Kilkenny withdraw from women’s National Football League for next season

The Kilkenny women’s football team have withdrawn from next season’s National Football League, but the county will compete in the provincial and All-Ireland junior championships.

The decision not to enter the 2027 league was taken with a view to assembling and preparing a squad to be competitive in the championship.

Kilkenny have struggled to make an impact in the league since re-entering the competition in 2023 following a three-year absence, failing to win a match in Division 4 in four seasons.

Kilkenny will contest both the Leinster junior championship, which starts in mid-April, and the All-Ireland junior championship next season, with a management team already in place, fronted by new manager Peter Dobbyn.

“We got permission from Croke Park to pull out of the National League next year,” said Kilkenny LGFA chairperson Joe Fox.

“The rationale behind our thinking on that is in terms of how you would normally start training around the first of December. You have Christmas and everything in between and then the league starts at the end of January. We found we weren’t getting a chance to build up a good training base or build any momentum.

“Because the next thing you were playing in the league, suffering heavy defeats and it just wasn’t allowing any chance to build.

“The players have been brilliant and the people over them have been brilliant to go out and face those hidings and keep going. We just wanted to give them the best chance possible of making improvements and felt if we got permission to pull out of the league next year, we could train the team together up until April and see how we get on then in the championship.”

The decision means Kilkenny will be the only county not represented in either the men’s or women’s National Football Leagues in 2027.

Kilkenny won the All-Ireland junior women’s football championship in 2007. Last December, Muckalee made history for the county in beating Kerry side Cromane to claim the All-Ireland junior club women’s football title having been the first Kilkenny club to contest an All-Ireland football decider.

“To be fair, we’re in a hurling and camogie county so it’s not easy,” Fox added. “We don’t get the best 15 footballers, and that’s understandable – the girls are going to play camogie if they can get on that team.

“But we hope by training a group consistently for a few months now, it will give us a chance to build up a team and help us to make progress and be competitive.”