Just days after confirming its first visit to Australia for the 2026 season, the National Football League (NFL) has now confirmed that it will play a regular-season game in Dublin, Ireland in the 2025 campaign.
The game, which will feature the Pittsburgh Steelers as the designated home team, will be staged at the city’s iconic 82,300-capacity Croke Park in partnership with the Irish Government and Dublin City Council.
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NFL commissioner Roger Goodell alluded to the prospect of a regular season game in the country in November 2024, with location scouts having been sent to the market prior, and the Rooney family that owns the Steelers has long pushed for the league to return to the country.
The NFL has visited Ireland once before, with an exhibition game in 1997 that the Steelers took part in, and the team also holds marketing rights for the country through the NFL’s global markets program.
Patrick O’Donovan, Ireland's minister for arts, media, communications, culture, and sport, said of the announcement: “This is a major vote of confidence in Ireland’s ability to host world-class events.
“Hosting a regular season NFL game in 2025 will have huge benefits for Irish tourism, the wider economy and our sports ecosystem… [and] also to the ongoing collaboration with the NFL, Sport Ireland, and American Football Ireland to grow American football participation in Ireland, both the tackle and flag format of the game, as part of the government’s commitment to increasing the number of people regularly participating in sport and physical activity.”
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By GlobalDataIreland is already an annual American football destination, hosting the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, a fixture that has twice been played at Croke Park (1996, 2014) although is most often played at the Aviva Stadium.
In 2025, that game will take place on August 23, well in advance of the NFL season opener on September 4, ensuring no gridlock between the two.
This is the sixth confirmed of a possible eight NFL international games in the 2025 season, adding to three London (UK) games, and the debuts of Berlin (Germany), and Madrid (Spain), and the league is still in talks to extend its commitment to hosting games in Brazil.
Goodell has been public with his ambition to bring the NFL to as many different territories as possible and has found success in partnership with local sports leagues in these territories, a strategy the league may continue in Ireland thanks to the popularity of rugby and gaelic football in the market, as well as the number of commercial partners the league has in the region.
Meanwhile, the Amazon Prime Video streaming service is set to keep broadcast rights for NFL playoff wild card round games in 2026 and 2027.
Retail giant Amazon reportedly forked out $150 million in 2024 for the rights to a wild card playoff game in the current 2024-25 season, but reports have now surfaced that that deal is a three-year commitment, with Prime Video set to remain in the coveted slot through the 2027 campaign.
Prime Video’s 2024-25 NFL regular season broadcast viewership grew year-on-year for the third consecutive season while its coverage of the Steelers' wild card game against the Baltimore Ravens this year averaged 22.07 million viewers, a new all-time high for the NFL on prime and up 14% on Peacock’s 2024 coverage of the equivalent fixture.
