Eli Mengem is back in his home country, covering the FIFA Women’s World Cup for London-based soccer media company Copa90.

Working at Copa90 for a decade, Mengem has directed and presented a catalogue of documentaries exploring the culture of the “world game” around the globe, contributing to the channel’s 128 million YouTube views.

His Once in a Lifetime documentary for Copa90, following the fans of Trabzonspor as the club won the Turkish Super Lig for the first time in 38 years, won sports documentary of the year at the 2022 Broadcast Sport Awards in London.

He chats with this masthead about the tournament so far.

How has the media coverage of the tournament been?

I remember when everyone in the football community was scolding Optus Sport for how bad their 2018 coverage was, and I just thought Optus are done here.

That just shows how incredible the coverage has been. They went from public enemy No.1 to adored because they put the work in, they hired real football people from the football community, some gems no one even knew about, and turned it around first with their Premier League coverage.

It’s been brilliant, I’ve got the app, and I am only here for a month, but I am loving it.

Having said that, the reality we have to face is that only so many people have the Optus Sport app. If we want to convert football fans, we need to get the non-football fans in or the fringe football fans in, and a lot of them may not have the Optus app, and that’s where you need Channel Seven, Nine and Ten going, ‘We’ve got this. We’re going to put it on Sunrise, we’ll put it on the six o’clock news, and we’ll have it in between MasterChef or whatever.’ ”