With her legacy and financial future assured, what’s next for Katie Taylor?The Bray fighter bowed out with a final win at Croke Park on Saturday night. Mon, 07 Sep, 2026 – 01:00Brendan O’Brien, Croke Park
The ring that had just staged her last bout was already dismantled and packed away into a handful parked vans by the time Katie Taylor made it to her post-fight presser in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Time and the business of boxing wait for no man or woman. Not even her. Eddie Hearn and Matchroom will move on to the next promotion. The rest of the fighters on the Croke Park bill will take some time and stock before stepping up on the treadmill again.
Taylor stares into a vast, unknowable space, like so many before.
The stories and the statistics are legion. The avalanches of Premier League and NFL players who declare bankruptcies or end up divorced so soon after stepping away. The emotional tolls to be paid. The harsh realities of what athletes call their first death.
“When a jockey retires he becomes just another little man,” said the American Eddie Arcaro who, 62 years after he quit the saddle, is still the only rider to have won the US Triple Crown of races – the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes – twice.
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Katie Taylor crafts her perfect ending: “This was definitely the highlight of my whole career”
Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, a former WBA lightweight world champion, held similar thoughts. “Since I’ve retired I eat less, weigh less, train less and care less,” he once put it. Both men did well in their ‘second’ lives, incidentally, but their struggles were real.
In a way, retirement is toughest opponent of them all.
What will Katie Taylor do next?
Alan Minter, an undisputed middleweight champ back in the early 80s, once joked that there were two reasons why boxers made comebacks: they were either broke, or they needed the money. Taylor shouldn’t slip into either category.
A purse of roughly €3m is expected to land in her account for her efforts in Croke Park. She banked over €7m for just the last of her three meetings with Amanda Serrano, and it is isn’t just the money here either. Far, far from it.
Everything about her send-off was as close to perfect as could be. As Irish sporting retirements go, it sits top of the tree, toppling Brian O’Driscoll’s long farewell in 2014, when he signed off with a Six Nations title, into a distant second place.
If Brian Peters has his way then the next time we see Taylor will be in some parish hall in Inisbofin and a necklace of other unlikely settings around Ireland where she will link up with Steve Bunce as part of a nationwide stage play called ‘Her Story’.
“It’s going to be quite magical,” said the promoter.
The idea of Taylor voluntarily travelling the length and breadth of the country regaling people about herself is incompatible with the Katie we came to know in some small way down the years, but then second acts are notoriously unpredictable.
Who would have foreseen a future where Roy Keane morphed into a media célèbre and darling of the TV ad department? No-one could have imagined the car crash that would become of Bill Belichick’s public life and image when he became an ex-Patriot.
Taylor was noticeably more vocal than ever before in the last week, so much so that Eddie Hearn joked about how long she spoke in the ring when handed a mic immediately after her classy defeat of Flora Pili.
She has a voice, we don’t know yet how or if she will use it.
“I determined very, very early on in my career not to talk but to show my boxing skills and just to let my excellence do the talking and let my talent do the talking,” she explained on Sunday morning.
“And I’ve kept to that throughout my whole career.” Those skills could still be put to good use. It seems certain that Taylor will stay involved in boxing in one form or another, but even that likelihood opens up as many doors as it might close with coaching one obvious route to explore.
Her influence on one generation of Irish fighters, male and female, has been profound. Legions have said as much. The sight of her sparring with ten-year old Clodagh Keating last week shows the hold she already has on generation next.
Taylor was asked specifically if a role in Irish boxing might be possible and joked that attempts to convince her husband to move here from their home in Connecticut might not have “gone down very well”. They have six children to consider in all this too.
If boxing remains a constant in her life then there will be others besides. Family, clearly, but also that strong religious faith that was there for all to see and hear at the weekend as she walked to the ring to the tune of ‘All Hail King Jesus’.
She was asked specifically about those beliefs after and responded by explaining how clinging to her faith and what she believes is the word of God sustained her through the low times, among them her heartbreak at the Olympics in Brazil in 2016.
“Look what God’s done. He’s done the impossible in my lifetime and he’s came through time and time again. And that’s what I was saying in the ring afterwards and giving him all the glory and the honour for all that I’ve achieved.” Whether that faith continues to frame her public life, whether she even has anything resembling a public life beyond that planned stage play of which she seemed to know little in the hours after her last fight, is just one of the known unknowns for now.
That open declaration of faith is something that fits more seamlessly into the sporting strand of an America that she now calls home than in Ireland where the relationship with religion and it’s place in our society is in a far more fluid place.
It’s testimony to her almost universal popularity that it has never acted as a counter argument among a public whose adoration of her spilled off the horseshoe-shaped stands of Croke Park deep into the September night.
Her’s is a status, not just in Irish sport, but in the Irish public consciousness that seems to have no equal, it’s hold all the more meaningful maybe because no-one has yet been able to quite put their finger on the exact whys of it all.
That includes Taylor herself.
“I don’t know, to be quite honest. I think people, the whole country, has seen me and my good times and they have also seen me during my devastations as well. I think people really resonate with your vulnerabilities as much as your successes.
“They see me cope with the heartbreak of Rio. They see me cope with the heartbreak of the shadow of loss. They see me in the, just, personal difficulties as well. So yeah, I think my story is the story of everybody in the whole country.” Her story? It’s not all been told yet.
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