Paul Rouse: NFL at Croke Park is welcome but military should not be part of spectacle

FLY OVER: A view of the F16 flyover before the game. Croke Park Classic 2014, Penn State v University of Central Florida in Croke Park. Pic: Pat Murphy / SPORTSFILE

Around 1.30pm on Saturday 30 August 2014, two American F-16 supersonic fighter jets roared low in the sky across Dublin. The sound was astonishing. Dogs howled, alarms rang out and people felt their houses shake.

What was their mission?

The flight of the jets had actually been permitted by the Irish Aviation Authority and sanctioned by the Irish government.

The request for sanction related to the playing of the Croke Park Classic – an American football match between the University of Central Florida Knights and Penn State Nittany Lions.

While almost nobody who lived around Croke Park and under the flight path seemed to have known in advance of the military fly-over, it had actually been advertised before the game as part of the event: “The spectacle will include a full day’s entertainment for all the family featuring an F-16 fighter jet flyover….” There appears to have been no dissent from anywhere within the GAA to the idea of American fighter planes being integrated into a sporting event taking place in Croke Park. If there was, it is not obvious from the public record.

Indeed, the only significant criticism seems to have come from the marginal justice and peace group ‘Afri’. It expressed outrage at the “the thunder of two F-16 fighter jets which, without warning or explanation, flew overhead in a “lap of honour” for the participating teams.” 

“What would it be like if, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, they were firing the missiles which are their stock in trade? Is it appropriate that the headquarters of Ireland’s national games, built over many years by the pence and shillings, cents and euros, of loyal supporters should be used as a backdrop for U.S. war propaganda?” Nobody else seems to have cared much.

Perhaps the whole thing was mitigated by the presence in the White House of Barack Obama and by the amount of money that was being poured into Irish pockets by the presence of 20,000 visiting Americans in Dublin?

SHOULD NOT BE PART OF SPECTACLE: Fly over should not be part of the historic spectacle when Steelers take on Vikings in Croke Park. Pic: Cody Glenn / SPORTSFILE

The question is: what will happen on Sunday 28 September 2025 when the Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Minnesota Vikings at Croke Park in the first-ever National Football League match to be played in Croke Park?

More precisely: will there be a fly-over of American military aircraft? And will the other trappings of imperial military power also be on display?

Military displays are a regular feature of the major sports in America and that is part of the culture. You don’t have to like it or agree with it to understand that it’s entirely acceptable for that to happen in America, if that’s the choice of the NFL.

As the league expands overseas, with more matches being played in England, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Australia, Spain, Ireland and beyond, the context of these displays obviously changes.

Advertisements for the NFL games to be played in London in 2025 read: “With the only custom-built gridiron pitch outside the USA, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the NFL’s European home. The capacity crowds, half-time shows and military flyovers bring the awesome spectacle of live NFL to Europe’s most exciting city.” At previous games in London, four US Air Force fighter jets took off from RAF Lakenheath and flew over the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as the last note sounded of the United States national anthem.

It is one thing for the fusion of sport, American patriotism and military power to be facilitated in the capital city of a NATO ally, it would be altogether another thing if it is to be enabled by the GAA and the Irish state.

It is great that Croke Park is hosting the NFL. To see at first-hand the athleticism of the players and to understand the extraordinary commercialism that surrounds the sport is a big opportunity.

But there should not be any military aspect.

It was plain wrong that the fly-over happened at Croke Park in 2014.

It was also wrong when U.S. Navy Osprey helicopters flew over the Aviva Stadium before another American football match in 2023.

And to allow it now – or any other versions of American militarism – to be staged in 2025 would be still worse.

No amount of sophistry can disguise what is now happening in global politics.

For example, F-16s are being used – along with other American military planes and equipment provided to Israel – in the brutal bombing of Palestine.

Further, the extent to which the world has been changed by the current American president and his odious sycophants is being revealed every hour of every day.

These revelations run from the ruins of Gaza to the streets of L.A. – and on to American smoothing the path of Russian imperialist war.

Basically, the world’s most powerful man sees other people only as extras in a TV show in which his ignorance and narcissism and cruelty are increasingly dominant (and to which no meaningful opponent has yet properly emerged).

The Irish State has paid €10 million to entice the NFL to come to Dublin. There are sound economic reasons as to why that is money well spent, given the number of rich overseas visitors that will come to Dublin. It is exceptionally hard to estimate how much money the game will be worth to Irish businesses, but it will be most certainly be a multiple of the outlay from the state.

Equally, the GAA will make a considerable sum from converting its pitch to one suitable for gridiron for a day.

That is all fine. Every state and every sports organisation needs money to fund the basics of its operation and to allow for the developments that will secure its future.

What would not be fine would be any sordid deal that promotes a vision of the world that treats certain people as being somehow less than human and their lives as being expendable.

America was never a paragon of virtue, but its politics now run like an open sewer under a president who is a disgrace to the idea of a Republic.

Passing a fly-over off as being just part of a spectacle doesn’t cut it: it is to pretend that sport has no meaning beyond the sidelines and the very existence of the GAA destroys that argument.

As much as any stadium in the world, Croke Park endured a day which showed the grotesque reality of what happens when a morally-bankrupt Empire tips into the sort of violence that leaves men, women and children dying in pools of blood.

No fighter planes, no conspicuous displays of militarism, no jingoistic rhetoric about the Land of the Free.

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin