If Sam Kerr reneges on the W-League, Foord's set to become the competition's biggest star this season. But you wouldn't know it to speak to her.

It's not that the 24-year-old is underprepared, in fact, she's over qualified. She was qualified by the time she was 16-years-old, back in 2011, when she outshone the greatest players in the world - including her mercurial teammate and bestfriend - to win the Best Young Player at the FIFA World Cup.

It was a record-breaking feat for Australian football and a momentous achievement for a restless teenager, who only a couple of years prior, had chosen football because there were no other sporting teams she could join.

"Football wasn’t the one I wanted to do," she says nonchalantly.

"I just wanted to do every single sport. Football was what I played at school, in the playground with the boys, and my sister came home and said I was pretty good.

"She said I should join the local team with the boys from my school and that’s the only reason I got into it. It was actually the last sport I was into."

Now a fiery winger, Foord plays with the same reckless abandon she did at the beginning of her career, a quality that stands her alone among a remarkable few in world football. Matildas legend Kate Gill summed Foord's game up best: "She's dangerous, and she runs at players."

But that reckless abandon isn't just cockiness, and it definitely isn't ignorance. There's a side to Foord that's never overawed by any occassion.

When, as a 16-year-old, she was crowned the greatest young player in the world, she didn't even attend the ceremony. She didn't want to.

She'd just dominated the World Cup, led Australia to the quarter-finals as one of the youngest at the tournament and football was the furthest thing from her mind.

"I was like ‘No way I’m going back!'," she laughs.

"We'd been knocked out of the World Cup and I got told over Facebook that I’d won that award.

"FIFA said they would fly me back to…um, wherever that final was, I can’t remember now. I was on holiday in Croatia having the time of my life.

"I didn’t know how big of a deal it was. I thought it was cool but it didn’t really sink in until years later and I look back and I think ‘Wow, that really was a big achievement.’"