ABSTRACT
As Bairner observes, the ‘history of football in Northern Ireland has witnessed some remarkable achievements, not least the performances of the national team at the World Cup Finals of 1958 and 1982’.[ 1 ] For a country with a population of barely 1.5 million people the success gained by both international and club sides representing Northern Ireland has arguably been disproportionate to its size. Indeed, Northern Ireland also qualified for the World Cup Finals held in Mexico in 1986, although it failed to progress past the initial group stages of that tournament. If the sport is viewed on an island-wide basis, an ‘Irish’ team has contested the latter stages of the FIFA World Cup on five of the last six occasions. The resurgence of the Republic of Ireland soccer team as an international force has been reflected in its presence at the 1990, 1994 and 2002 finals. Northern Ireland has also produced some of the finest exponents of the game, amongst them Pat Jennings, Martin O Neill and, most noteworthy, possibly one of the greatest players the world has ever seen, George Best. Yet, for all this, soccer in Northern Ireland has, certainly from the late 1960s, been synonymous with sectarian division and ethnic conflict. That this remains the case is of course lamentable, albeit not surprising given the political maelstrom in which the sport has sought to exist.
