to be a proud and active person in this forum? Don't beat my brains in with insults, please. Just an observation that 99% of all Irish are Man Utd or Liverpool supporters. Just curious. Patrick
Really??? You think Celtic is more popular with the Irish than Man Utd or Liverpool??? There are tons of Man Utd supporter chapters in Ireland and Liverpool has plenty too.
to be honest when i started watching soccer it was the 94' world cup and i cheered for ireland and The good ol USA. My Opinion irelands 2 best players were keane and irwin(still never forget beating italy in the group). To this day have never even really played pick up soccer yet will wake up at 6:30 AM to watch the shirts lose to wolves.
Slight exaggeration, I think Check out any of the regular posters on this forum - I can only think of a handful that list Man Utd as one of their favoured teams, and none that say Liverpool. Blackburn have more Bigsoccer Irish fans than Liverpool
Re: Re: Do I have to be a Man Utd or Liverpool fan... A vagary of BigSoccer methinks. And now Duffer's gone to Chelsea I can see the Balckburn support dwindling
Re: Re: Do I have to be a Man Utd or Liverpool fan... http://www.theirishrovers.com/links.html Not a whole lot of Rover supporter clubs in Ireland and N. Ireland. LFC: 38 supporters club in Ireland, 36 in N. Ireland! Man Utd: 34 supporters clubs in Ireland, 51 in N. Ireland!!! I got this information straight from the clubs official websites. Just thought you would be interested in the numbers.
As far as Celtic go, I counted 90 affiliated supporters clubs in the 32 counties. As one would expect, there is no differentiation between those in the North and the rest of the island. There are probably as many supporters' organisations again who are not affiliated to the club. Certainly, when I was younger, Celtic were the best-supported overseas club in Ireland, but with the rise in media exposure of the English Premier League, this may well have changed. On my most recent visit to Offaly, for example, I witnessed the rather odd sight of one bunch of BIFFOs referring to another as "scouse scum" and being called "manc w*nks" in return. Odd, that, since the furthest east I'd venture any of them had ever travelled was Tullamore. PP
That was not my experience growing up in the west of Ireland in the 70's and 80's. People supported the big English clubs of the time, Liverpool , Leeds..... you'll even find 30-40 something fellas in the whest that still support teams like Derby, West Brom and Coventry etc, who were half way decent back then. Our main exposure to soccer was Match of the Day, so it stands to reason. People were aware of Celtic, but no one really followed them..... as there was no coverage of Scottish football. I'm sure it was different in the North and places like Donegal where there's a strong Scottish connection. It wasn't until the mid to late 80's that Celtic support started to become more widespread throughout the country. The League of Ireland was a strange exotic beast that we heard about on Sunday Sport when Jimmy Magee gave the results. Other than that we knew about as much about it as we did the Portuguese or Swedish leagues. To this day the LoI is still very Dub-centric. They (LoI-FAI) never really made much of an effort to get us culchies interested..... so it's no wonder that to this day everyone follows English football.
No LOI in the west? What about Sligo Rovers and Galway Utd? It's a bit of a catch 22 with Irish soccer outside Dublin, therefore although the FAI could have done and could still do more, the fact is that the GAA has a greater influence and following in country areas than in the cities.
True. I'm sure there is a ton of potential in the rural area where GAA is king. But the GAA can be very manipulative with younger ones.
also very few country schools play any organised soccer, its just football & hurling. expect the private schools for the wealthy, where rugby is of course the prefered sport!
Lads, it has SFA to do with the GAA. Did ye not read my post at all? Sports are not mutually exclusive when it comes to being a fan. Most of us in the rural Irland grew up PASSIONATE soccer fans as well as hurling, football and rugby fans. The thing is the hurling-football-rugby teams we followed were local, but the soccer teams were English. Yes there are LoI teams in provincial towns in Ireland, but their support is confined to the town itself. There is almost never any attempt made to appeal to a larger fan base. For example, I grew up 20 miles from Limerick, yet I never felt any attachment to Limerick City (or Utd, or FC or whatever they've morphed into). Mainly becuase they never made any effort to reach out to people like me. Now contrast that to the Munster Rugby team, who also play in Limerick, we all felt an attachment to them, they were "our" team. There is no reason that a city like Limerick shouldn't have a decent soccer team. They have the whole city to themselves soccer wise, and the whole county of Limerick, plus North Tipp, most of Clare, even North Kerry is in there hinterland. That's a substantial potential fanbase. There was never any attempt to tap into that. Even something as simple as a name change... Thomond United, would have been a start. That's just Limerick, but a similar situation exists in most of the rest of the country outside of Dublin. Yet almost anywhere you go in the country, from Kenmare to Mullingar, most fellas are avid soccer fans, with no local team to support, or one that makes an effort to get them interested so they pick an English team. Part of the problem is that the FAI-LoI has tryed to impose an English style Urban concept of sporting allegiance to a country that was predominatley rural. Naming teams after towns like Athlone or Sligo was never going to work. They should have gone for counties or regional areas. This works in other sports, like rugby or the myriad of American sports teams that are named after a region, not a city... i.e Minnesota Vikings, New England Revs-Pats... works in Australia too. A team like Kildare County is a move in the right direction in this regard. Dublin has the opposite problem, too many teams for the size of the city, diluting the fanbase. Though it looks like Bohs and Shels may pull away into an Old Firm type set-up in the future. If the FAI-LoI were really serious they could sit down and come up with a decent 12 team league in the country that was reasonably well supported and capable of sending competitive teams into Europe. But it would require a complete overhaul or the present system.... a new paradigm.
What has that got to do with anything? We played plenty of soccer, both organised and not, growing up. It had nothing to do with the fact that we supported English teams and not LoI teams. That's due to FAI-LoI ineptitude.
Funny that, because half of rural Ireland supports Man Utd. Are the GAA manipulating kids into supporting English teams? That's right when we went to hurling practice it was beaten into us to support Liverpool and not a LoI team. It's amazing how the GAA gets blamed for everything that's wrong with Irish soccer. I suppose it's their fault we lost on penalties to Spain in the World Cup too. The GAA don't stop anyone from supporting "foreign" sports. The same people that go to a Clare v Tipp hurling match will also go to a Munster Rugby match or a soccer intl at Landsdowne. Some of the same people even make trips to Old Traff and Anfield. But most wouldn't be arsed going to a LoI match. Give them something to watch and make them interested and they would go to those too....... but that would mean that FAI-LoI would have to get their head out of their hole.
Zacatecas, you make some interesting points, while agreeing that the FAI only organised soccer on a country town basis, the fact was that they would have been competing directly against the GAA on a per parish basis. While this may seem like no big deal now, a few decades ago the GAA was openly hostile to the "foreign" game. IMO a couple of generations ago soccer would have had little support in rural Ireland anyway. Also, if someone 20 miles away does not feel any alliegence or desire to support Limerick, how come half the country supports Man Utd?
It's the same here in Tyrone. Nearly everybody who's Catholic is into GAA, but most support either Man Utd, Liverpool or Celtic. Some Older people supported Leeds.