A DANCER. An artist. A joy.
Ask people to talk about how Sinéad Farrelly plays football and there’s an ebullient consensus.
“She’s kind of like an artist, you’re not sure what’s going to come out but you know that she’s very capable of making a great song or a great painting when she plays because she’s got that creativity. That is hard to teach,” her college coach Steve Swanson says during a recent phone call with The 42.
“It’s something just so natural and pure to watch you play,” her former teammate Michelle Betos tells Farrelly herself on the podcast, Counter Attack.
“And I think that’s a gift. It looks like dance. Like you’re dancing on the ball. Like you’re smooth as you go. It looks like what I believe it’s supposed to look like when you’re meant to do something.”
On the same show, her mom reminds her: “You loved chasing after something.
“You had a swagger about you. But win or lose, there was always a big smile on your face. It was fun to see.”
If this was a movie, there’d be one of those zip-back-through-time montages, and we’d see a young nine-year-old watching the US Women’s National Team win the World Cup in 1999. Farrelly and her best friend Bridget would be lined up outside their homes in Haverton, Pennsylvania holding posters to implore passing motorists to ‘honk for the 99ers’.
They’d look wide-eyed into the cameras and put plain words on their dreams: they were going to be footballers.
We truly believed that we were the next 99ers. They were just us, grown up. We were like, that’s what happens when we grow up.”
In a different, Disney-version of this film, the zip-forward montage would show a jubilant Farrelly, amongst more experienced teammates, lining out with the US national team at a World Cup aged just 21.
As with life, football comes with unwelcome plot twists.
The scene we land on, instead, is located in Haverton, PA. It’s post-Covid and Farrelly, somehow, hasn’t even touched a football in almost seven years.
“My soul is screaming at me so much to just follow soccer wherever that takes me and I’m reclaiming that because I felt like that was taken and I want it back,” she tells 99er Briana Scurry in the Counter Attack podcast during the summer of 2022.
She has just started kicking around a football for the first time since 2015.
“It was like screaming at me but also like a quiet whisper”: she expands on the theme with me in Dublin in summer 2023. “Do you know what I’m saying? It didn’t take until I quit my job and took time off. It was when I had no distractions, that I was like, ‘Wow, this is a really prominent voice’.
“It was always a hope. I wanted to play at the highest level and do this. But at the time, I just didn’t know what was possible and I had so much self-doubt.”
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star.
Back to May 2011. An injury had opened up a spot on the US women’s national team roster ahead of the World Cup and Farrelly’s sliding doors narrative takes shape.
To date, she was everything that the 1999 team wanted their legacy to be. A young girl, growing up with an eye to a future in football, a paid future. A more-than-stellar highlights reel from her time at university playing with the Virginia Cavaliers – and appearances for America at U15 right through to the U23s – would pave a path to a professional contract.
In the 2011 college draft, she was picked second after Alex Morgan, now one of the most decorated and famous footballers on the planet.
“I always knew she would be one of the most sought after players,” recalls Swanson, the head coach at the University of Virginia where Farrelly played between 2007 and 2010.
“She never had a bad year for us. She was always just getting better and better and better. And it wasn’t all of a sudden. Once she got to college, she instantly impacted [the team].
“Everybody knew what she could do. And then it was just a matter of okay, what kind of player do you want? Whether she would go one or two [in the draft]. I’ve coached a lot of very good players, and Sinéad, she’s just a special talent.”
What made her stand out?
“When I first saw Sinéad play, it was clear she was just so good with a ball at her feet. But she was also very agile – she could stop and start so quickly and could run all day.
“She’s got such a creative side because she’s so good on the ball. And she sees things that maybe others don’t. And then the other thing that stood out to me is just how much enjoyment she looked like she had when she was playing the game.
So she’s always had that kind of romantic, 10-year-old disposition when she plays.
“It always looks like it’s the most fun thing in the world for her to do is to play soccer.”
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star. A survivor.
Philadelphia Independence were equally sold on Farrelly’s ability in midfield, making her their pick in the draft.
Their coach, Paul Riley, himself had a growing reputation. In Farrelly’s own words, “He took good players and he made them great. He knew better than other coaches. He knew better than other teams. He knew what was best for you.
“The way that players talked about him, the way he was with his coaching staff… he was at the top. He made all the rules. Everyone listened, everyone respected him. He was in full power.”
The Englishman had big plans for Farrelly in Philadelphia. Speaking to reporters when she joined, he said: “A lot is expected of her and I’ll be shocked if she’s not in the lineup early in the season because she is the most complete player in the draft. She is the one thing that will make a team tick.”
Farrelly was performing at a level her family and friends always anticipated for her but away from the pitch, none of the standards that came with those predictions were being met.
As well as the professional league being in financial difficulties, Riley had zoned in on Farrelly as not only someone he could control on the field, but a player he could rule over in all aspects of her life.
Farrelly would eventually come to learn the word for it: coercion.
Publicly, Riley told reporters that he expected the Pennsylvania native to make the US Olympic team in 2012 but figured the World Cup of 2011 would be ‘too soon’ for her.
But it shouldn’t have been.
That May, Lindsay Tarpley injured her knee and was ruled out of the summer competition, and Farrelly was offered the spot. But instead of that nine-year-old seeing out the timeline she set for herself, she said no.
No – to the US Women’s National Team. No – to the World Cup.
“I remember I couldn’t understand what were some of the reasons why she wouldn’t take this opportunity,” Swanson tells me. “But now when you look back and you see the pressure that her coach at that time [put on her], it makes a little more sense but it didn’t at the time.”
This is how Farrelly tells it to Scurry in Counter Attack: “The World Cup was coming up pretty soon. Erica Walsh was the assistant of the US team at that time and she had come to the game to get me and she was like, ‘Lindsay Tarpley just got hurt and we think you’d be a good fit. I’m gonna take you to camp with me. I know it’s last minute, but I figured I would just like come get you and bring you with me.”
Riley was not happy, and made that clear to Farrelly. She could have a successful time at Philly or the USWNT. She couldn’t have both.
I remember when I turned down the national team being like, ‘I can’t wait to tell Paul, he’s going to be so proud of me.’ And he was.”
That was only one of the casualties from Riley’s alleged misconduct.
Aged 47 and married, he began to make sexualised comments to a 21-year-old Farrelly.
He eventually moved from the verbal to the physical. This particular playbook wasn’t new or particularly innovative. Revisiting the first time he touched her – by grabbing her hips – she is candid with Scurry about its impact.
“That was like such a pivotal moment. It flashes through my brain. Because it just felt like the moment that I felt completely, like, imprisoned. It was like this decision had been made by him and I couldn’t go back on it.”
Riley had sex with Farrelly four times over the course of the years she spent playing on his teams – Philadelphia Independence, New York Fury and the Portland Thorns. Amongst the other episodes which left Farrelly depressed, despondent and lacking any self-confidence, he asked her to kiss a teammate, Mana Shim, in front of him as they attempted to leave his hotel room.
Riley denies all allegations, claiming he and Farrelly never had sex.
But Farrelly remembers the incidents clearly. Such as the time – in her own words – she and another player walked into a hotel room with Riley at the end of a night.
“And we literally like laid on the bed and he had sex with both of us. I remember being like out of my body watching. And I was so confused and disgusted. And I just remember being like, ‘This has happened before’.
“To not even talk about it, and just to know, that that was the next step to the night. This isn’t the first time this had to have happened with them. I was like, ‘This is just how it is… this is how it is in the pros. This is how growing up is I guess.”
In some ways, Farrelly was right. While she suffered the mental and physical consequences of the inappropriate actions of her coach, she didn’t know that similar scenes were playing out across women’s football.
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star. A survivor. A whistleblower.
In September 2015, Riley’s actions caught up with him in some ways. A perfunctory investigation was carried out following a complaint from Mana Shim at Portland Thorns, but Shim and Farrelly felt the system was protecting Riley, and not them.
“I felt totally let down and… lonely and sad and insignificant. I just felt like it minimised my whole experience,” Shim says on Counter Attack.
Farrelly hadn’t been ready to tell anybody about what had happened with Riley and the reaction of the Thorns felt like vindication of her position.
“They called me into the stadium. I wasn’t treated like I had anything to do with the incident. They wanted to know if what Mana was saying was true. They wanted to know who I told because it wasn’t going to be good for the club for people to find out. And it was like 20 minutes and that was it.”
The club terminated Riley’s contract, and although he was out of a job, it was not for long. The Thorns had thanked him in their closing statement and in her independent review into sexual misconduct in US women’s soccer, Sally Yates notes that the Thorns failed to disclose any pertinent information despite queries from other clubs.
So within five months, he had moved onto Western New York Flash and then North Carolina Courage.
Shim travelled to Sweden to play her football there, while Farrelly, to her shock, was traded to Boston.
It was not Riley who would disappear from the sport but Farrelly.
A car accident in Boston put paid to any attempt to move on from Riley’s actions. Only 27 years of age but suffering from concussion, whiplash and other injuries, she quietly retired and slipped away from the sport.
She had always thought she would never tell a soul about Riley. That they would ‘take it to their graves’.
But then the world order shifted after Harvey Weinstein and MeToo happened. Women started talking, sharing and coming up with a language that more accurately portrayed their experiences.
Coercion. Grooming.
“I was fucking livid,” Farrelly says with venom in a particularly memorable episode of Counter Attack.
She started talking. To her mom. To Bridget. To a therapist. To Michelle Betos. And it was healing.
She even called Paul Riley himself to tell him she had ‘finally figured out it was wrong’.
She reconnected with Mana Shim and, together, they blew the whistle.
Riley was still coaching. The league still didn’t seem safe for players. So they told them – the very top brass.
But not much happened. Bar excuses, of course.
There was more to be done. They approached Meg Linehan, a journalist with The Athletic.
“Sinéad called me maybe nine months before the story actually ran and told me,” remembers Swanson. “She was very open with me, there were a lot of tears that call because I think she just needed to get that out and I needed to listen to her.
“It made me incredibly sad to hear all the things that she went through but I was really glad that she could still trust and I was someone she could talk to and open up with.”
When The Athletic published in September 2021 after the months-long investigation, the consequences were seismic. People – many people – lost their jobs. A proper investigation and review process was established. Players, in the form of their association, started to amass true power.
Despite his denials, Riley is now banned from ever coaching in the NWSL.
Change was coming.
And not just for the league.
That voice inside Farrelly was getting louder and louder. By July 2022, it couldn’t be ignored.
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star. A survivor. A whistleblower. A footballer.
Riley, with his actions, had taken soccer and all of its possibilities and opportunities from her. It was time to reclaim it.
The start of the come-back looked like street ball – solo kicks against a wall and pick-up games with men.
Reflecting on those first few months, Farrelly uses phrases like ‘ups and downs’, ‘a rollercoaster’, and ‘not easy’.
“It’s been a lot physically but a lot emotionally and mentally as well. I think that I’ve had to fight a lot of demons on this road back,” she tells me in June 2023.
There was a strategy though: make sure the football (and the joy) is still there; get the fitness back; find a NWSL team.
“My college coach was really helpful to me on my journey back, even connecting me with teams in America to go train with and try out with.”
Swanson says there was little doubt about any of it.
“She came down and trained with us in Virginia… and I remember after a couple of weeks, I said, ‘Sinéad, I’m being honest here, but I feel like you’re just in college again.’
“For her, it was hard because her body is going through it – it was just harder for her to recover. But she looked every bit what I remember in college, and so I felt confident.
“I just felt it was a matter of time that Sinéad got played in – that she would do well at Gotham. What’s happening now with Sinéad does not surprise me at all. At all.”
Swanson and Farrelly had surveyed the landscape and NY/NJ Gotham FC had agreed to a try-out.
The club’s general manager Yael Averbuch West had played against Farrelly so knew the potential there.
She made the roster. Then she made the squad. And, now, she’s a regular – 11 matches under her belt between Gotham and Ireland.
“She’s doing amazingly,” says Averbuch West in Counter Attack. “She’s exciting to watch. She’s silky with the ball like the Sinéad I remember. I think the coolest part about watching her comeback is that she’s only at the beginning of the journey of who she can be again as a player.”
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star. A survivor. A whistleblower. A footballer. An Irish player.
Did you think your soul would lead you to Ireland?
“No,” Farrelly responded succinctly, but still thoughtfully, when I asked that question.
Swanson elaborated on the journey during which he echoed his 2011 sentiment to the player – “You gotta do this. You gotta give it a shot. You gotta go.”
He began with an email to Vera Pauw who he knew through his own international coaching. He acknowledges that he was probably part of a rush on the Dutch woman by people with Irish connections as qualification became a reality. But, he says, Farrelly’s Irish connections were always part of her story in Virginia.
With a father from Cavan, a stint living in Dublin as a child, and an obvious love for the country and its heritage, he felt it wasn’t a difficult sell.
“But I honestly would not have talked to her or reached out to her if I didn’t feel Sinéad could help,” he adds. “I knew that if Sinéad could get anywhere back to where she was; she can help any team. I felt that strongly about her.
“I just wanted to make sure that she knew about Sinéad, knew that Sinéad was interested, knew that Sinéad had citizenship and that she wanted to come back. And then my goal was to try to get Vera as much information about Sinéad as I could.”
That meant video. No modern day coach is going to waste real-life eyeballs on a player without doing their homework first.
But Sinéad hadn’t played in front of a camera for six years.
Swanson got the drones out at Virginia during that two-week camp. Farrelly was focused on her body with an eye to Gotham but Swanson had Australia/New Zealand in July 2023 on his mind: “We got just enough video where I felt I could give her a flavour of what Sinéad could do and sent it to Vera and to Juan Carlos at Gotham.”
Pauw has gone on record to say that short video was enough to more than pique her interest.
“At that moment, I said to my husband, ‘Come and have a look here’. Just those few touches; we saw it against USA that she buys time for others, not herself,” she said.
Now, she’s clear that Farrelly was the player this team had been looking for.
“It just shows her courage,” continues Swanson. “She did a great job. She just focused on one thing at a time. I think she focused on getting herself mentally in the right place, then physically in the right place. Then she focused on making an NWSL team in Gotham. And then she focused on Ireland and, thankfully, the timing worked out.”
That timing saw Farrelly join the Ireland team for their US training camp in April where Denise O’Sullivan described her as the best player during training.
“I knew seeing Sinéad coming into camp that she brought something to the team,” she tells me a couple of months later.
“She was technically fantastic with the ball at her feet and obviously she hadn’t played for a while so I was like, ‘Wow, this girl is is really good.’ Like, coming in here and not playing football for a while and to shine like that in camp was great to see. She made an impact from the minute she came in.”
In Pauw’s Ireland team, organisation and defence are key even for attack-minded midfielders.
Swanson believes she won’t be found wanting, especially in a results business like the World Cup group stages.
“Sinéad understands her role on the defensive side. Ireland are going to have be a good, well-organised, defensive team. They’re going to need everybody to defend. I think she’s always done the work, but can she find her moments to break teams down and to help create and to score goals? I think she can.
“Sinéad loves to get forward. I think she likes the freedom to express herself on the field. She can solve pressure. So what I would say is, when I look at her and I look at Ireland… They’ve got some really good players. They’re very organised but Sinéad is spontaneous and can solve pressure and can break teams down. I would say this for a lot of teams – a lot of teams don’t have some of the qualities that Sinéad has. They don’t have a player of her quality.”
Everyone who saw a beaming Pauw being interviewed after the April game in the US knew Farrelly had sealed a place on the plane to Brisbane with the Irish squad. Everyone except Farrelly herself.
“It was always a hope,” she says. “I wanted to play at the highest level and do this. But at the time, I just didn’t know what was possible and I had so much self-doubt. I can look back and be like, ‘it was there’, but 99% of me just didn’t think I could ever play soccer again in general. So I just had no idea, this is such a surprise,” she said a few minutes after being presented her official World Cup jersey.
“I think all of us who play at this level, we’re just anxious – like always. We want to be the best and perfect. There’s a lot of self doubt. For me, I have… patterns of negativity and criticism and self-doubt.”
Some of that anxiety was evident during her 75-or-so minutes playing France in Ireland’s send-off game earlier this month. But a few misplaced passes masked some of the less-showy strings to her bow, as well as her leadership, particularly during the first 30 minutes when the team kept pace with much higher-ranked opposition.
The job now is to banish the self-doubt and the anxiety, and to free that nine-year-old girl.
“I think I was stuck in the things that happened to me for a long time and it didn’t feel possible and now I’m kind of, not on the other side, but I’ve just broken through more than I thought was possible,” she says. “So I just want to let people know that they can do that as well.”
What does Farrelly think of football now?
“It’s been a rollercoaster since I’ve been back. It’s been amazing. I’ve felt so much joy, at times, with soccer. And that’s why I wanted to come back, to reclaim that for myself…
“I think it’s part of my healing process and I wouldn’t have chosen a different path. I just feel so grateful and blessed that I even get the opportunity to do that. Overall, it’s been amazing and beautiful.”
Swanson is rooting for that child-like spirit to emerge at Stadium Australia on Thursday evening. A smile on her face, friends by her side and a nod back to those 99ers and their most dedicated fans.
“With Sinéad, the more free she is, the more fun she’s having, the better for her,” he says with the animation you can imagine from a college coach who has stuck around for his kids for decades.
‘It’s an amazing story. And, you can probably sense it in my voice – I’m really proud of her. Every athlete has to go through adversity. They have to… but the adversity that she’s gone through, you don’t wish that on anybody. She’s been very courageous, very brave. She’s fought back and it’s what sport is all about.
“But she wants to be a part of it [with Ireland]. She wants to help. She wants to do what she can to help Ireland win. And that’s what she’s thinking. That’s what I love about her. That’s what everybody should love about her.
“And I think Ireland should feel great that they have somebody who loves the country, loves her heritage and plays hard all the time. You want somebody to play with the freedom that Sinéad plays with and play with a smile on her face. If she can do that, I think Sinéad could turn a lot of heads in Australia on 20 July.”
A dancer. An artist. A joy. A college star. A whistleblower. A survivor. A footballer. An Irish player. A World Cup debutant.
***
This piece was originally published on The 42. The Journal publishes the biggest breaking news in Irish and international sport but for all of The 42‘s insightful analysis and sharp sportswriting, subscribe here.
Listen to the Religion of Sport podcast Counter Attack here.
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