Treasured memento: Matt Ciavarella with the trophies he received for volunteering at the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
What do you do when the man who controls the world’s most popular sport invites you to his office?
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Say yes.
Shepparton’s Matt Ciavarella knows the scenario because he was on the end of the question posed by FIFA president Gianni Infantino when he volunteered at the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Infantino, boasting a net worth of around $15 million, personally invited the Shepparton South Soccer Club committee member to FIFA’s headquarters in Switzerland a few months ago.
Ciavarella intends to head to Europe in May next year and accept the offer.
However, he’s still coming to grips with the magnitude of a conversation that caught him completely off guard.
“He (Infantino) came up and actually shook hands and gave me a hug. I thought that was nice of him,” Ciavarella said.
“Then he started talking to me and asking me all these questions, and of course I told him I’m from Shepparton and how football is moving ahead and so on.”
“I thought that was fantastic with the conversation we were having until his offsider came along, Harry, and he said to this Harry bloke, ‘I’m inviting Matt to FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland’.
“All jokes aside, I nearly fell over.
“When I land in Zurich they will send a car out for me, a little bloke from Shepparton, and I’ll see what happens there.”
Long serving: Matt Ciavarella has been a football volunteer for more than 50 years.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
Ciaverella, a Football Victoria life member, was first contacted about volunteering at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in July last year.
From there, he went through a rigorous application process.
It included numerous interviews, a police check - even an Interpol check - which Ciavarella chuckled at.
“I now know I’m not a criminal,” he said with a laugh.
“That was my application to it and when I was accepted I was obviously thrilled and the rest is history now.”
Ciaveralla was stationed in the VIP room at AAMI Park, or Melbourne Rectangular Stadium as it was known, for all of the Women’s World Cup games at the venue.
His role was to greet the dignitaries and mixing among the big wigs was none other than Infantino.
“The highlight of everything was the day that Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, made a beeline to me and I thought ‘what’s going on here?’,” he said.
“He asked how long I’d been involved in volunteering, and I told him since 1971 on a continuous basis as administrator.
“He then asked if he’d be knighted. That cracked me up, I thought ‘I like this bloke’. He’s a really down to earth person, he really is.”
Opportunity of a lifetime: Matt Ciavarella was given the rare chance to volunteer at the Women’s World Cup through his affiliation with Football Victoria.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
According to Ciavarella, the FIFA president questioned him about his team - Shepparton South - and what league it competes in.
Infantino didn’t like the answer.
“He said to me, ‘what is your football league called?’, and I [replied] ‘Bendigo Amateur Soccer League’,” Ciaveralla said as he recounted the conversation.
“He said, ‘it must be football (not soccer), we have used football for a long, long time, soccer is just a name people use. Every club, every league should be called football - it’s the only sport in the world that deserves that name’.”
After a lighthearted grilling, Infantino asked Ciavarella whether he’d fancy visiting the FIFA headquarters in Zurich.
It’s a football purist’s dream, and Ciavarella is no exception having joined Shepparton South’s committee as the youngest member aged 20 back in the early 1970s.
Half a century later, he’s now the oldest on the committee and plans to use his daughter-in-law’s connections at Flight Centre to tee up a trip to visit the roundball mecca next year.
However, Ciavarella wants to have some good news banked for Infantino ahead of time.
“From next year, you’ll see (the club called) Shepp South FC.”
