Croke Park is all lanyards and locker-rooms this week. GAA headquarters is once again preparing to host a noteworthy football fixture at the end of September, just not as we have ever known it to be.
If the third Sunday of September continues to be longingly romanticised by a large chunk of Irish society, the fourth Sunday of September 2025 might eventually be remembered as the day a sporting behemoth came to town and fluttered its suggestive eyes.
The National Football League (no, not the competition Kerry won this year) has this week pitched its tent in Dublin 3 in preparation for Sunday’s game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings.
It is the first regular season NFL fixture to be played in Ireland – there was a preseason match between the Steelers and Chicago Bears in 1997. But this is different, bigger, brasher.
RM Block
Croke Park has been a hive of activity for days as NFL staff transform the stadium. Immediately on arriving, it’s clear this is no quick lick-of-paint makeover. In GAA parlance, these folk have come to play senior hurling.
Firstly, if you ain’t got no lanyard swinging from your neck, you ain’t nobody. Because if you want to get anywhere inside the stadium, you better either have a lanyard or you’ll need to negotiate safe onward passage with somebody wearing one.
The stadium is all black and yellow and Steelery, Pittsburgh this and Steel Town that. Posters of Pittsburgh players cover the wall cabinets listing every All-Ireland winner. It’s their house, now. Seemingly.
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And Pittsburgh supporters, we are told, will be waving their famed Terrible Towels on Sunday, which must be some sort of odd but touching tribute to Galway’s famed Terrible Twins, Seán Purcell and Frank Stockwell. Or maybe not.
For as Micheál might have put it: “Ireland, it’s not an American football stronghold.”
Though that, we can only assume, is kind of the NFL’s end goal with its global expansion push. For a sport fuelled by commercialism, the billionaire franchise owners know that more markets will likely lead to more dollars.
Members of the media were brought on a tour of the repurposed stadium on Thursday, primarily to be given a closer look at the medical facilities and various medical technologies utilised by the NFL.
But before we get to the important medical stuff – an equally important public service announcement for those who will be in attendance on Sunday. It seems you will be able to bring a beer to your seat.
The ban on drinking alcohol in the stands for sporting events at Croke Park has generated plenty of debate over the years, particularly when the stadium hosted rugby matches. The stands remained a dry county those days.
But where one oval-ball sport couldn’t force the GAA to embrace the craic, another seems to have simply punted away the house rules and told their hosts how the party was going to play out. After all, this is senior hurling, lads. Pints? Hurl away.
Some of the more noticeable differences to Croke Park include the installation of digital advertising hoardings around the perimeter of the pitch and also wrapped across the middle tier of the stands.
The field is also tiny in comparison to a GAA pitch. It’s more Go Games than senior hurling, truth be told. Still, it has lots of freshly painted white lines and numbers and flashy colourful badges. It’s a busy looking patch.
The Hill has had a facelift too, dressed up with thousands of grey plastic seats. It’s not the first time there have been seats on Hill 16; temporary ones were also installed for Ireland soccer internationals.
But with tickets priced at an eye-watering €250, presumably you get to bring the seat home with you afterwards.
The dressingrooms have become locker-rooms – all kitted out in Steelers paraphernalia. The tunnel to the pitch is also decked out in black and yellow, and splashed with slogans such as “Steel City Football”.
The medical tour was very informative and there is little doubt the area of concussions continues to be a matter of focus for the organisation.
“I think the public opinion on these issues has continued to change,” said Dr Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer. “If you look back at film from games 20 and 30 years ago, there were a lot of hits that were celebrated and were part of the game that are all illegal now, and I think people understand that.
“We’ve certainly made a major focus around head contact. We’re now measuring head contact and giving our teams data on that, and so we want to see head contact continue to go down.”
A chart was provided on the various helmets available to players, rating them based on the helmet’s ability to reduce head-impact severity. The helmets are graded from green to yellow to red – with medics encouraging players to select from the green options. Not all do.
“Concussion remains a difficult injury to diagnose because we don’t have an X-ray or a blood test today that we can say is absolutely diagnostic,” added Sills.
“So we are still heavily reliant upon self-report of symptoms and on signs that we can observe. That’s why we spend so much time and energy emphasising why that’s important and how that contributes to our ability to make a diagnosis.”
The Steelers and Vikings will undertake their first training sessions in Ireland on Friday – less than 24 hours after arriving. They’ll play in Croke Park on Sunday and then Minnesota will make for London while Pittsburgh will head back to Steel Town.
Just like that, after so much fuss, it will all be over.
And soon there’ll be senior hurling in the old house again.
