Tuam Stadium, last Saturday. The sky was grey and the weather was mild, the west-of-Ireland summer hanging on by its fingernails. Out on the pitch, Corofin were pulling away from Mountbellew-Moylough in the second round of the Galway championship. Up in the stand, Seán Fitzgerald had his hoodie up around his ears and the drawstrings pulled tight against his cheeks. He got recognised anyway. Someone came over and asked for a picture and then someone else and then a few more. And just like that, Seán Fitzgerald was Fitzy again – or, as he goes online, @Fitzy.007. The Galway footballer. The primary school teacher. The social media star. But mostly, for now, the Love Island hunk. No escape.“It’s funny,” he says. “I don’t know why I thought this but I thought going to a club match might be a place where nobody would care. Like, Lola and I were in Liffey Valley there one of the days and we got stopped everywhere for pictures but you’d nearly expect that. I thought going to see Corofin and Mountbellew, I’d get away with it. But it’s grand. It’s what we signed up for.”“We” are him and Lola Deal, the English girl he met in the Love Island villa over the summer. For the countless readers who come to the Irish Times sports section thirsty for island gossip, the good news is they’re very much still together, living back in his home house in Furbo, Co Galway. The plan is to move to Dublin together in the next while but for now, it’s Galway Bay and the Aran Islands and championship against Milltown next weekend.Bearna na Forbacha won their first game against Caltra and though Salthill-Knocknacarra hammered them last weekend, a win against Milltown would put them in a quarter-final. “That would be huge for us,” Fitzgerald says. “We’re the kings of the relegation final usually, so if we could get to a quarter-final, it would change that narrative.”The Caltra game was his first time kicking a ball since playing Leitrim in the Connacht championship in April. A week later, he got confirmation of his place in the Love Island villa. A week after that, Galway lost the Connacht final with him sitting in the stand with the rest of the Galway extended panel. Back at the hotel afterwards, Pádraic Joyce gave him the nod and told the panel that Fitzy had some news.Galway manager Pádraic Joyce reacted enthusiastically to Seán Fitzgerald's news about the possibility of going on Love Island. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho “A few of them knew already and obviously the management knew. But it was great actually. Pádraic started off making jokes about me but then he said, ‘We’re going to back Fitzy 100 per cent.’ And the lads were all buzzing for me, they gave me a round of applause. But yeah. That was my last interaction with the Galway panel.”Joyce had known it was on the cards for a couple of months. The whole thing started half by accident. Fitzgerald has been a medium-sized noise on TikTok for a few years, posting videos about his life as a teacher and other bits and pieces. He made one in February and it wasn’t, as most people assumed, an audition tape to join Love Island. Inadvertently though, that’s what it ended up being.“The video went viral and got half a million views in a day or something like that,” he says. “And they actually rang me the next day, the Love Island producers, asking if I would have any interest in coming on the show. And I was like, ‘Jesus, no, no, no, not at all. I was just taking the piss.’ But then I thought to myself, ‘Well, why are you even taking the call here? You must want to do it on some level.’“They said they’d set up an interview to talk about it properly so it was at that point that I knew I’d have to talk to Pádraic about it. Because if there was any chance I’d be leaving the panel, I had to make sure it wasn’t going to come as a shock to him. I rang him and told him, ‘Look, nothing’s set in stone, I don’t know if this is going to happen at all but it might.’“And he was great. He burst out laughing first of all. ‘F**k off! Love Island! No way!’ He was actually just excited for me. He wasn’t like, ‘What the hell are you doing that for?’ He was actually just proper excited, just buzzing for me. He was like, ‘That’s class. That’s some opportunity.’”Joyce told him to keep it quiet until they knew something more concrete. When championship came around, Fitzgerald played all 70 minutes of Galway’s Connacht opener against Leitrim. The confirmation call came through the following week and both of them agreed he’d stand aside for the Connacht final against Roscommon. Seán Fitzgerald's involvement with the Galway footballers ended after the Connacht SFC semi-final victory against Leitrim, when his selection for Love Island was confirmed. Photograph: Joel Anderson/ITV There was never a tug-of-war or even any real agonising. Here was a chance to do something fun. He was going to do it and the Galway management knew who they were dealing with. They weren’t going to try and make him be someone he isn’t.Fitzgerald has been on the Galway panel since 2022, after being full back on the under-20 team that won the All-Ireland two years previously. He is not, as you might have guessed, a typical intercounty footballer – when he joined up to the senior set-up, he wasn’t particularly au fait with how the season was laid out. “I didn’t know anything about championship structures or the league being first or the round-robins or anything.”But he was fast and strong and athletic and there’s always room for someone like that in a county dressing room. He was fun and social as well, never taking himself too seriously. He had started doing bits and pieces on social media and every once in a while, his teammates would be horse-shoed around a phone, creasing up at his latest bit of nonsense. Everyone liked him, management included. In a long season, it never hurts to have someone around to cut through all the po-facedness.At the same time, he was no court jester either. He was as dedicated as the next guy. More so, even. His day job was in Scoil Úna Naofa in Crumlin, a DEIS school deep inside the south M50. Getting from there to training in Loughgeorge outside Claregalway twice a week was a five-hour round-trip. No journey for the half-committed, especially in that first year when he was struggling to break through.He got injured early on in 2022 but made it back to play in the Division Two league final. “I was terrible,” he says. “My worst ever game. I was slow and unsure of myself after the injury and Donie Smith made bits of me. So that meant I was on the extended panel for the championship.”Fitzgerald stuck at it though. He went from not getting into a matchday 26 in the 2022 championship to making his full debut against Mayo in the preliminary quarter-final the following year. Galway lost by a point but Fitzgerald kept Aidan O’Shea scoreless and made the GAA.ie Team of the Week. The following season, he was a mainstay of the Galway team that went to the All-Ireland final, playing every minute down the stretch.Seán Fitzgerald celebrates Galway's victory against Mayo in the 2024 Connacht SFC final at Pearse Stadium, Galway. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho And yet, through it all, there was a part of Fitzgerald that felt a bit cowed by the intercounty game. With his club, he’s expected to take the game to the opposition. To get on the ball, to go on a run, to get the whole thing moving. But with Galway, he often found himself going into his shell.“I knew I wasn’t terrible, that I could have a good go at it. But like, I know this is probably not a good thing to be saying about yourself but I wouldn’t put myself as a great player. I would say I’m a very average county footballer. The David Cliffords, the Seán Kellys, all these guys, I would put them way above me. “I think that’s what made it easier for me to step aside this year. I wouldn’t value myself as being very important. I actually didn’t think it would make a difference to Galway’s season whatsoever, whether I’m there or not there. “I think another player could have gone in and done the same job I did. Personally, I don’t think I add much to the team as such. I can do a job but you wouldn’t be watching a game and thinking, ‘Oh, Jeez, he’s a great player’. I just do the basics right, and I don’t put much of a foot wrong, I’m just solid and reliable. But I wouldn’t be adding much at intercounty level.“I remember watching back that All-Ireland final against Armagh and it was just lots of passing the ball, moving it on. If that was my club, I would have been taking on lads the whole time, just going for it. But with Galway, I just had that fear of doing the wrong thing.Lola Deal and Seán Fitzgerald met in the Love Island villa this summer. Photograph: Jo Hale/Getty Images “Watching back that game, I’d have so many regrets that I didn’t just do what I know I can do. It was fear of losing. I’d be on the ball and I would be like, ‘Give it to Shane [Walsh], he’ll take the shots. Give it to Rob [Finnerty].”People come in all shapes and makes. The guy who found himself conscious of doing the wrong thing in a game of football thought nothing of going in front of millions of people on television every night. Of making himself vulnerable and sincere, looking for a girlfriend with everyone watching. Of taking a career break from a teaching job he adores to see where the road takes him.And maybe it will take him nowhere. That’s a possibility too. The schools go back this week and he’ll be calling up to Scoil Úna Naofa soon to catch up with everyone there. He reckons he’ll know by the New Year what he’s going to do with himself but he definitely doesn’t rule out being a teacher again. Or, for that matter, being a Galway footballer again.But for now, life is good. He jumped off a cliff and landed on a cloud, got himself a girl and had himself a laugh.When you’re 25, that all adds up to a pretty good summer.