Oct 24,2024
On Saturday week, Barcelona Gaels will make history when they become the first Iberian team to compete in the Leinster Club Junior Football Championship.
They'll travel to Kilkenny to take on Conahy Shamrocks at UPMC Nowlan Park, intent on adding more chapters to the story of their remarkable rise.
Barcelona Gaels enter the Leinster JFC as European champions - they beat Berlin GAA 4-15 to 3-09 in Maastricht last month to clinch the crown and set up a trip to the Emerald Isle.
It's just reward for a club that has grown exponentially over the last few years, with the men's and women's sections enjoying impressive growth.
"Especially since Covid, we've seen a massive boost within the club in terms of people moving to Barcelona – people either working remotely or people just deciding to move here.
"Look, it’s two hours from home, it’s really nice weather, it's a great standard of football. It’s hard for people not to want to move here. It’s really booming within Barcelona and then obviously across Iberia and Europe as well.
"The vast majority (of the players) would be Irish. We’d have quite a few Catalans involved with us, we’d have Australians as well. But the vast majority would be Irish.
"It’s hard to walk down the street at the minute without hearing an Irish accent. There’s a lot of Irish living here and that’s a great thing for us as a club. It really help us to improve numbers and participation, and then the success we’ve had in the last few years as well."
"We've two huge events in the history of the club happening on the same day about 3,000 miles apart."
In a neat piece of symmetry, former Barcelona Gaels player Eoin Kennedy helped Cuala to win their first ever Dublin senior football title with a late score against Kilmacud Crokes in Parnell Park.
"Eoin was in Barcelona very briefly," McCall recalled. "He arrived maybe two weeks before Covid so he got to play one tournament with our intermediate team, then he gets a winner in the Dublin senior final!
"He got to play one tournament for our intermediate side and everyone was really excited and happy to have him, then unfortunately Covid happened. Football had to go on the back burner, but it’s good he was able to take whatever he learned in those two weeks and apply it back to Cuala!"
Kennedy's cameo in Spain signifies the transient nature of the club and sheer volume of Irish men and women moving across Europe to pursue opportunities.
And while the trip to Nowlan Park will be a monumental day out for the club, it's not the only significant date they have on the calendar.
"On the 2 November we also have a Gaelic 4 Mothers and Others blitz in Barcelona as well," McCall added.
"We’re going to have about 150 women coming over to play football here plus spectators and everything like that, while our men’s side are going to be in Ireland. We’ve two huge events in the history of the club happening on the same day about 3,000 miles apart.
"But we’ll take it as it is. It’s a great situation to be in. They are good problems to have."
These are heady times indeed for the club but such progress comes at a cost.
The logisitical and financial strains are obvious, with McCall admitting it requires a serious commitment from everyone involved to keep things moving forward.
"Our regional championship would be Iberia and our county championship would be Europe," he said.
"Within Iberia, that’s broken down again, so our closest team would be Sitges which is an hour away, Madrid and Valencia, which are three hours away. We’d play off maybe three blitz tournaments against them, then have an Iberian finals in May with teams from the south of Spain and then the Europe championships would be in either Maastricht or Rennes.
"Everyone who is a part of this club is paying about €1,000 in travel but they’re doing it because they really love doing it. They do it because they’re part of a really good community here.
"If we win that game in Leinster, which is what we’re 100% aiming to do, we want to make history and be the first European team not just to win in Leinster but have a really good rattle through it, we’d be back out the week after.
"So there is a case where you’re flying two and half hours to potentially fly two and half hours back to Barcelona to get a training session in, and then fly straight back the weekend after.
"These are great problems to have, but they are problems at the same time."
