Barcelona Gaels targeting history in emotional return for Irish expats

The Barcelona Gaels have history in their sights. 

After winning the European Gaelic football championship in September, the team of Irish expats in Catalonia qualified for the Leinster Junior Championship and are now aiming to become the first ever European side to defeat an Irish team.

They travel to county Kilkenny this weekend to take on Conahy Shamrocks on Saturday, November 2, in what will be a culmination of a year of hard work. But Gaels chairperson Eoin McCall says the team isn’t getting carried away with the excitement and are focusing on the task at hand. 

“We're not going to make up the numbers,” McCall tells Catalan News the day before flying to Ireland for the historic encounter. “We’re not going for the craic, to get our picture taken, have a couple of pints, and come back again. We're going there to make a serious dent and hoping to stay for a couple of weeks.” 

Playing in the 18-000 seater Nowlan Park is a “huge opportunity,” McCall says, adding to the motivation.” “The mood in camp is very, very positive.”

“We've a really strong team, we're very confident,” McCall says. "That's not to say that we're expecting to win, we wouldn't be saying that, but sure we're very very confident in our own abilities, that we can go out there and really make a statement, and we want to be that team that makes history.”

Emotional return for expats

The story of the Barcelona Gaels, like any Gaelic football team outside of Ireland, is one of emigration – their success is built on the back of so many young people having to leave Ireland and set up a new life for themselves elsewhere. 

Now, after qualifying for this historic Leinster Junior Championship match, these expats have given themselves the chance to return to their home country through sporting infrastructure they may have thought they had left behind.  

The Gaels chairperson points out that for many of the club’s players, “their parents haven’t watched them play football in years, and that’s such a normal thing for your family to come and watch, but that’s something these people have lost out on.”

Now, the emotional return to Ireland is another “huge motivating factor” for the team. “That’s what gets you through those cold nights in February when you’re training in the mud or in August when it’s 30 or 33 degrees.”

McCall admits that the housing crisis in Ireland has, in its own way, helped the Barcelona Gaels grow as a club, with more and more numbers. “People of our age can't afford to live in Ireland, so they're having to look abroad. Barcelona obviously being a tech hub and relatively affordable to live in, rents are a bit high but the cost of living is very low, we've just been very lucky that we've had an influx of Irish people coming into the city.”

The chairperson is also proud of how well-established as a club the Barcelona Gaels are, beyond the success of the men’s senior team that have qualified to travel to Ireland. McCall points out that the club offer players two training sessions a week of a “quite high” standard, and the club also cater for people who've never played the sport before, with both a senior and intermediate teams for both men and women. 

Through sport and beyond it, “we provide a community for people when they're away from home and I think that that's the reason, as much as anything, for the growth of the club.”

“Significant financial burden”

Playing Gaelic football abroad is a labour of love for any Irish person who does it, but having this level of success is also financially burdensome too. 

Gaels players have paid around €1,000 just to play this season alone, McCall estimates, and the trip to Ireland will cost each player around €350. Should they beat Conahy Shamrocks, they’ll be looking at another trip to Ireland the following week, with another journey of roughly €350 per person again.

They’ve been given a grant by the European and Leinster boards, but McCall estimates that the figure is worth around €50 per person for the trip. 

Fundraising is a quintessential part of the GAA community experience, and it’s no different for the players on the Catalan coast. “We've been doing a huge fundraising drive, we've raised just over €8,000 now, but that's not just for this trip, that's to support all the members throughout the year, the ladies' teams and everything.”

Their target is to raise €10,000, and anybody can donate at this link if they want to support the Barcelona Gaels Gaelic football team. 

“We're grateful for the help that we do get but it's still a significant financial burden for people,” the club chair says. “But, the reason why we're playing in these games is to put ourselves in this position, so that's why on the club side we're trying to fundraise as much as possible and reduce that burden for people.” 

Journey so far

To make it this far, their season started last December and took in a clean sweep of four trophies at the Iberian Championships in May before they took the continental crown for the first time. “We’re used to six-week on-off periods, but training numbers have been excellent throughout,” McCall says. “Given the nature of the game we have coming up, we don’t really take much of a break.” 

Given that the Gaels made the previous two European finals, losing both to Amsterdam before finally defeating Berlin this year, McCall says the team has barely had much of a break for nearly “three years.”

The Barcelona Gaels take on Conahy Shamrocks this Saturday in the Leinster Junior Football Championship in Nowlan Park, Kilkenny, Ireland. 

Anyone interested in watching the game can do so on the Clubber.ie platform.