Colin Sheridan: NFL is spectacle, invasion, conquest — and has no place in Croke Park
The Irish and American flags in Croke Park ahead of Sunday’s game. A venue built on Irish volunteerism and history will be draped in imported nationalism. The irony would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Photo: ©INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
Croke Park has always been more than a stadium — it is a stage where Ireland decides what kind of culture it will honour.
When the GAA opened its gates for Eid celebrations, it was an act of solidarity, a gesture of belonging that said: this ground is for all our people.
But when it opens the same gates to the NFL this weekend, it is something else entirely: not solidarity, but surrender - to money, to branding, to a spectacle that trades in militarism and profit while dressing itself up as sport.
The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Minnesota Vikings will arrive like two well-heeled colonial armies, flying in with their cheerleaders, brass bands, and corporate overlords.
They’ll march across the hallowed sod where blood was spilled in 1920, where we buried empire beneath sliotar and pigskin. And we’ll applaud as the NFL plants its stars-and-stripes on sacred ground.
Make no mistake: this is not sport. This is spectacle, invasion, conquest dressed up as craic. It is the world’s richest sports league using Ireland’s most symbolic stadium as a billboard for American power.
The NFL does not simply “play games”. It orchestrates rituals of obedience. In the US, as American sportswriter Dave Zirin points out, every Sunday is theatre: military flyovers, troops saluted, anthems sung with compulsory reverence.
Dissent is not just discouraged but punished. Zirin calls it “the weaponization of patriotism,” a flag-draped pageant that silences criticism and enforces conformity.
Now that circus has arrived in Dublin, welcomed by arguably the greatest amateur sporting organisation in the world - the GAA.
Will we stand politely for an anthem that isn’t ours? Will Croke Park, once forbidden even to foreign sports, now host a stadium-sized commercial for American militarism?
A venue built on Irish volunteerism and history will be draped in imported nationalism. The irony would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. If we are to stand and salute something, we should first understand what it is.
The NFL is a masterclass in racial capitalism. The league is 70% Black on the field and nearly 100% white in the boardroom. It profits from the bodies of young Black men, many from poor communities, sold to owners and fans as both warriors and entertainers.
Teams even employ sociologists when drafting players to assess their socio-economic origins, ranking their “hunger”. If a kid is too smart, he may suss the ruse too soon and hesitate to sacrifice his body. Poverty breeds hunger; hunger breeds desperation.
When Black players like Colin Kaepernick dared kneel in protest against police brutality, the NFL exiled him. When others spoke up, they were branded “unpatriotic.”
As Zirin has noted, the league bent the knee not to its players but to Donald Trump, who demanded obedience from Black athletes as if they were errant servants.
And now that same NFL comes here, to the land of famine ships and forced migration, to stage its triumph on the ground where British forces once murdered 14 civilians on Bloody Sunday. Croke Park, of all places, becomes the set for a league that cannot look its own racism in the eye.
That is hard to stomach, because it is not just a stadium. It is a fortress of cultural resistance, the cathedral of the GAA, the symbolic beating heart of Irish identity.
It was built to defend us from cultural erasure, to nurture our own games, our own people, our own sense of belonging. For decades, foreign sports were barred from this ground not out of parochialism, but out of survival.
And yet here we are. The GAA has flung open the gates, rented the turf to America’s most rapacious league, and told us to enjoy the show. As though Croker were just another arena for hire. As though the ghosts of 1920 will not stir when American flags are waved where Irish blood once ran.
This is not cultural exchange. It is cultural colonisation.
The NFL does not love Ireland. It loves Irish wallets. It loves our tax loopholes, our strategic position in Europe, our willingness to sell heritage for a quick buck.
It will plant its logos in Dublin schools, push “flag football” on kids, and shove merchandise down every willing throat. It will sell Ireland a brand, not a sport.
The GAA, for all its faults, has never been about this. Its values - community, volunteerism, identity - are incompatible with the ruthless commodification of the NFL.
You can’t reconcile parish loyalty with billionaire owners. You can’t square amateur ethos with a league that uses human beings like meat. And yet, for a slice of the gate, Croker is now complicit.
We should have said no, or at the very least opened it up for discussion. If only so we could tell the NFL, Trump and the billionaires: we see you. We see your military fetish, your racial hierarchy, your corporate greed.
We see the way you brand dissent as treason, the way you drape nationalism over profit. We see the hypocrisy of playing in Croke Park, a ground consecrated by Irish blood and preserved by Irish hands.
Zirin warns us that the NFL’s exported values are toxic. He is right. To host the league in Dublin without critique is to offer them our history, our symbolism, our identity – gift-wrapped.
So let the game go ahead. Let the cash registers ring and the dirty Guinness flow. But let no one mistake it for a benign spectacle. The NFL has not come here to entertain. It has come to conquer.
Croke Park was once a fortress against cultural erasure. This weekend, it risks becoming a billboard for it. And the only question left for us is this: when the NFL flies its flag over Jones’s Road, will we remember who we are?
Or will we clap along while the empire sells us another beer-soaked lie?
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