Port Adelaide forward Matilda Scholes' booming TikTok presence has reignited an old debate inside the AFLW about how players should manage their growing personal brands, particularly when results are not going their team's way.
The 20-year-old, who has roughly 47,000 combined Instagram and TikTok followers and a Nike sponsorship to match, has been the subject of online criticism telling her to focus on "less dancing, more training" after a string of social posts. AFLW Weekly co-host Sarah Bert pushed back firmly on that line of attack.
"The reason I use Matilda as an example is because recently there's been a lot of comments on her TikTok saying, 'less dancing, more training, imagine actually training, play footy or go do cheerleading'," Bert said. "Someone said, 'Yeah, less training, more playing.' On a video that she posted the day before, she got 22 disposals, 16 hit-outs and four goals."
Bert sees Scholes, who also holds a diploma in social media marketing, as a poster child for an AFLW economy where female athletes need to monetise their own profiles to make up for a fraction of AFL men's wages.
"Matilda Scholes' mark last year of the Mark of the Year was better for the game growth than making a TikTok," Bert agreed, but stressed: "Women have to do it to create revenue that men don't. The positive comments underneath here, fans asking about the game, when's the next game, young girls saying, 'I'm going to ask my dad to bring me, which week should I come?' There is a lot of engagement between fans happening underneath these videos as well."
Former Collingwood player Georgie Parker, however, drew a different line: not against social media, but against its timing.
"I've got no problem with social media. media. I've got a problem with doing it when you're not winning," Parker said. "They had just been pumped by 72 points by North the week before. So my thing is it's time and place. From an athlete perspective, if we've just been pumped and you're too concerned about what your hair looks like and the dancing video that may or may not go viral, I'd be like, can you pull your head in for a hot second?"
Parker invoked the high-performance environments she experienced at the Olympics, where some athletes deliberately pull themselves off social media for the duration of competition.
"I know from the inside of the four walls of a high-performance environment, distractions can unravel individuals," she said. "It's the reason why over the Olympics some teams and people go, 'I'm on a social media ban for this fortnight,' because it is a really distracting place."
The two co-hosts converged on one point: Scholes' brand-building helps AFLW grow and supplements pay that remains far below male equivalents. Where they parted ways was the question of whether posting dance content the day after a heavy defeat sends the wrong cultural signal inside an elite football program.
"You don't get a Nike sponsorship without that," Parker conceded. "But it's just time and place, and making sure those distractions, distractions can be like distractions can unravel individuals. Time and place. I've got no problem."
The broader picture is that AFLW players, unlike most of their AFL counterparts, are still essentially building the financial scaffolding of their careers in real time on social platforms. The Scholes case underscores how much of that work now happens in public, and how much of it gets policed by fans who are more invested than they often admit.