Athlone Town Ladies have gotten used to being a part of the FAI Women’s Cup final day. On Sunday, the town will contest the decider against Shelbourne at Tallaght Stadium. It is their fifth year making it this far, winning in 2023 and last year, losing in 2022 and 2024 – victory would be the first part of what they hope would be a ‘double double’, as they are poised to win a third league title on the trot.
It has been quite the evolution for a club that first entered the national league in 2020, recording two seventh-placed finishes before finishing as runners-up to Shels in 2022; with the Dublin club also beating them in the cup final.
Those experiences served to be educational, as Athlone only came back stronger. The club’s CEO, Steven Gray, is full of praise for what they have achieved.
“It’s a very special group of girls,” he says. “There’s been some foreign recruitment – American girls that are really good players – and then there’s a great team spirit, because a lot of girls are from Athlone or the west of Ireland.
“They have a good connection, a good camaraderie, that’s really important to a successful group.
“Then the whole objective for 2026 was, like with anything, how can you improve?”
Off the field, that involved developing the club’s medical department, adding two full-time academy staff and bringing in Seán O’Connor as full-time head coach of the men’s team.
Women’s team
On the women’s side, former Ireland international Lily Agg was appointed as manager. Aged 32, it was her first such role – it has proven to be a success, but was there a risk attached?
“Someone asked me why it was taking so long to bring in a head coach to the women’s team and I said, well, who do you want?” Gray says.
“The league as it is now is only five years old and so everyone is inexperienced, as far as I can see.
“We spoke to a few other names, but once we had our initial conversation with Lily, her background and her playing experience speak for themselves. Her skills and traits as a human being are so positive and so, based on all that put together, I don’t think Lily was a risk, because I think she ticked so many boxes.
“The only box she didn’t tick was having success as a head coach in Ireland, but that pool is tiny.”
As Athlone continues to collect silverware on the women’s side, the quest for the men is to earn promotion to the Premier Division and, ideally, grow from there.
Gray, who played League of Ireland for a number of clubs, doesn’t see much in the way of conflict in trying to strike a balance between the two.
“It’s like any other business, that’s all I can say,” he says, “and I don’t look at it as a football club, I look at it as a business.
“When I went in there, there wasn’t a whole lot of structure; there wasn’t a lot in terms of operations; there was a mountain of work to do and I probably put 10 different departments in place.”
Steven Gray says he doesn’t really separate the women and the men. “I just call it the football department and they’re given their budget at the start of the year. The thing that I’m proud of is that there’s not that much [difference] in the budgets, which is probably unique in Irish football. We’re pretty aligned and I think that’s a good thing.
We spoke to a few other names, but once we had our initial conversation with Lily, her background and her playing experience speak for themselves. Her skills and traits as a human being are so positive and so, based on all that put together, I don’t think Lily was a risk, because I think she ticked so many boxes
“At the end of this year, we’ll have very, very accurate financials and I’ll be going to my technical director Brian Shelley, who’s the head of the football department, ‘There you go, that’s how much you have to spend in the football department.’
“Then it’s his decision to say, ‘Well, I’m going to spend this much in the women’s, I’m going to spend this much in the men’s, this much in the academy.’
That information is then communicated to the head coach of the women’s team, the head coach of the men’s team and the academy director, who will have conversations on that.
Curtain-raiser
A sign of how the women’s game has progressed is the fact that, where the final was previously the curtain-raiser for the men’s equivalent at Aviva Stadium, it now stands as an attraction in its own right in Tallaght.
That, Gray feels, is a positive development. “I think women’s football is growing in this country,” he says.
“The women’s team does us proud every week and we’re happy that they have a standalone event.
“The final was in Tallaght Stadium last year and it was a really good event. The last few years, it’s been averaging between 3,500 and 4,000 [people].
“The FAI is pushing it and we’re pushing it in our own marketing and commercial departments to sell more tickets.
“You want people to come, you want to improve the brand and you want to increase the numbers every year, so I think it’s great that it’s a standalone event.”
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