FC Cincinnati goalkeeper Paul Walters is a Cincinnati kid through and through. But his 2026 is being defined not by being an FCC homegrown player, but by being a loanee to an overseas team that is looking to earn its way into continental competition.
Walters, 22, has spent the season on loan to Irish side Bohemian FC, which plays in the League of Ireland Premier Division, the top flight league in the country. “Bohs,” as they are more colloquially known, are based in Dublin and are one of the nation's founding football clubs, dating back to 1890.
135 or so years later, the FC Cincinnati Academy graduate and FCC homegrown keeper joined the side on loan in 2026 for multiple reasons. With FC Cincinnati’s keeper department stocked full of talent, Walters' pathway to first-team minutes was blocked. Similarly, after four seasons as the de facto starter for FC Cincinnati 2 in MLS NEXT Pro, he and the club felt it was time for him to pursue a different kind of challenge, rather than return to the same situation he had been in.
So a loan was pursued, and had been pursued for multiple years, but nothing right emerged. FC Cincinnati's Director of Goalkeeping, Paul Rogers, wanted to see his player in a situation where he could compete for playing time without being handed anything. Walters had previously done a short-term loan to USL side Hartford Athletic, and had gone on a training stint in Germany to Hoffenheim, but this needed to be something more stable and where he would be having to operate in a new environment.
In 2025 there were conversations about loans to clubs in Scandinavia, but they just never materialized. But through some club connections to Ireland and mutual interest from FCC, ahead of the 2026 season, a proper situation came through, and Walters joined the Irish side for their new season.
“The goal with this loan is to go and earn minutes, earn the right to play, and then just play at a senior level, in a new environment, an uncomfortable environment, and try to win that spot,” Walter said in a conversation in January before departing on the loan. “Just learn, develop, win games, and hopefully that'll prepare me for a time here at FC Cincinnati.”
“I think it’s important to go into this just trying to be yourself and be willing to learn,” Walters continued. “You can take something from every experience, and this will be a great chance to work with new people, pick up new skills, and just spend time learning from the guys who have been there, learning the culture and just adapting. I think that's the biggest thing I can take away from this.”
Eight months later, he has established himself with the club, won the starting job, and has helped Bohs to third place in the league, which would qualify them for UEFA Conference League Qualification.
“I think the whole idea of him going over there was obviously he needed real games, and games that are probably above the floor that the second team level provides here,” FCC Director of Goalkeeping Paul Rogers said in a recent conversation on Walters' loan stint with FCCincinnati.com. “Also real competition for a starting role, which obviously has competition here, but he wasn't in the running to be the number one.”
After starting the year as the number 2 for Bohs, Walters won the starting job in early June and quickly secured it with a strong run of play. In his first seven matches, he earned five clean sheets and has since started in net for the side across all league matches and European competition, helping the squad reach the Third Round of Conference League Qualification.
“Talking to Paul, the environment's been decent, and even when he wasn't playing, he's been the number two, so you're in everything,” Rogers continued on the young keeper. “Here, right now, Paul was a three; you're not really in everything in the same way. You're in everything working and training, but it’s a different feeling, at any moment in the game, a keeper gets sent off, get injured, something can obviously happen, and then you know you're up next. He needed that experience and opportunity that he wasn’t going to have again this year.”
Goalkeeping is a unique situation: for every team, there’s only one keeper on the field at a given time, and rotating keepers is not something teams typically want to do. Healthy competition in the keeper room is important, vital even, but unlike other positions on the field, it’s not like Walters, or really any keeper in a similar situation, has the opportunity to rotate in.
So finding an opportunity for Walters to gain that experience is vital to his development. At 22, he is still a very young player, especially given the longevity and career arc most keepers experience, but stagnating his development with another year behind two more veteran keepers wasn’t helping FC Cincinnati or Walters.
So the loan, even if he never won the starting job, would have been valuable for the young man.
“From his standpoint, the main thing he’s gotten out of it so far is now he's playing, so he's getting competition minutes. He’s won competition minutes,” Rogers explained. “It’s also his adaptation to being in another country, being with a new team, being in a house with three other players – which by the sounds of it is a great setup that they've got – and he's enjoying a different environment with different kinds of pressures. That’s important.”
A key part of the development process that Rogers believes in for all of his keepers is developing the players as players, but almost more importantly as people. He believes, as many do at FC Cincinnati, that to develop a player for your first team, they need to be developed as a ‘professional.’ In this case, the word professional is somewhat of a representation of a person who displays traits such as responsibility, self-sufficiency, courtesy, effort, honesty, coachability, respect for others and intelligence. They are what a layperson might describe as a responsible adult. So while talented players come along in all sorts of ways, a ‘professional’ is the most valuable to an organization, for many reasons.
For starters, they’re more likely to train well and fit into the team. They’re also more likely to take care of their bodies and ply their trade with intention, therefore outstriding other players with less professional attributes.
This is a lot to ask of young people in some cases. In the context of the explanation Rogers gave about his goalkeepers, he highlighted that these are traits he seeks to help develop in players as young as 13 years old, which is hardly an ‘adult’ by any definition. But Rogers believes that is the responsibility of a coach; that’s the “whole point,” to use his own words. Yes, training skills on the field is vital, and is something they do every day, but that is just 50 percent of the job.
Paul Walters is someone who excels at displaying many of these traits and has risen through the ranks because of them. In addition to his talent, part of Walters' development has come through his professionalism. But that doesn’t mean he’s done growing as a person.
“Developing a player isn't just training a player. Different players have different weaknesses,” Rogers explained. “Is it in the gym, is it recovery, is it managing your life, is it managing losses? This is all part of your development, in my opinion, not just, oh, ‘I'm going to train him because he needs to be about a shot stopper.’ Yeah, that's part of goalkeeping, but that can't be the only development piece.”
“There's got to be a start point, a middle point, and an end point,” the FCC Director of Goalkeeping continued. “Obviously the end point is getting him into MLS, where he's either a number one or a number two battling to be a one, and the way he's doing it right now looks like he would have a chance, because we’ve been watching the games, and obviously I've seen all the clips. So hopefully he comes back, and one, he’s able to make an impact, and two, I hope it shows (players) how important the loan system is and how you've got to be comfortable going out to get games as a young player.”
The loan move to Bohs for Walters then serves as a growth opportunity. A chance to learn and mature in a new environment, to test himself and develop professionally in a place that isn’t his hometown. It’s the kind of experience the FC Cincinnati first team asks of players they bring in from abroad all the time.
“There's pressure in football everywhere, but there's a different pressure when maybe you're in a country where you're boarding and on loan and you're expected to be at a certain level – you’re not the homegrown academy kid, you’re brought in expecting to help the team – and by all accounts, and I'm only going off conversations with a goalkeeping coach, he has been that,” Rogers said of the experience they were hoping Walters would get overseas.
“They've said they're very comfortable with him,” Rogers continued. “With his feet, they say (Walters is) by far head and shoulders above any goalkeeper in the league, which for us is great to hear, but obviously League of Ireland is a bit different with how most teams play. Bohemians are a possession team, so Paul's helped that I think.”
Boh’s are, at the time of publishing this article, 28 games into their season with eight games left to play in the league. That will take them through November before the end of the season when Walter’s loan will expire.
“So if you were to ask ‘what has he got out of this loan?’ He's got everything that we wanted from it,” Rogers said. “If he can keep playing till the end, this will be an unbelievable success for him, but also for ours as a club in development.
“When I talk about development, I’m talking about a plan for a player,” Rogers continued. “We wanted to get him out (on loan) last year, and it just didn't happen, but now you're going to look at a different keeper from when he left to when he comes back. Maybe not so much the goalkeeper, but the human side, the game management side, the leadership side because of where he’s gone, what he’s experienced and what he’s done.”
“Developing a player isn't just training a player. Different players have different weaknesses,” Rogers explained. “Is it in the gym, is it recovery, is it managing your life, is it managing losses? This is all part of your development, in my opinion, not just, oh, ‘I'm going to train him because he needs to be about a shot stopper.’ Yeah, that's part of goalkeeping, but that can't be the only development piece.
“There's got to be a start point, a middle point, and an end point,” Rogers explained. “Obviously the end point is getting him into MLS, where he's either a number one or a number two battling to be a one, and the way he's doing it right now looks like he would have a chance, because we’ve been watching the games, and obviously I've seen all the clips.
“So hopefully he comes back, and you know one, he’s able to make an impact, and two, I hope it shows (players) how important the loan system is and how you've got to be comfortable going out to get games as a young player.”
