Ladies Football's Class of 2026 and the County Jerseys Behind the All-Stars
The 2026 TG4 Ladies Football All-Star nominations were revealed this week, and like every long list it doubles as a snapshot of the season just gone. Galway, fresh from their All-Ireland win, top the shortlist with fourteen of the forty-five nominees; Kerry, the side they beat, sit next with twelve. The rest is spread across the country, from Cork to Mayo to Meath. The full team will be named at a banquet in Dublin on 14 November.
Read it as a team-sheet and it is a list of very good footballers. Read it the way a jersey obsessive does and it is something else: a map of the women's championship told in county colours — maroon, green and gold, orange, sky blue — and a reminder of the half of the GAA whose kit almost nobody talks about.
The summer Galway's maroon won Sam again
Galway's haul makes sense once you remember the summer they had. On 2 August 2026 they met Kerry in the TG4 All-Ireland Senior Championship final at Croke Park and won it 2-7 to 0-12, a low-scoring, nervy decider settled in the closing minutes. It was Galway's first senior title since 2004 — a 22-year wait for the county's footballers to get their hands on the Brendan Martin Cup again.
A final like that does for a jersey what it always does. The maroon Galway shirt was already one of the more handsome county jerseys in the game; now a whole cohort of supporters will keep the 2026 edition folded away as the one they wore the day the wait ended. That is how a county jersey earns its meaning — not in a design studio, but on an afternoon nobody in the county will forget.
A nominations list that reads like a county-colours chart
The pleasure of a long list, for anyone who thinks about kit, is the range of colours on it. Galway's fourteen and Kerry's twelve dominate, but the nominations pull in counties whose jerseys rarely get a national airing — and every one of them is instantly readable from the far side of a stand. That legibility is the whole point of a county jersey: you should know who is who from distance, in bad light, at a glance. The women's game has exactly the same visual grammar as the men's, because in almost every case it is wearing the same colours and the same crest.
Which is the odd thing. For all that the ladies football and camogie championships now fill Croke Park, the jerseys those players wear have been treated, for most of their history, as an afterthought.
Why ladies' GAA county jerseys are the overlooked half of the game
Ask a casual fan to picture a county jersey and they will picture the men's team. Yet the ladies football and camogie sides wear county colours that are, in most places, identical — the same green and gold for Kerry, the same maroon for Galway, the same sky blue for Dublin. For years the women's teams often ran out in a jersey designed for the men and simply reissued, sometimes with a different cut, sometimes not even that.
That is starting to change, and the kit is where you can see it. Several counties have moved to a single unified county jersey worn across all four codes — men's football, ladies football, hurling and camogie — launched together rather than as separate afterthoughts. Dublin's most recent jersey did exactly that, revealed as one design for every code. It is a small administrative decision with a real cultural weight: it says the ladies gaelic football jersey and the camogie jersey are the county jersey, not a spin-off of it.
The LGFA jersey is a collector's blind spot
For anyone building a GAA jersey collection, the women's game is a blind spot worth correcting. An LGFA jersey or a camogie shirt from a championship-winning season is every bit the historical object a men's jersey is — arguably more interesting, because far fewer people thought to keep them. The 2026 Galway shirt is a case in point: a title-year jersey from a 22-year drought, and one that most collections will not have a copy of. Scarcity plus a story is exactly the formula that makes a jersey worth chasing.
The county jersey as the through-line
What the All-Star list really underlines is how much a county jersey carries beyond any one team. The colours on that shortlist did not arrive with this generation of footballers; they were chosen generations ago, for club or diocesan or entirely accidental reasons, and they have been worn by everyone since. When Galway's maroon turns up on fourteen nominees, it is the same maroon the county wore in 2004, and long before. That continuity is why county colours end up meaning so much more than a season — it is the same instinct that turned Mayo's green and red into one of the most iconic GAA jerseys of them all, and it applies to the women's game just as completely.
It is also what makes GAA kit so much better to collect than most sports. A county jersey is never just this year's squad; it is a little archive of everyone who ever pulled it on, women and men, and of the years those colours stood for. Half the fun is in the range of it — thirty-two counties, four codes, and a different story stitched into every set of colours. That is the ground plenty of collectors of retro GAA jerseys have been quietly working for years.
A collection that finally tells the whole story
If the women's game has been the overlooked half of GAA kit culture, the fix is simple enough: stop overlooking it. Treat the ladies football and camogie county jerseys as what they are — the same colours, the same crest, the same history, worn by the other half of the association — and a jersey collection suddenly tells the full story of a county rather than a partial one.
That is part of the appeal of a mystery Gaelic football shirt, where the county and the era inside the box are a surprise and the fun is in the reveal. Every county's colours are somebody's favourite, and every one of them — women's and men's alike — has an afternoon like Galway's 2 August waiting somewhere in its history. The All-Star list is just this year's reminder of how many of those stories are still going unwritten about.