On the eve of her biggest move yet, Matildas captain Sam Kerr sits down with Forbes Australia to discuss leaving Chelsea, joining one of the world’s most exclusive watch brands, and what it really cost her to get here.
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It’s the last day of September 2006, and West Coast Eagles midfielder Daniel Kerr is storming through the centre of the Melbourne Cricket Ground with just minutes to go in the AFL Grand Final. Among the 97,431 people in those stands watching on is his 13-year-old sister, Sam.
She knew then and there that was the life she wanted for herself. The version she had in mind, though, didn’t exist yet. “Women’s sport at the time was just untouchable,” she says. “You could just never imagine yourself doing that.”
Sam had always wanted to play AFL.
“My dream was to play for Aquinas, go to Aquinas College, and play for the West Coast Eagles,” she says. There was just one issue. “Aquinas was an all-boys school”. There was no AFL Women’s team to idolise or eventually play for, so she watched.
Daniel, alongside AFL greats Ben Cousins and Chris Judd, did go on to win the premiership that afternoon, a memory Sam holds close to her heart.
Twenty years on, that little girl in the crowd is now the captain of Australia’s national team, Chelsea’s all-time equal leading scorer, the first Australian ambassador for Richard Mille, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia alumna, and the mother of a one-year-old son named Jagger.
The path between those two points is not the one she imagined. It has been harder and more taxing than anything a teenage girl in those stands could have calculated.
Player Profile
Samantha May Kerr
- Current club
- NJ/NY Gotham FC (NWSL)
- Former clubs
- Chelsea FC, Chicago Red Stars, Perth Glory, Sky Blue FC, Western New York Flash
- Sponsors
- Nike, Richard Mille, Mastercard, EA Sports
- Investments
- Private ventures, including her beverage brand Chihuahua
Striking a Balance
As we sit down inside Richard Mille’s new boutique at the Capella Hotel, Kerr readjusts the strap of her quarter-of-a-million-dollar timepiece – an RM 07-04 Automatic Sport.
The novelty is not lost on her. After all, she has been omnipresent for both eras of professional women’s football – the one with no crowds, and the one that now pays for watches like this. It’s not a watch she wears freely everywhere, mind you.
Back in London, where watch theft has become common enough to change how she moves through the city, she leaves it at home. “I wouldn’t roll around in London with it,” she says. “That’s for sure.”
“There weren’t these leagues overseas,” Kerr recalls the start of her professional career. “There weren’t 50,000 people in the stadium. We are a part of that generation that still knows what it was like when there was no one in the crowd.”
The night before our interview, she’d been on the pitch in Western Sydney, captaining the side in a 3-1 win over Mexico that closed out the Matildas’ June friendly series – the same week, as it turns out, that she’d quietly signed away her future with another club entirely.
“We had 20,000 on a Tuesday night nearly,” Kerr says. “That’s special to us. That is becoming more normal for us – it is always a privilege.”
Those numbers have been on the rise ever since the Matildas’ historic run to the 2023 World Cup semi-final. Football Australia’s Legacy ‘23 report put the economic impact at $1.32 billion, with the team generating $2.78 billion in earned media value.
A Victorian media study found that during the same tournament, Kerr was covered 4.5 times more than any other athlete in the state, men included.
It’s only fitting, then, for Kerr to join Richard Mille’s roster of athletes and cultural figures – a list that includes Rafael Nadal, Formula One drivers Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris, musician Pharrell Williams, actor John Malkovich, and Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. She is the brand’s first Australian ambassador.
It is a generational shift Kerr helped build, and one she paid for in full before there were any big contracts or watch sponsorships to show for it. “I’ve been living out of home since I was 17 years old,” she says. “I’ve missed a lot of my family’s life. I’ve missed a lot of weddings. I missed funerals.” Her grandmother died last September. “I couldn’t get home for it,” she says.
The discipline that carried her through it traces back to her father, an accomplished Aussie rules footballer in his own right. “My dad was always really strict on us,” she says. “Even if I played on the weekend as a 10-year-old and I stayed up late, my dad was mad at me.”
It hasn’t loosened either. “I’m 32 years old, and if I have a drink, he’d say, ‘Should you be drinking?’ His discipline around sport was, you know, his levels were up there.” She laughs. “It has shaped me to be so disciplined around what I do as an athlete.”
It is, in her words, the part of the job nobody outside it sees. “If you’re not in this completely and you don’t love it completely,” she says, “it’s very hard to be away from your family.”
Where to, captain?
Just days earlier, the striker signed a new contract to return to the American club where she still holds the all-time National Women’s Soccer League scoring record, and the same one she left a decade ago when it was struggling under its old name, Sky Blue FC.
Today, rebranded as Gotham FC, they are the reigning league champions and are backed by a high-profile ownership group that includes basketball greats Kevin Durant and Sue Bird.
She is only in town for a few nights – a brief pit-stop before her world tilts on its axis again – but she looks as relaxed as you’ve ever seen her. The deal isn’t public yet. She doesn’t let on. Months of speculation about her next club have run in the press – Barcelona, Real Madrid, the usual list. Much of it is completely off the money.
“Everyone thinks it was decided months ago,” she says. “But telling you honestly, I only signed my contract last Wednesday while I was in national team camp. It wasn’t as easy as maybe people thought.”
Despite having been away from the American league for six years, Kerr still holds the NWSL all-time regular-season scoring record with 77 goals.
Just weeks earlier, the 32-year-old walked off the pitch in London, having wrapped up a highly-decorated era with Chelsea. Yet, leaning back in her chair, she plays her cards with an absolute poker face. “I actually am really sad about leaving,” she admits.
“It’s been my home. It sucks to leave such a big club, but everything comes to an end. I spent the first six months of the season on the bench, coming back from injury. For where I want to be in my career, it’s time to move on and do something different.”
Her wife, American midfielder Kristie Mewis, gives the move back to the US an added layer of familiarity. The pair met on Instagram during the pandemic, their first proper meeting was an enforced two-weeks together in quarantine. “I was thinking if I don’t like her, this is going to be awkward,” Kerr said of it.
They went public after a moment at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Mewis consoling her on the pitch after the US beat Australia to bronze. They married on New Year’s Eve, and their son Jagger arrived in May last year.
Within days of our conversation, the three of them were boarding a flight to Spain – a family holiday, long overdue, before the next chapter begins in earnest.
The girl who sat in those MCG stands in 2006 had none of this mapped out. She just knew she wanted to be out there.
“I think,” Kerr laughs, “I always just thought it was normal.”
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