Pittsburgh Steelers to face Minnesota Vikings in first regular-season NFL game in Dublin

HISTORIC FIXTURE CONFIRMED: The Pittsburgh Steelers Will Play the Minnesota Vikings at Croke Park in Dublin on Sept. 28

It’s official. The first ever regular-season NFL game in Ireland will see the Pittsburgh Steelers host the Minnesota Vikings at Croke Park on Sunday, September 28th.

Let the scramble for tickets begin.

Confirmation that the Steelers, six-time Super Bowl champions, would be the ‘home’ team for a Dublin tie was made in early February of this year. The rest of the details, including the opposition, were sketched out at an unveiling on Tuesday at Dublin Castle.

The Vikings and Steelers are two strived franchises with huge fan bases at home and abroad. They are also two hugely competitive sides in recent years. It bodes well for the game itself.

And as for the occasion… The government and Dublin City Council are said to be spending almost €10m in bringing this event to the capital with Minister for Arts, Culture, Communications, Media and Sport Patrick O’Donovan defending that outlay back in March.

Estimates have it that 30,000 visitors will descend on Dublin for the game and, while many American fans will be tempted, there is no doubt but that it will attract the attention of NFL fans from all over Europea as well.

Predicting returns for the local and national economy is always interesting. It is naturally in the interest of organisers to play up the monies that may flood into local coffers but these calculations can vary wildly.

It was claimed that the 2012 Emerald Isle Classic, a college game between Notre Dame and Navy at the Aviva Stadium, brought anything between €100-€180m in. That’s quite a margin of error and it shows how unscientific estimates actually are.

Minister of State with responsibility for Sport Charlie McConalogue has quoted figures of €80m broken down into a €60m contribution to the economy and another €20m for the exchequer in terms of this NFL encounter.

The 2022 college game between the University of Nebraska and Northwestern University at the Aviva brought in an estimated €53.5 million while Munich’s first NFL game in 2022 apparently generated and economic boost of just over €70m.

There is, of course, the incalculable worth of the occasion to the country’s tourism prospects given the fact that it will be beamed into millions of homes in the USA and around the world where the game is breaking new boundaries.

There have been 49 ‘International Series’ games to date stretching back to the original of the species, which was a drab 13-10 win for the New York Giants over the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium in 2007.

It stayed at one game per year for London for a time before being expanded out to include Twickenham Stadium and Tottenham Hotspur. By 2017, the English capital was hosting four in the one season and Mexico had already hosted its first.

Germany joined the club in 2022, Madrid and Dublin will get their go in 2025 and then the show will take in Melbourne in Australia come 2026. All told, there will be seven international games in 2025 between the UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Brazil.

Ireland’s partnership with American football goes back to the first Emerald Isle Classic between Boston College and Army at the old Lansdowne Road in 1988 since when there have been another eight college fixtures.

The first ever NFL game played here was a pre-season meeting of the Steelers and the Chicago Bears in front of maybe 25,000 fans at a half-reconstructed Croke Park nine years later. The crowd, and the stadium, will be much larger this time.