Athlone Town Women’s Rise to Be Captured in New Documentary Series

Athlone Town’s women’s team will feature in a new four-part documentary following a season in which they won a third successive Women’s Premier Division title, played Champions League football and reached a fifth consecutive FAI Cup final.

The Town, produced in partnership with IRIS Productions, has followed Lily Agg’s squad throughout 2026 and will continue filming for another month. Talks are under way with broadcasters and streaming platforms in Ireland and abroad, although the series does not yet have a confirmed home.

The producers have arrived at a fairly good time.

Athlone only entered the national league in 2020. Two years later they finished runners-up in both the league and FAI Cup, then beat Shelbourne on penalties to lift their first major trophy in 2023. A maiden league title followed in 2024, before a league and cup double in 2025. This season brought a third championship in a row, something no Women’s Premier Division club had managed before.

Going from newcomers to the team everyone else is chasing in six seasons would give any documentary enough football to work with. The medals, though, only tell part of what has been happening in Athlone.

Much of the squad remains part-time, with players combining football with jobs and education. Police officers, baristas and students sit alongside professional players in the same group, while training generally takes place three evenings a week.

That is where The Town has the chance to show something supporters rarely see in football documentaries. One player can be preparing for European football while another is arranging the exact same session around work or college. Athlone have a full-time head coach and a team capable of winning three leagues in succession, but the working week behind those results can look very different depending on whose boots you are standing in.

IRIS executive producer Kieran Hartigan said those lives away from matchday are central to the series:

“The heart of the series is everything happening around those 90 minutes: their jobs, relationships, injuries, personalities, sacrifices and decisions that the scoreboard doesn't reflect.”

The football itself has hardly been short of material either. Athlone have maintained their success through a period of considerable change in the dugout.

Ciarán Kilduff left after delivering the 2024 league title. Colin Fortune succeeded him, John Sullivan began the 2026 campaign in charge and departed after one league match, before Agg arrived in May on a full-time, two-and-a-half-year contract. Four permanent managers in less than two years is normally the sort of sequence followed by plenty of talk about patience and rebuilding. Athlone went and won the league again.

Agg took over after the side had briefly slipped from top spot and guided them to another championship, another FAI Cup final and a Champions League qualifying victory over ZFK Skopje. Polish champions Czarni Sosnowiec ended their European run, while Shelbourne denied Athlone another domestic double with a 3-1 win in Sunday’s cup final.

Even that defeat came in Athlone’s fifth consecutive FAI Cup final. Trips to the decider are beginning to look suspiciously like an annual booking.

All of that gives the series another useful story to tell about the Women’s Premier Division. Professional contracts are becoming more common, coaching structures have improved and clubs are putting more resources into their women’s teams, yet plenty of players are still trying to build elite sporting careers around ordinary working weeks.

Athlone capture that stage of the league particularly well. Their dressing room can contain internationals and professional players alongside teammates heading back to work or college. They have full-time coaching, European fixtures and three league titles in a row, while training still needs to work around the lives players have outside football.

Four episodes spent inside that world could tell viewers far more than another general discussion about how quickly the women’s game is developing.

Where the series eventually ends up will decide how wide that audience becomes. Women’s Premier Division clubs do not often get hours of television to introduce their players and personalities to people who have never watched the league. European football can produce a few nights of attention before everybody moves on again. The Town gives Athlone the possibility of keeping people around long enough to actually know who they are watching.

There is plenty to introduce them to. A senior team that entered the national league in 2020 now has three consecutive titles, five consecutive cup finals and Champions League football on its recent CV.

And somewhere behind all of that are players finishing training on a Tuesday night knowing the alarm is still going off for work or college the following morning.

That might end up being the most interesting footage of the lot.