Irish women travel far and wide to pursue football dream

When Sue Ronan named her squad for today's Euro 2017 qualifier against Spain in Tallaght (live on Setanta Ireland at 2.0), it was noticeable again just how many of her players are based outside Ireland, 10 of the 22 representing clubs from England, Scotland, Sweden, Norway, with two of her United States-based players unavailable due to college commitments.

The spread of countries is a fair indication of where opportunities still lie for Irish players hoping to pursue careers in football, or, in the case of Florida State's Megan Campbell (Social Science) and Megan Connolly (Sport Management), combining their sport with studies through scholarships.

Diane Caldwell is the most widely travelled of the squad, having had spells with Balbriggan United and Raheny United at home, before playing for Hofstra Pride, her college side at Hofstra University in New York, Hudson Valley Quickstrike (New Jersey), Albany Alleycats (New York), moving on to Por Akureyri in Iceland, where she got to play Champions League football, and then on to her current club, Avaldsnes in Norway.

The chief attraction of Avaldsnes for the Dubliner was that they offered her a chance to devote herself to football, giving her a position coaching the club’s youth teams which she could combine with her playing career.

Focus solely

And it’s still a rare enough treat for Irish players to find clubs where they can afford to focus solely on football. Louise Quinn is one of the few others; she joined Sweden’s Eskilstuna in 2013.

A survey by the BBC earlier this year revealed that many players in the English Women’s Super League (WSL), for example, earn as little as £50 a week.

Things are considerably better than that at Chelsea who Niamh Fahey joined from Arsenal earlier this year, having won four league titles and four FA cups during her eight seasons with the north London club. At 27, though, she wanted the chance to play full-time, and that is what Chelsea offered, unlike Arsenal where she combined football with a job in a biopharmaceutical company.

Fahey, a member of the Galway team that won its first senior All-Ireland women's football title in 2004, gave up that job, taking a "massive pay cut" to go full-time. The average salary of the Chelsea squad, she told the Irish Times back in April, is between €18,000 and €30,000, gross, per annum. Not quite in Eden Hazard territory then (he's on just the £220,000 a week), but with accommodation provided and some bills paid, she described it as "liveable".

Ironically, though, Fahey found she had too much time on her hands once turning professional, largely because of a light match schedule (there are only eight teams in the WSL), and ended up doing some work again for the company she had left.

Her debut season proved a huge success, helping Chelsea to a league and cup double, the highlight proved to be playing in front of a crowd of 30,000 at Wembley when they beat Notts County 1-0 in the FA Cup final.

After the success of the English women's team at the World Cup, where they finished third, their domestic game received a boost, but an average 48 per cent increase in attendances (Chelsea were up 164 per cent) still only saw the average league crowd at 1,076. Still some way to go, then, before the English game can generate the level of income that will allow more of its players go full-time on 'liveable' wages.

Meanwhile, Cork players Claire Shine, who scored a hat-trick in the Scottish Cup final earlier this month, and Denise O’Sullivan both play their football with Glasgow City, an ambitious club that dominates the Scottish game, winning the treble four years running. The players train four days a week, so the demands are professional enough, but the funds aren’t there yet to allow them go full-time.

A shop

Over at Celtic, Ruesha Littlejohn, the Glasgow-born striker with maternal grandparents from Antrim who played for Scotland’s underage teams before switching to Ireland, had a taste of the full-time life when she played with Sandviken in Norway.

But on returning to Scotland she was back to combining her football with her work as a carer and a part-time position in a shop.

There’s a fair old distance to be travelled, then, before the women’s game can afford to give its players the opportunities they crave, but it’s moved on a little, at least, since the days when Irish captain Emma Byrne described the highlight of her working day at Arsenal, where she was a member of a team that won all around it, as scrubbing Freddie Ljungberg’s underwear in the club laundry. Tiny steps.