 under the “VWFL” umbrella. As we know, despite the name change, it wasn’t really what we now think of the VFLW until 2018 at the earliest.

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25 Honourable Mentions

Ebony Antonio (WA)
Kara Antonio (VIC, WA)
Marlo Brack (QLD)
Katie Brennan (QLD, VIC)
Fiona Clancey (SA)
Deanne Coates (WA)
Courtney Cramey (SA)
Brianna Davey (VIC)
Dana Hooker (WA)
Moana Hope (VIC)
Kate Hore (VIC)
Meg Hutchins (VIC)
Jaimee Lambert (VIC)
Debbie Lee (VIC)
Tiffany Lee (SA)
Chloe Molloy (VIC, NSW)
Breann Moody (VIC)
Danielle Ponter (NT, SA)
Elizabeth Skinner (VIC)
Cora Staunton (NSW)
Darcy Vescio (VIC)
Natalie Wood (VIC, NT)
Lou Wotton (VIC)
Rohenna Young (VIC)
Emma Zielke (QLD)

 

[Teen Wolf]

The Lineup and Closing Thoughts

First thing I love about the selected 25 is its toughness. Only Conti and Riddell wouldn’t have some variation of the word among their 3 or 4 most prominent superpowers, and they’ve nevertheless always gone when their turn to go would come. As for fairness, yes there’s a fair few iffy free kicks won over the journey which I would call a fair trade for the times these guns have copped maliciously directed knees and elbows from your Sophie Caseys, Angela Foleys, Aasta O’Connors and Lauren Tesorieros (never mind the pre-AFLW thugs who weren’t so vividly exposed in the caught-on-camera era).

The other thing I love about the selected 25 is… did I mention toughness? Hey, I could wax lyrical all day long about the clean hands of Pearce and Bates, the aerial feats of Harris and Randall, the spearing passes of Blackburn and Prespakis, and so on. But what misses the mark most with criticisms of women’s footy is how the unmatched pound-for-pound courage has quickly been taken for granted, and now “the standard” is too often judged by haters and followers alike through the same skill-only lens of ****ing soccer or some other soft**** circus!

 

[cmndstab]

View attachment 2194519

Erin Phillips

Only being able to talk up her 66 matches by demonstrating NFI about Daisy’s 256 would be sufficiently shameful, but now I fear time spent at the two SA clubs has both supporter bases rewriting history to downplay Erin’s influence: Crows fans delusional enough to think they would even have a single flag without her; Port faithful unable to agree she would’ve made their cush-fixtured team more competitive this year. Softballs not worth entertaining. The lone tricky question is where to put her on the field? Answer: Anywhere but full-forward, i.e. the position which revealed her most glaring weakness (set shot kicking) and cost her teams a few of those 66 matches, whereas her work beyond the goal square won them premierships.

Great thread, hard to argue with any of these!

On the question of Phillips being instrumental to all three Crows premierships, I suspect you are correct. Not just for what she did in the grand finals themselves (we probably could have won without her in 2019, unlikely in 2017 or 2022), but for actually getting us there in the first place. She was quite often the difference between winning and losing minor round matches at least a couple of times per season.

We're still struggling for midfield/forward connection since she left, Gould's contested marking aside.

 

[craffles]

Wonderful piece of analysis, enjoyed the read