EARLIER IN THE week, the Pittsburgh Steelers emerged for training at Carton House sporting jerseys with their surnames on the back written in Irish.
The Steelers’ equipment manager, Adam Regan, hatched the idea and employed the help of Munster GAA to kit out quarterback Aaron Rodgers — or ‘Mac Ruairí’ — and his teammates.
Wide receiver Ben Skowronek greeted a couple of waiting videographers on Friday with a “conas atá tú”, while US ambassador Edward Walsh welcomed the Steelers’ part-owners, Art Rooney II and Dan Rooney, to the US embassy where their family’s contribution to its motherland was formally acknowledged.
In Dublin city, meanwhile, Viking Splash Tours became more literal, with fans in purple loading onto WW2-style amphibious DUKWs and giving jump-scares to passers-by in time-honoured fashion.
All pretty cute, right?
Anyway, Croke Park will this afternoon hang the flag of a nation that has not only armed a genocide in Gaza but blocked every UN vote to end the massacre of innocent Palestinian people, many of them children.
On the halfway line will sit the logo of a multi-billion-dollar sports league which not only promotes the US military at every turn both contributes funding towards it.
The Irish government, meanwhile, will fork out €10 million for the honour of hosting this country’s first ever NFL regular-season game between the Steelers and the Vikings, €4.2m of which will be paid directly to the NFL as a licence fee. The forecasted return for the Irish economy is around €64m, the majority of which will be spread across the hospitality industry in Dublin.
The Vikings’ owner, Mark Wilf, is the son of Holocaust survivors and is currently the chairman of the board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a non-profit which actively promotes Israeli settlement and the displacement of Palestinian people.
It’s hardly a coincidence, then, that somebody chose this week to fly a Palestinian flag from near the top of The Spire — so high up, in fact, that it’s confounding as to how somebody managed to place it there at all.
Unlike our neighbours to either side of this island, Irish people remain free to fly that flag — or virtually any flag — without fear of repercussion. Any deferral to the sensibilities of an American audience in Croke Park today will make for a serious problem.
While the majority of NFL owners are doubtless sympathetic towards the current US presidential administration, the idea that the league now exists as some kind of extension of Donald Trump’s regime is a stretch. That’s going down at Bethpage Black.
Where it embodies Trump, though, is that the NFL has rarely espoused with conviction any ideology other than rapacious capitalism.
That alone is the point of this first ever regular season game in Ireland, as well as the league’s outreach to 900 Irish secondary schools. It’s not so much about ‘soft power’ as it is about hard cash.
It should be acknowledged that the Steelers’ intentions in coming to Ireland were probably more pure. Founded in 1933 by Art Rooney — the descendant of a family from Newry who emigrated to the States during the famine — the Pittsburgh franchise has always remained connected with its roots.
Art’s son, the Steelers’ late longtime president and chairman, Dan Rooney, was the US ambassador to Ireland during the first Obama administration and brought his team over to Croke Park for a pre-season game in 1997. These days, the Steelers are a far bigger deal in Brazil than they are in Ireland, but the latest generation of Rooneys pushed hard for a historic day in what is, by comparison, a puny market.
The Steelers’ players have all week acknowledged the significance of today’s game through that lens.
This fixture will also mark a standout day in the career of Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, who is understood to have explored his Irish heritage before crossing the Atlantic with his team. Quarterback JJ McCarthy, meanwhile, is unfortunate to miss out through injury.
There is, after all, just a sports match at the end of this. Most Irish people who will attend it are not subscribers to American imperialism but merely to Sky Digital. Inconvenient is the bigger picture behind what we consume on the small screen to fight off the Sunday scaries or catch up with friends in a fantasy-football group chat. But let’s not pretend in 2025 that you can separate the politics from a sport that deliberately intertwines itself in war efforts, beating the drum of patriotism to reap its endorphin-fuelled rewards.
Hundreds of people involved in the sport of American football in Ireland, meanwhile, deserve this landmark occasion on their doorstep, which has been a long time coming. Don’t point the finger at them if you intend to enjoy next year’s soccer World Cup, for example — a competition at which Ireland have so bravely turned down the opportunity to compete. Where Lionel Messi was draped in a black bisht before he raised the trophy in Qatar in 2022, the winning captain at MetLife Stadium could yet be offered a red hat.
Today, those in the purple helmets should prove too strong for those in black and yellow.
Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers can still process opposition defences better than most but it takes a while for this information to reach his 41-year-old legs. The last time he was confronted by the Vikings’ defensive coordinator, Brian Flores, in 2023, he threw a joint-career-high three interceptions, and the Vikings’ ‘D’ looks arguably meaner now than it did then.
In the Vikings’ favour, as well, is that the Steelers have struggled to contain the run throughout the first three weeks of the season, and Minnesota running back Jordan Mason has appeared a man possessed since replacing the injured Aaron Jones.
While the Vikings will deploy a fairly unimpressive backup quarterback in Carson Wentz, they boast enough on paper to keep the game out of his hands.
Whether or not any of that matters to you is fine.
It will be possible to enjoy today’s game while understanding the points of view of those who find it unpalatable. Many of us — including this writer — will probably have our cake and eat it, enjoying the sporting spectacle while lamenting much of its political subtext. Indeed, this is how plenty of people engage with the NFL on a weekly basis, and not only when it spreads its wings to newer frontiers.
Croke Park won’t be a one-off but it’s unlikely to become an annual fixture for the time being, either. Staging this event in Dublin is still absurdly expensive compared to far more lucrative markets in England, Germany, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere.
That will always be the bottom line by which the NFL is governed.
