When Tyler Bindon jogged onto the field at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles late in the second half of the All Whites’ World Cup draw, he did more than win another cap for New Zealand. He completed a piece of football history that began nearly two decades earlier, on the other side of the world, with his mother between the posts.
The 21-year-old defender and his mum, former Football Ferns goalkeeper Jenny Bindon, have become the first mother and son to play at a FIFA World Cup, according to RNZ and international reporting on the milestone. Plenty of fathers and sons have shared the honour over the decades, but a mother and son had never both reached the game’s biggest stage until the Bindons did it in New Zealand colours.
The moment landed quietly. Tyler came off the bench in the closing stages, slotting in at the back as the All Whites saw out their result. There was no debut goal, no last-minute drama, just a young centre back doing the unglamorous work he is paid to do. The significance only fully arrived afterwards, in a few words from son to mother.
“After the game he just said ‘we did it, Mum’,” Jenny told RNZ. “Just when he said that, it really dawned on me like, we did it, we’re the first, and that’s unbelievable.”
Jenny Bindon knows exactly what that stage feels like. A goalkeeper for New Zealand from 2004 to 2014, she earned 77 caps and represented the Football Ferns at the Women’s World Cups of 2007 and 2011, as well as the Olympic Games in 2008 and 2012. She was a fixture of the side during a period when women’s football in New Zealand was fighting for recognition and resources, long before the home Women’s World Cup of 2023 helped push the game into the mainstream.
Back then, a small boy was often in the stands cheering her on. Jenny has spoken about hearing a young Tyler urging her forward at her own World Cup, never imagining he would one day follow her onto the same kind of pitch. That memory now sits at the heart of a family story that has caught attention well beyond New Zealand, with outlets including the Washington Post picking up the record.
Tyler’s own path to this point has crossed two countries. He was born in Auckland and grew up there until the age of 12, when the family moved to California after Jenny took up an assistant coaching role with the women’s programme at UCLA. In the United States he came through the Los Angeles FC academy system, developing into a composed central defender before earning a move to England.
He is now contracted to Premier League club Nottingham Forest, having spent last season on loan at Sheffield United building experience in the demanding world of English football. At 21 he is still early in his career, but a place in a World Cup squad, and minutes on the field, mark him as one of the more promising defenders to come through the New Zealand pathway in recent years.
Football clearly runs deep in the household. Tyler’s father, Grant Bindon, captained New Zealand’s volleyball team, which makes the Bindons one of the more decorated sporting families the country has produced. Two parents who wore the silver fern at the top level, and now a son writing his own chapter at a World Cup, is a rare collection of achievement under one roof.
The record itself reflects how the game has changed. For most of World Cup history, the path for mothers to reach the tournament barely existed, with the first Women’s World Cup not held until 1991. Jenny Bindon was part of the generation that helped normalise the idea of New Zealand women competing on the world stage, and her son is now a direct beneficiary of the culture she helped build. Their shared milestone is, in its own way, a small marker of how far the women’s game has travelled.
For the All Whites, the timing could hardly be better. The team has enjoyed a strong start to its World Cup campaign and the Bindon story has given supporters back home an extra reason to follow every fixture closely. The family is reportedly travelling with the team, with the next stop in Vancouver, turning a tournament thousands of kilometres away into something personal for everyone watching from New Zealand.
There is something fitting about a record set not by a superstar striker or a famous captain, but by an ordinary substitution and a quiet word between a mother and her son. New Zealand sport has always celebrated the people who turn up, do the work and carry their families with them. Jenny and Tyler Bindon have simply done it on the biggest stage there is.
What do you make of the Bindons’ achievement and the All Whites’ World Cup campaign so far? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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