In its own way, every sports stadium is a landmark. Some declare their status via physical architecture and scale, others do so through their location in the lived environment, and some do it by longevity, via their history and meaning to the people who turn up. When tens of thousands of Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings fans descend on Dublin next week, in Croke Park, they will witness a stadium meeting all these criteria.

Emerging from Dublin airport, just-landed NFL fans will see glimpses of Croke Park on the horizon of the city’s northside. One of Dublin’s assets is that its skyline has not — yet — been disfigured by the mania for glass skyscrapers afflicting so many cities, so the top of Croke Park can be seen peeking above local houses and offices. A better view is from the nearby Dublin-Belfast railway. From there, the stadium dominates the one and two-storey houses of inner Dublin.

But it will not be until visitors are on the pavement, walking down Fitzroy Avenue from Drumcondra station or along Jones Road or Clonliffe Road, that Croke Park will truly hit. Rising from these red brick, terraced city streets of Ireland’s capital, Croke Park greets the first-time visitor like a big statement.

Some of this is to do with height, in comparison to the surrounding streets and the adjacent rail line. The natural reaction is to look upwards. It is just there, huge yet up close, part of the neighbourhood.

Some of it is about the structural footprint of the 82,300-capacity modern version — it is, alongside Twickenham in London, the largest non-soccer stadium in Europe. And a lot has to do with the history contained within Croke Park. A ground first used in 1884 has the accumulated experience and muscle memory, 141 years of it, of the fans who have walked inside and those who have played there.

Croke Park towers over the townhouses on Jones’ Road (Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

It has been built and re-built over the decades by its owners, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) — a professionally run amateur organisation with an ethos to match. Architecturally, it is pleasingly irregular — three recognisably 21st century stands gather round and look down on Hill 16, the 13,000-strong, seatless, uncovered beating heart of the ground. A stadium skyline tour is available for the brave.

Every year, euphoric and colourful All-Ireland finals are staged here and a large swathe of Ireland stops to watch. But ‘Croker’ has seen bloodshed as well as sport. The main stand, the Hogan Stand, takes its name from the most momentous day in the stadium’s history — Sunday, November 21, 1920 — when 14 people attending a Gaelic football match between the counties of Tipperary and Dublin were killed by a police force controlled from Britain. Michael Hogan, a Tipperary player, was one of those shot and killed.

It became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ — 52 years before the modern version in Derry.

Earlier that same day in 1920, the IRA had killed 15 members of British intelligence in Dublin. The Irish War of Independence, then well into its second year, gripped the country, though in many ways normal life continued.

That revenge was taken at a sports ground speaks of the sometimes valid external perception of the GAA’s proximity to those actively fighting British government rule.

The Dublin Evening Herald reports on the massacre at Croke Park (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Among other things, Croke Park is therefore an Irish history lesson, and in his book, The Bloodied Field, author Michael Foley writes of the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the dramatic evolution of the stadium’s status, of the GAA and of the newly-independent Irish Free State itself: “Croke Park was recast as martyrs’ ground, the blood spilled there sanctifying the GAA’s position as the pre-eminent Irish sporting organisation and a key pillar supporting a new Ireland.”

Historic heft is therefore attached to Croke Park, though while accepting and celebrating that, a rather more innocent description comes from the GAA’s Alan Milton.

Milton takes The Athletic on a tour and, beneath the Hogan Stand, says: “For many Irish people, it’s the nation’s playground.”

These are serious claims for a sports field, but then Gaelic games — football and hurling — are unique to Ireland and in 2025 continue to resonate in all 32 of Ireland’s counties. The sport has a meaning beyond matchdays and for sections of society, it is ingrained in everyday Irish life. Rural Ireland, not just population centres, is dotted with GAA pitches and training grounds of size and obvious investment. It is an amateur sport with a professional outline.

Every GAA season has as its focal point the ‘All-Ireland final’. It is held at Croke Park. Kerry won this year’s Gaelic football final and Tipperary the hurling.

To the uninitiated, Gaelic football is (very roughly) a cross between rugby and soccer with hints of basketball. There is constant movement. Hurling is played with a shaped stick and a hard, small ball called a sliotar. Again, it is a game of movement. Camogie is the women’s version of hurling. Some will see similarities with lacrosse.

There are 15 players on each team in each code, and the numbers are needed because pitches are massive — Croke Park is 145 metres long and 88 metres wide. American football pitches are 110 x 49. Croke Park’s turf comes from a farm north of Dublin owned by the Association.

Traditionally, ‘All-Irelands’ were held in September, but since 2022, the finals have been moved to July, partly to accommodate the use of Croke Park as a venue for concerts. These bring in revenue for an organisation often noted for its financial savvy. Oasis and Robbie Williams played there in August.

This non-sports usage is an example of the stadium as a modern venue. It is a long, long way from its origins as an open field.

The Kerry and Donegal teams line up in this year’s All-Ireland final (Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

The GAA was formed in 1884. It was part of an Irish cultural revival involving the Irish language and culture, including sport. It all chimed with the growing political ambition of independence from Britain.

“Alongside bodies like the Gaelic League and other organisations dedicated to Irish literature and language,” Foley writes, “(the GAA) was part of a revolution designed to revive Ireland’s cultural identity. By the end of the 19th century, the GAA was a visibly distinct expression of Irishness.”

The organisation was initiated at a meeting in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Two of those present, Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin, have stands at Croke Park in their name. Three ‘patrons’ were nominated at the inaugural meeting, two of whom were huge political figures in Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt. The other was Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Cashel (another Tipperary town). Croke died in 1902. In 1913, the sports ground on Jones’ Road, Dublin 3, was named in his honour.

The land in inner north Dublin had been bought by a GAA member, Frank Dineen, for £3,250 five years earlier. The Association acquired it from Dineen.

The first All-Ireland final held on Jones’ Road was in 1895 and by 1913, it was established as the final venue. Every final since has been played there, bar one. In 1947, Cavan and Kerry crossed the Atlantic Ocean to play in New York, a recognition of the Irish diaspora in the United States and the centenary of the 1847 famine in Ireland, which caused a tsunami of emigration. Today, there are 52 GAA clubs in New York alone, and almost 200 across the U.S. and Canada.

In 1913, the newly named Croke Park had fencing, and then a long, covered stand arrived. A year later, a Dublin-Wexford match attracted 13,000, and a wall at the Railway End was completed. Yet Foley says the 1920 version of Croke Park was “a rough, unfinished husk”.

What eventually became Hill 16 was then known as Hill 60. Even while seeking independence, Irishmen fought for the British Army in World War I, and Hill 60 was part of the Gallipoli campaign, where many were killed. In 1915, Hill 60 and Gallipoli were in the news as the banking at Croke Park was being finished. As had happened with English football grounds, such as Liverpool’s Spion Kop, Hill 60 was adopted as the name of that end.

It stayed that way through the Easter Rising of 1916 and the fight for independence, but by the 1930s, there was some disquiet within the GAA that the most famous part of the stadium should be called after foreign territory in a foreign war. Hill 16, a reference to the Easter Rising, was considered much more appropriate, and its formal use began in advertisements for entrance through turnstiles at that end of the stadium. By the end of the decade, a myth had been erected that the banking itself was built from the rubble of the Rising.

It was untrue, but it added to the martyr mythology.

Hill 16 in 2012 (Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images)

Given the traumatic events of Bloody Sunday 1920, no myth was required. A pivotal day in the history of the island began with the IRA leader Michael Collins, a keen GAA man, ordering a squad of volunteers to execute as many British Army intelligence agents, mainly around south Dublin, as possible. The assassinations were to occur early on a Sunday morning.

The plan was daring and largely successful. It was, however, certain to bring a strong reaction. It came at Croke Park that afternoon, shortly after a challenge match between Dublin and Tipperary had begun.

There were a number of Gaelic footballers who were also IRA volunteers — Tipperary’s Hogan and Tommy Ryan were two — and as Foley notes, there was to be a collection for the IRA’s prisoners’ fund outside Croke Park. The connection was not official, though, and the general secretary of the GAA, Luke O’Toole, tried to keep them separate. It was a volatile, dangerous time.

But all knew an overlap existed, and the British Army suspected the crowd would contain some of those who had participated in that morning’s shootings.

The Army cornered the stadium. There was no organised plan to open fire indiscriminately, but that is what happened. A 14-year-old boy, Billy Scott, who lived on Fitzroy Avenue, was one of the first shot and killed; Jane Boyle, a 26-year-old butcher’s assistant due to be married the following week, was hit by a bullet and was one of those trampled to death in the ensuing chaos and crush.

Bloody Sunday did not happen in a vacuum. Less than a month earlier, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died in London’s Brixton Prison after 74 days on hunger strike; British Auxiliaries had also just killed a leading IRA figure, Sean Treacy; a few days later, Kevin Barry, 18, was hanged for his participation in a deadly IRA attack.

But this was a day of national change and Croke Park was central to it. Jack Butler Yeats, brother of W.B. Yeats, produced an evocative painting called ‘Singing the Dark Rosaleen, Croke Park’.

Just over 12 months later, the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, signalling British withdrawal from Ireland, except from the six counties that would become Northern Ireland. An Irish republic, the Irish Free State, was established in 1922.

Michael Collins throws in the sliotar to start a hurling match at Croke Park in 1921 (Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The subsequent Irish Civil War disrupted the flow of finals, but Croke Park endured as a venue and by 1929 could accommodate 44,000 spectators at the Kerry-Kildare All-Ireland. By 1944, there were 80,000 at Roscommon v Kerry, and in 1961, over 90,000 saw Down defeat Offaly.

The stadium had long staged other events — in 1924, Texas Austin, ‘King of the Rodeo’, brought a show across the Atlantic, and in 1972 a rather more famous American, Muhammad Ali, fought Al ‘Blue’ Lewis in the stadium — some still refer to the ‘Ali Tunnel’ in one corner.

In 1985, U2 and REM performed in front of 57,000, and Garth Brooks, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones have all been since. British Queen Elizabeth II made a historic visit of reconciliation in 2011, and Pope Francis arrived in 2018.

From 1993 to 2003, the stadium was redesigned, refinanced and reconstructed, its capacity rising all the time. There were still some excluded – those who played what the GAA historically deemed ‘foreign’ sports, effectively soccer and rugby union. But in 2007, with the home of those two sports, Lansdowne Road, being redeveloped, both were allowed to play in Croke Park.

Muhammad Ali fights Al ‘Blue’ Lewis at Croke Park in July 1972 (Don Morley/Allsport/Getty Images)

American football had been an on-off presence since the late 1940s, but stepped up a gear in 1996 when Notre Dame and Navy played in the ‘Shamrock Classic’. The Steelers faced the Chicago Bears in a preseason game at Croker a year later.

The forthcoming Steelers-Vikings match is the first NFL regular-season game to be played there, and Milton says, “The NFL is incredibly respectful.

“But they have their own history, too, let’s not forget that. In American sport, people are very connected to their college or university; we have your club and your county. We have a connection with Notre Dame — they have a fascination with Irish culture and they have a place here in Dublin. We take an intern every year.”

Milton notes the number of nearby ‘watering holes’ that Steelers and Vikings fans can discover, which takes us back to Croke Park’s centrality, geographic as well as cultural.

“In America, the turnover in stadiums is considerable, because local governments will build a stadium for a franchise,” adds Milton. “They have a tailgate tradition and that tends to be green-field stuff, whereas we’re a 15-minute walk from O’Connell Street. It is the biggest plus for the stadium — accessibility. For Americans, the fact that we’re in the middle of the hustle and bustle really appeals to them.

“We’re in the middle of the madness, we don’t need to create it.”

(Top photos: Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile via Getty Images; Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)