The player drain in women’s Gaelic football won’t end anytime soon

There was a time, not all that long ago, when Sarah Rowe had a small ritual she performed whenever a new Irish woman came to Australia to join an AFLW club. Rowe is going into her ninth Aussie Rules season with Collingwood and has seen the new world from every angle – wide-eyed newbie, dutiful foot soldier, mother-hen veteran. Nobody knows the trail better.

So if and when she got word of a new player landing from the old country, she regularly took it upon herself to be part of the welcoming committee. She’d source a phone number and send a message offering herself as a one-woman Google, a kind of Ask Me Anything session to help the new girl settle in. It was no hardship – there was only ever a handful of new faces each year.

“It’s got to the point now where I don’t do that any more,” she says. “Because there’s just so many players. It would be almost a full-time job to do that now! Which is hard to believe. Cora [Staunton] was the first one to come over, I was the second and Ash McCarthy was the third. To think now that there might be 50 Irish players in the league at some stage is crazy.”

Things haven’t reached that point yet but they will. The 2025 AFLW season featured 39 Irish players, a number that will rise to around 43-45 in 2026. Mike Currane, the Mayoman who acts as the AFLW’s main conduit between their side of the world and ours, says the 50-player mark will be reached and probably passed in time for start of the 2028 season.

This is a phenomenon with no parallel in Irish sport. Between them, those 39 Irish women were paid somewhere in the region of $3.5 million last season, or about €2 million. Salaries break down into four tiers, from $109,000 (€64,700) in tier one to $67,000 (€39,800) in tier four. You wouldn’t say they’re setting themselves up for life but they’re definitely getting on with living one.

It isn’t just the weather, although given the past few weeks here, that aspect clearly shouldn’t be dismissed. The AFLW offers 12-month contracts now, which adds up to more than just money landing in bank accounts at the end of the month. It means year-round access to medical support, strength and conditioning, skills coaching, psychological help. The facilities are good and getting better. The crowds aren’t amazing but they’re sustainable, which is enough for now.

The pull factors, then, are obvious to everyone. On top of offering the life of the professional athlete, there’s also the glaring fact that so many of these women’s friends are already working in Australia. Every Australian city is teeming with Irish nurses, teachers, waitresses and the rest. Footy player is as good a line on a CV as any. Especially when Irish players are in such demand.

“The standard is so high now and it’s rising every year,” says Rowe. “When I came over first, you were thrown in after a couple of months of learning the ropes in pre-season. It’s less forgiving now for Irish players. You’re seeing them come in for pre-season and it might take them until week five or six of the games to get a place in the team.

“But Irish players have such a good reputation within the league. We’re a lot more bold with our play because of the way we learned to play Gaelic football. If you’ve grown up playing Aussie Rules, you can become quite regimented because it’s been drilled into you all your life to be ‘in structure’ as they call it. Irish players find the structure quite a tricky thing to learn but once they have it, they’re good at playing around it because that’s a more natural thing.

“Also, Irish players bring professional standards, which is hard to believe because obviously they’re coming from an amateur game. But because intercounty standards are so high, they arrive with an ingrained tenacity, a willingness to work and a desire to improve that’s really admired around the league. We’re known among coaches all around the league for putting the head down and working hard. The harder the better.”

In almost every sense, this is a good news story. Triumphant, even. Last year’s All-Australian team contained five Irish players for the first time ever, rising to eight in the extended squad. Nine Irish women have won AFLW medals, with the likes of Erika O’Shea and Vikki Wall chasing a three-in-a-row in 2026. These women are pioneers, marking out new ground every year for the generations to follow.

But for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. It would be wrong to say women’s football in Ireland lost 39 of its best players to the AFLW last year because (a) not all of them came from Gaelic football and (b) of those who did, not all of them missed all of the season. All the same, there’s no denying the fact that the sport here feels like it’s being asset-stripped with each passing season.

Last year’s All-Ireland final between Meath and Dublin is a good case in point. Although Wall, Aoibhín Cleary, Eilish O’Dowd and Sinead Goldrick got dispensations to play for their counties just a couple of weeks out from the start of the AFLW season, Jennifer Dunne (Dublin) and Orlagh Lally (Meath) stayed in Australia. These are All Star players with five All-Irelands between them. Elite performers gone from the game.

On the whole, nobody has any big issue with individual players heading off and trying their hand at Aussie Rules. Everyone understands that the AFLW can offer a way of life that isn’t possible in Ireland. But as the number gets larger, it feels harder and harder to ignore. The player drain has become a fact of life in women’s football.

The Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) have been notably quiet about the situation, which hasn’t gone unnoticed within the game. Meath manager Wayne Freeman made a few headlines last month when he called out the LGFA in an interview in the Meath Chronicle, berating the governing body for not making more noise about the whole thing.

“I can’t for the life of me understand how the LGFA haven’t made a statement on it,” Freeman said. “It could in some capacity destroy the intercounty game in ladies football. I do feel the LGFA have just swept this under the carpet because what other sport would say nothing if they lost 50 of their biggest stars?”

In the LGFA’s defence, there isn’t a lot they can feasibly do to change it. They are working on the ground to improve the lot of intercounty players here but it’s still a struggle. Dublin are the reigning All-Ireland champions and yet their first two league games – against their two biggest rivals Kerry and Meath – have been played on club grounds in front of handfuls of attendees. The game can feel very small-time here.

And yet, almost without fail, pretty much every Irish player in Australia you talk to hankers for the game they left behind in one way or another. Professional life fills a certain bucket for them but it leaves another one empty. Ultimately, that’s the LGFA’s most potent weapon – however many players leave on an annual basis, the majority of them will come home and play again eventually.

“We definitely talk about it a lot,” says Rowe. “Our heads are in the AFLW but our hearts are in Gaelic football. It doesn’t sit well with any of us. Any of the girls who have gone back home to play say the same thing – it fills me up like nothing else. My heart, my family, my community. That’s what we miss here.

“So that’s the thing the Gaelic football has going for it. I miss how that sport makes me feel. Playing AFLW is the right thing for me, it allows me to plan for my future, it’s part of who I am. But you’re constantly torn. We always say you can’t beat the GAA. You can’t beat the people in it. But we also say, ‘this is a nice life too’.”

In all likelihood, it won’t always be this way. Currane expects the number to plateau out at around 50 – the quality of players coming through the AFLW academies will eventually crowd out some of the Irish hopefuls. But that could be a decade away. And the best Irish players will always be welcome.

For now, it feels like the game here can’t do much more than wave them off and wish them well.

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