Well, we can't say she didn't warn us.
Barely half an hour after Sydney FC's championship win against Melbourne City in May, Cortnee Vine used her last media opportunity as a domestic club player to call on the A-Leagues to urgently invest in its women's league, lest its biggest stars depart for greener pastures overseas.
"I feel like we could have done heaps more, to be honest. More investment, more professionalism," she said.
"There are coaches that are still not full-time, [players] are not technically full-time.
"I feel like, post the World Cup, that was the perfect time for people to say, 'I'm going to invest in women's football and see where we go.'
"We're competing now with the WSL, the NWSL, and [America] have a new league coming in, the USL, so we're competing with three big leagues. And now we've gone from a 12-week comp to a 30-week comp, we're fighting against them to get players to come here.
"If we're put in that position, you need to pay more because the girls aren't going to come here for less than what they can get back home or overseas.
"No one's gonna come unless that's what it is; nothing happens until we invest more."
In hindsight, those comments also appeared to apply to herself.
This past weekend, the 25-year-old signed a three-year deal with the North Carolina Courage, three-time premiers of the National Women's Soccer League in the United States.
Her contract is the longest ever offered in her career to date, and will keep her overseas all the way through to the next World Cup in Brazil.
For some, the move came as no surprise. In fact, the bigger shock was that it hadn't happened sooner.
With 17 goals and 14 assists in the past two seasons, the winger was already among the league's best, and some believed she would not be able to improve unless she went elsewhere where the competitive ceiling and off-field standards were higher.
It was a difficult decision, no doubt. Vine had repeatedly spoken about how much she loves living in Australia, and how important her life off the field is. She was studying here, she had family and friends close by, she loved the climate, and had built a life with her partner, Sydney FC teammate Charlotte McLean, as well.
It was a huge coup for the Sky Blues to secure her for the post-World Cup season, especially after she shot to super-stardom following that historic penalty shoot-out against France.
She immediately became the club's marquee player and the league's biggest marketing tool, her face splashed across bus-stop posters and football blogs and magazine covers.
Fans from every other club set aside their rivalries and flocked to Sydney games just to get her signature or a selfie.
She had profiles written up in high-end fashion websites and was invited to award shows and even had her portrait voted as a finalist in the Archibald Prize.
And yet, despite the whirlwind of the past year, the country's top club in its top women's competition was still not able to make her stay.
Vine's departure, alongside that of McLean, who was Sydney's Player of the Year, signals what is arguably becoming a second wave of Australian players departing the A-League Women in search of year-round football elsewhere in the world.
It follows the first wave back in 2020 which saw players like Sam Kerr, Caitlin Foord, Ellie Carpenter and Steph Catley leave Australia for European clubs that had significantly increased invested in their women's programs.
While the ALW has certainly made some key improvements over the past year, including introducing its first home-and-away season, expanding the league to 12 clubs, scheduling games in friendlier time-slots, and increasing the minimum salary for players, the unfortunate reality is that it is not growing fast enough, and risks slipping further behind other leagues that are accelerating into full-time professionalism.
The majority of ALW players earn at or just above the minimum salary of $25,000 for a 35-week season (which is not expected to lengthen until after 2026, meaning their salaries will only grow by a few hundred dollars each year), with just $12,400 offered for scholarship players. In last year's players survey, three in five had to work second jobs to make ends meet.
Although this is an increase on the previous season, it still significantly less than what women footballers in the top leagues of Europe or North America can earn in a year, with the average NWSL player earning around $65,000 a season in 2024.
Beyond money, these clubs and leagues also offer access to greater resources than what most A-League Women environments can provide.
Training facilities, dedicated stadiums, full-time staff, housing, and insurance are part of these deals, too, and for a player like Vine — who still had to train in the early morning or late evening to allow for most of her Sydney teammates to work or study during the day — the idea of living the life of a full-time footballer was understandably too good to pass up.
But the fact that we are still having this conversation four years after the first major Matildas exodus begs the question: exactly what is the plan to keep hold of Australia's best and brightest players, and therefore keep pace with the women's club game elsewhere in the world?
The league has stated in the past that it is aiming to be in the top five women's leagues, as well as the destination women's league in Asia, but how is it going to get there?
It is no secret that the Australian Professional Leagues (APL), which owns and operates the A-League Women, is struggling financially.
Through a combination of pandemic payments, keeping cash-strapped clubs afloat, underwhelming viewership figures which have impacted broadcast distributions, and misguided investments into now-defunct projects like KeepUp, the league's administrators have done little to convince fans that the significant investment Vine called for will be forthcoming any time soon.
Frustratingly, because both Vine and McLean were at the end of their contracts, Sydney FC received zero transfer fees for their departure, meaning the league overall has lost what could have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue simply because it did not invest longer-term in players it already knew were, or could become, superstars.
Football is an ecosystem, and as Vine said, if there's not enough money invested in the league, clubs won't be able to attract the best players.
Great players not only help to make their teams better, but they also create a product that more fans are more likely to enjoy.
And more fans equals more of everything that fans can buy: tickets, memberships, merchandise, products, and subscriptions, which means more sponsors, more visibility, and more opportunity to grow. And so it rolls on in a virtuous cycle.
But will we ever see the A-League Women reach its full potential in a place like Australia, with its multi-sport culture and fractured football economy? Has the competition, like the Matildas who have departed it, simply reached its ceiling under the people who currently run it?
There are alternative possibilities, of course. One suggestion quietly gathering momentum is that the ALW could be run independently from the men's competition, with its own governing body, broadcast deal, and financial framework.
Like the NWSL, its owners and administrators would be focused entirely on the women's league, prioritising its players, staff, sponsors, and fans, and making the kinds of strategic decisions that has seen the American league become one of the envies of the world.
But that utopia could be a while away. As for the next few years, little is known of how the APL plan to grow its premier women's league further, or just what steps it is taking towards the full-time professionalism its players are crying out for.
All we know is that the best of them probably won't wait around much longer to find out.
