Of all the things that will pick away at Pádraic Joyce now that he has stepped down as Galway manager, maybe the one that will annoy him most is that they were good enough to be better. Some managers leave teams knowing they got the very last drop out of the players available, some walk away knowing they hadn’t the tools in the first place. Joyce wouldn’t have much truck with either assessment here.
In the seven seasons he was over Galway, five different counties won the All-Ireland. Of those five, Kerry are the only team Galway didn’t beat in a championship game somewhere along the way. Armagh, Dublin, Tyrone, Mayo – Joyce’s Galway teams were well fit for each of them on a given day. They knocked Donegal out in Jim McGuinness’s first year back, put Derry to the sword in 2022 when they were clearly a coming force.
And yet in the past two seasons, the only teams they’ve knocked out of the championship have been Westmeath this year and Down last year. They went out at the quarter-final stage to a middling Dublin team this summer and surprise package Meath in 2025. They coughed up winning positions both days – six up with 15 minutes to go against Dublin, three up with eight left on the clock against Meath.
If you want to pick a theme of the Joyce era, that’s definitely one of them. For all of their abundant talents at both ends of the pitch, his Galway teams routinely failed to kick on when critical games were in the balance. Even in their two All-Ireland final appearances, they were right there in the mix in the last 10 minutes against Kerry in 2022 and Armagh in 2024 but didn’t get it done.
That’s probably why it all feels a bit unfulfilled, now that Joyce is leaving. It’s not necessarily because they didn’t lift Sam Maguire, although that’s invariably the metric by which the two-time All-Ireland winner will measure his time. It’s more that they too often seemed to slither out of the championship, watching from the sidelines as teams with fewer premium players to call on forged onwards.
The sense of wasted promise will linger. Galway are the only team this decade to have had four different players shortlisted for Footballer of the Year. They’ve had four different players on the shortlist for Young Footballer award too, all in the past five years. Beyond those, they were able to call on All Stars in the shape of Damien Comer, Rob Finnerty, Dylan McHugh and the rest.
In fact, Joyce ends his time having managed the same number of players to All Stars (10) as were on the Galway teams he starred for around the turn of the century. Whatever they lacked during his time, the raw materials were demonstrably in place to go further than they did.
He probably could have done with a bit more luck, it’s true. His first season was the Covid year and Galway were flying in the league that spring, top of the Division One table on March 1st. They never got out of the traps when they came back in October, losing their last two league games and going into the Connacht final undercooked after Sligo had to give them a Covid-enforced walkover. They still only lost to Mayo by a point.
Comer was only fit for the last 20 minutes of that game, laid low for neither the first nor last time by uncooperative hamstrings. If you wanted to pick another theme from the Joyce era, that’s high on the list too. Comer, Shane Walsh, Seán Kelly, Matthew Tierney – all of them missed significant time with injury. Finnerty had to come off after just 10 minutes of the 2024 final against Armagh. Matthew Thompson was the big find of 2025, only to miss 2026 entirely.
But then again, as Joyce repeatedly said when asked, everyone gets injuries. Galway’s tended to attract attention because of the names involved, but you have to get up and get on regardless. The environment he fostered didn’t make the Galway dressingroom a place for excuses and Joyce never put a tooth in it when talking about his team and their potential and his expectations of them.
There was a league game against Dublin in 2025 where he whipped off Finnerty on 32 minutes and Walsh at half-time. Simpering cowards that we are in the press corps, we offered to Joyce afterwards that maybe the lads might have had a knock or two? Nope. “They missed about 2-10 between them, so we had to get someone to try and score on to the pitch.”
Harsh? Maybe. Spitting truths? Absolutely. If you want a third and final theme of the Joyce era, that’s it. He never pretended to be anyone else. He is remembered as a prince of a footballer, stylish as hell with a wand of a left foot. But he was a flinty winner above all else and he had very little time for the notion of Galway being mediocre also-rans.
After they won Sam in 2001, Galway made it back to just one All-Ireland semi-final in the next 18 years until Joyce took over. In only eight of those years did they even make it to the quarter-final. They went out of the championship to Westmeath, Meath, Wexford, Antrim, Tipperary and a pre-McGuinness Donegal. They were never a factor at the business end of things.
Joyce came in at the back end of 2019 and immediately started talking about All-Irelands. This, remember, was at a time when Dublin had just completed a five-in-a-row and everyone else was a mile back the road. He never saw it out but he led them to two finals, as well as putting together their first Connacht four-in-a-row since the 1960s. By any measure, he has left them in a better place than he found them.
That would satisfy most people. But Pádraic Joyce isn’t most people. He’s still only 49 and the job feels unfinished. It wouldn’t be a shock if he came back for another swing at it somewhere down the line.