Steelers’ Irish Roots Are Deeper Than NFL Dublin Game

The Steelers and Vikings will face off in the NFL’s first regular-season game in Ireland on Sunday.

The league has aggressively expanded its presence abroad with a record seven regular-season games this year, and aspirations of up to 16 in the future.

Ireland could be an ideal partner for the NFL—and a second home for the Steelers. It’s a relatively short international flight to an English-speaking country that, like NFL fans, loves tackle sports and beer. 

College football has successfully staged games in Dublin dating back to 1988, and has made it an annual tradition since 2022. The college games are usually held at a smaller venue, but they have drawn at least 40,000 fans every year since 2012.

Yet as much as Sunday is the start of something new for the NFL season, it’s not the first time the league and its seventh-oldest franchise have been to Ireland. 

From the mid-1980s through early-2000s, the NFL put on an annual series of international preseason games called the American Bowl. Teams went to Mexico, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Spain, England, Germany, Australia, and—for one Sunday in July 1997—Ireland. The Steelers played the Bears at Croke Park, the same historic Gaelic Games stadium where Pittsburgh and up to 82,300 fans will return Sunday.

The Rooneys—who have owned the Steelers since the elder Art Rooney bought and founded the franchise in 1933—have strong Irish roots. The family emigrated from the town of Newry in Northern Ireland during the Great Famine in the 1840s, ultimately finding their way to Pittsburgh. The late Dan Rooney cofounded a charity that supports Irish Americans and even funded Croke Park renovations, and would go on to serve as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Ireland.

He had long wanted to host a game in Dublin, and got the Bears’ McCaskey family to buy in. “I think everyone really knew how important it was to Mr. Rooney,” Hall of Fame coach Bill Cowher, now an NFL analyst for CBS Sports, tells Front Office Sports.

Dan wasn’t the only Rooney who wanted to win what was effectively a meaningless preseason game in July. In the buildup, Steelers matriarch Patricia Rooney caught a glimpse of the game’s Waterford crystal trophy and remarked to her husband how nice it would look in their trophy case.

“Dan is giving me one of those looks like, ‘Coach, we’re gonna win this game, right? So that Pat can get this crystal,’” Cowher tells FOS. Cowher says he pulled in his coordinators and told them to put in “a couple more plays on offense, a couple more blitzes on defense,” and play the starters for longer than typical.

The Steelers trounced the Bears 30–17. “The starters, we went hard,” former Steelers defensive lineman Nolan Harrison tells FOS. “Even the Bears players were like, ‘Why y’all going so hard?’”

The Steelers have put down more formal roots in Ireland in the past couple of years. 

“Our aspirations long term are to play a game in Ireland,” Daniel Rooney, the team’s director of business development and strategy, who is widely anticipated to inherit the team from his father Art, said in 2023.

That year, the NFL granted the team marketing rights in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Pittsburgh jumped at the opportunity, making Steelers Ireland social media accounts and a podcast, hosting a watch party at Croke Park, and holding youth clinics around the country. For the 2024 draft, Gaelic footballer Paudie Clifford announced the team’s fourth-round pick from County Kerry.

Neither the Steelers nor the NFL have indicated whether Ireland will become an annual fixture.

Still, Pittsburgh can continue to sow more commercial roots in the country and push to become Ireland’s team. The Jaguars created the blueprint for planting a flag overseas, becoming England’s de facto team while playing in London nearly every year since 2013. With a growing Irish fan base, the Steelers could make a similar play to bring more games to Dublin and make Croke Park their home away from home.

On his 1997 trip, Harrison says he enjoyed the friendly locals, including some soccer and rugby players who walked up to the NFLers after practice and playfully asked why they were wearing so much protective equipment. 

He’s held on to the small crystal football helmets gifted to players as a memento of the trip. And the lineman, who had just signed with the Steelers that summer, says that stumbling into his new head coach at a Dublin pub and having a conversation over Guinness marked a “really good intro” to the organization. “Coach Cowher and I were cool from that moment on,” Harrison says.

Former Steelers tight end Mark Bruener spent his downtime golfing with teammates, and he says he still wears the golf shirt he bought from the links-style course, a change-up from the terrain the group usually enjoyed in Pittsburgh. The trip was a family event for Bruener, whose wife, Traci, his parents, and her parents all attended. While he was at practice, they hopped on a train with other families to the Waterford crystal factory.

Bruener and his wife will be back in Dublin this weekend for the game, because their son Carson is a rookie linebacker for Pittsburgh. “It’s pretty surreal what’s going on here with my kid,” he tells FOS. “I’m just so excited that my kid gets to experience some of these amazing things that I’ve talked to him about.”