If you want a barometer of what the cool kids are wearing, one of the best places to go is a music festival such as All Together Now in Waterford, and at All Together Now this year, everyone was wearing GAA jerseys.
There were Mayo colours up front at Christy Moore; Glen Rovers, Cuala and Newbridge Sarsfields kits down the back at Pulp; and pink ladies’ GAA jerseys catching the light of the Ferris wheel that overlooked the main stage. The revolution, one might have been tempted to conclude, will be Gaelicised.
“GAA shirts [are] becoming trendy, especially niche and vintage ones,” says Ciaran Boyle of online GAA shirt retailer Elite Jerseys. “From about 2019, but especially 2021/22, there was a huge boom of soccer shirts in Ireland being worn as fashion pieces, especially at gigs and festivals, and around 2024/25 in particular is when a lot of Irish people started asking ... why not GAA shirts?”
Nothing is predictable in popular culture or fashion – and it is safe to say few could have forecast the emergence of GAA hipster chic. Yet that is what we have, with online sellers reporting huge demand for club shirts (the more obscure the better) and Slane headliners Fontaines DC moving on from their association with the soccer team Bohemians to a tie-in with the guitarist Conor Curley’s old hurling club, Monaghan Harps.
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This is an extraordinary turnabout. One that stands in contrast to the long history of Ireland’s chattering classes – in Dublin, especially, if we’re being honest – sneering at those of us with a fondness for displaying our club or county colours. Anyone sufficiently ancient to recall the Oxegen Festival outside Naas will remember that a major ding against the event was that it attracted people in “GAA jerseys” – which, in the early 2000s, was a byword among tastemakers for cloddishness and unsophistication.
How to explain this dramatic shift in perceptions? One reason is the short-term impact of Mayo’s historic All-Ireland win going viral. How amazed and flattered we all were as strangers around the world took one look at the last 30 seconds of the football final and immediately understood that football was the greatest sport in the world – more free-flowing than rugby, faster moving and more tactical than soccer.
Obviously many of us in Ireland will have known that already. But hearing those sentiments echoed in other countries brought a crucial infusion of cultural confidence – something of which Ireland, as a small and historically poor former colony, has for too long suffered a deficit. Total strangers in Spain, the US and Japan thought the GAA was great. And so, the GAA must be great, and wearing a Roscommon shirt to a gig might actually carry some cachet.
“There’s no doubt that Mayo’s success this year has contributed to them attaining fame outside of Ireland. We’ve had customers from Europe, South America and Australia come to the store specifically looking for a Mayo shirt,” says Barrie McCormack, owner of Shirts v Skins, a vintage and pre-owned sportswear store in Smithfield, Dublin, in an email.
“Mayo has definitely become a lot of Irish people’s ‘second team’ over the years, it’s one shirt that a lot of non-Mayo people are comfortable donning.”
But it isn’t just Mayo. The Cork hurlers are now one of the best supported sides in Europe. At the sold-out 2025 All Ireland semi-final against Dublin, Cork fans outnumbered Dubs at least four to one. Crowds of 60,000-plus travelling to away games places Cork in the top tier of supporter numbers, up there with soccer powerhouses such as Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund or Real Madrid.
Then there is the rise of historic “weaker counties” such as Louth and Wicklow – all of which has changed perception of the GAA. If there is a precedent it is English soccer in the 1990s, which become suddenly voguish – Baddiel and Skinner on BBC Two, Damon Albarn going to Chelsea, etc – after being derided for decades as a distraction for oiks.
“None of it would have been possible if it wasn’t for a historic season, Wicklow’s Tailteann win, Louth’s run to the semi, Mayo’s famous win and Cork fever really helped bring back GAA fever in a way that’s not been seen for a long time,” says Boyle. “And as [we can see with] Fontaines, recent years has seen an Irish cultural boom and, I believe, Irish people embracing their national sports’ jerseys as more than just something to wear to a match. It falls into this modern pride in the country.”
There is also a celebrity component – former underage Kildare and Maynooth centre back Paul Mescal scoring his tidy goal in Normal People and then wearing his O’Neills shorts in a GQ fashion spread; the BBC inviting quasi-celebs such as Tom Grennan (with Offaly roots) and Adrian Dunbar to its live coverage of the All-Ireland finals.
“It’s been a cumulative effect that reflects GAA itself becoming more fashionable. GAA is very adept at marketing itself and with the growth in corporate sponsors who in turn run their own marketing initiatives to highlight their sponsorships; they help to grow the popularity of the sport,” says Nigel Taylor of retro sports retailer Onsideerseys.ie.
“RTÉ’s own marketing of live matches is very polished, capturing the drama and colour, while other cultural elements have also contributed over the years such as popular TV shows [such as] Normal People, which saw GAA shorts take on cult fashion status, musicians and actors wearing jerseys when in Ireland: Will Ferrell wearing a Longford jersey on the Late Late Show, Bill Murray wearing a Limerick jersey at the 2022 All-Ireland hurling semi-final and Ed Sheeran wearing a Cork one when he performed in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.”
County boards seem to have picked up on this trend. This year has seen well-supported sides such as Cork unveiling their new kits with the sort of lavish roll-outs you might associate with Champions League soccer teams.
The other contributory factor, of course, is that the biggest rival of hurling and football – soccer – has had an image crisis that is starting to look existential.
The Manchester City scandal has confirmed English soccer to be the hollowed-out plaything of bored anglophiles from the Middle East and the United States. Meanwhile, Gianni Infantino’s shenanigans before, during and after the World Cup put into sharp relief the historic grudges against the GAA. If you’re looking for a “grab all association”, allow us to introduce you to Fifa.
GAA chic has to be understood in the context of hipster soccer culture and clubs such as Bohemians and St Pauli in Hamburg styling themselves “anti-colonialist”.
However, if anti-colonialism is your bag, then why are you playing a sport that only spread around the world because of British cultural hegemony in the late 19th century? Had the US become a superpower 30 years earlier, then logic dictates that Bohs would be an American football team. If you truly are anti-colonialist, why not take the next obvious step and embrace hurling and football instead?
In the case of Bohs, there is the additional headache that their pioneering collaborations with bands such as Kneecap is a template all too easy to replicate. Bohs have Fontaines DC and Bob Marley T-shirts. But now Aston Villa are doing a Black Sabbath kit. Inter Milan have unveiled a Pink Floyd tribute. You can’t copyright an idea, and once the sharks wade in, how can the minnows compete?
[ A vintage jersey - a moment in time preserved forever in polyesterOpens in new window ]
The other factor is that Irish people often have a connection to their GAA teams that runs far deeper than the ties that might bind them to other sports.
“Nostalgia is huge – finding that old shirt your club or county wore when you were 10 years old, just as you were falling in love with the game, that shirt your childhood hero wore,” says McCormack.
“I had a lad from Meath in the shop, he found a ‘90s St Mary’s Donore and Rosnaree club shirt on the rails, the same style his dad would have worn back in the day. He was totally shocked, bemused and delighted at the find and started FaceTiming his dad to show him. It was such a great buzz. There is definitely something special about finding something so unique that also has a personal history.”
