Eimear Ryan: The rise of AFLW means a crisis is looming for the LGFA
50 UP: Cora Staunton (left) scored her 50th AFLW goal at the weekend. Pic: Michael Willson/AFL via Getty Images
Half a world away, AFLW season has started, and a record 22 Irishwomen have entered the fray across the league’s 18 teams. The AFLW now rivals the men’s league in terms of the breadth of competition, and while it is still technically semi-pro, a collective bargaining agreement ahead of the new season has ensured that all players will earn at least $39,184 (roughly €27,000), with top tier players receiving $71,935 (around €50,000).
In its short life, the league has become fiercely competitive, with ever-increasing salaries, access to professional facilities, and All-Ireland final-level hype and media coverage around each and every fixture.
The Irishwomen have made their presence felt from round 1. Meath’s Vikki Wall and Cork’s Erika O’Shea made their debuts for the North Melbourne Kangaroos; the evergreen Cora Staunton scored three goals to reach a career milestone of 50 goals and become the league’s second highest all-time scorer; Orla O’Dwyer slotted two goals for the Brisbane Lions and was named MVP for their opening game.
The league’s growing cultural importance – not just in Ireland or Australia, but worldwide – is evident in the fact that a new multi-episode documentary, , has just begun streaming on Disney+.
Focusing on four clubs – Collingwood, the Adelaide Crows, the Western Bulldogs and the GWS Giants – the documentary takes us into the gyms, homes and playing fields of a handful of players at each club. If you are in any way emotionally invested in the progress of women’s sports, be warned: I already had something in my eye by the time the opening credits rolled.
Episode 1 kicks off in the Adelaide Crows camp with captain Chelsea Randall. She describes her induction into the sport at age 11, filling in on the local boys’ team. Her story took me straight back to my own experiences playing underage hurling as a kid: ‘The opposition spotted me with my ponytail and lost it laughing.’
Her response, however, was spunkier than anything I ever attempted: ‘So I just picked the prick that was laughing the hardest and tackled him into the ground in the first 30 seconds … I thought “I kinda like this game”.’
In Melbourne, we meet Amanda Ling, a 19-year-old rookie for the Western Bulldogs. Lingy, as she’s known on the pitch (‘Don’t call me Amanda,’ she tells one coach, ‘it’s so weird’), gets her first start for the Bulldogs in the opening episode. It’s not the dream start she wanted; as the game unfolds, in her own words, she ‘got in her own head.’
She breaks down in the dressing-room after the game, in a stark reminder that sport is not just about friendship, excellence and enjoyment, but also failure and disappointment. This young player’s identity is so tied up in the sport that when she fails to meet her own high standards, she experiences a crushing low on an existential level.
‘If I’m not that [good at sport],’ Ling confesses to camera, ‘what am I?’ At the GWS Giants, the main protagonist is – unsurprisingly, given her extraordinary story – Cork’s own Brid Stack. This is the emotional core of the first episode, as Stack – with several energetic cameos from her young son – relates to camera the serious injury incurred in a pre-season game soon after she arrived in Sydney in early 2021.
She relates how her teammates rallied around her and her family, despite only knowing her two weeks; when she gets her first start for the Giants after a long road to recovery, and her teammates envelop her in hugs, it’s hard not to cry along with her.
Elsewhere, Giants coach Alan McConnell, who recruited Cora Staunton as the league’s first international signing back in 2018, gives fascinating insights into his interest in Irish players. He recruited Staunton and Stack ‘not just because of their athleticism and their ability to play football, but because they’re winners.’ Cue footage of Stack scoring a point in one of her eleven All-Ireland victories in Croke Park. ‘I was handy enough, yeah,’ she allows.
Finally, at Collingwood – the biggest Aussie rules club in the country, and home to Sarah Rowe and Aishling Sheridan – the squad is energised by the arrival of Bri Davey from Carlton, widely acknowledged as the best player in the league. Like Randall, she describes playing Aussie rules as a kid until being told, aged 12, that this was the end of the line for her as a girl.
She pivoted to soccer, playing her club football in Sweden and becoming Australia’s national goalkeeper for a time. But when the AFLW was inaugurated in 2017, she came back to her first sporting love. She describes playing for Carlton in the first-ever game: ‘There were women bawling their eyes out in the crowd. I’m not only representing myself but all the women who missed out and never got an opportunity to play.’
That is the overwhelming sense you get from this documentary – these players never take playing at pro level for granted, because it was never promised, let alone guaranteed to them.
It was certainly never promised to the Irish contingent. There are advantages that a brand-new sport has over a long-running, slow-burning one: namely, that if you are formed in 2017 as opposed to 1974, there are certain expectations in place in terms of standards, player welfare, and equality with the men’s game.
A crisis is looming for ladies football: increasingly, their marquee players will be recruited by Aussie rules clubs, and those clubs’ demands on their players’ time will only increase, especially as the AFLW moves towards a fully professional model.
Eventually, dual ladies football/AFLW players will be a thing of the past. The decision for the players will not be difficult: one sport expects them to be entirely self-funded, while the other pays their bills. If the LGFA wants to become more than a feeder system for the AFLW, they will need to act quickly.
