Euro 2028 would light up Belfast but some fans oppose use of Casement Park

A group representing Northern Ireland soccer supporters has said it opposes plans for Euro 2028 matches to be held in west Belfast’s Casement Park if the joint UK and Ireland bid to host the tournament is successful.

The group claims that football tournaments should stick with football stadiums, the message being they’d prefer not to support Euro 2028 than support it with an enhanced Casement Park.

“It is our view, and indeed our preference, that football tournaments should be hosted by football stadia,” the group said in a statement.

It’s a strangely new expression of football dogma that few people have come across especially in a world of multipurpose stadia.

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The Amalgamation of Official Northern Ireland Supporters’ Clubs (AONISC) group don’t explain why football tournaments should be hosted in football stadia. But also added that football should get more money if the GAA develop their grounds.

“Should Casement Park receive the significant public funding required to allow redevelopment to progress, we believe that Northern Ireland football should receive parity of funding,” the group said.

The statement landed like an 11th commandment on a tablet of stone appealing to an imagined natural order of football’s proper place in the sporting firmament.

AOINISC is recognised by the Irish Football Association, who are fully behind the Euro bid as is Northern Ireland football manager Michael O’Neill.

[ Legal challenge against GAA’s Casement Park redevelopment dismissed ]

“Securing this bid for Northern Ireland would be transformative for our legions of passionate football fans,” he said. “I am fully behind it and hope everyone will lend their support to it.”

So is the British government behind the bid. The Irish Government is too and the GAA. Many of Northern Ireland fans, it would seem, are not.

The football temple purists, who follow the national team, have spoken out as one over the proposed new 34,500 GAA ground. Casement Park is among 10 included in the 2028 bid. Croke Park was initially but is no longer part of the submission.

If successful, the Andersonstown ground will join Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, where rugby and American football is played, and Wembley Stadium in London.

Wembley, you could say, is a football stadium. Of the 24 acts booked between May 13th and October 13th this year, eight are football events including the playoffs and the men’s and women’s FA Cup finals.

There is also professional wrestling, while all the other events, 15 of them, are music orientated including Harry Styles, Def Leppard and Blur concerts.

To maximise commercial success, modern stadiums like Wembley and the Aviva are under pressure to be multi-use. They must host a variety of events in addition to their core purpose to survive financially.

Leinster Rugby have been tossed out of their home in the RDS this weekend because The Boss is playing three gigs in Ballsbridge. Springsteen fans don’t care why the stadium was initially built. As it happens, it was show jumping and at one stage Shamrock Rovers’ home ground.

Up the road in Donnybrook, the other Leinster rugby ground was transformed into a hockey pitch for the Irish women’s team, where they qualified for the first time for an Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020.

[ Casement Park revamp crucial to UK and Ireland’s Euro 2028 bid ]

Opening facilities to the neighbouring community is part of the playbook, providing access for a wide range of people to sporting opportunities. If organisations do that, it enables positive impact and a long-lasting legacy.

Tottenham Hotspur has a retractable pitch, while Croke Park has its own turf farm, giving them control over schedules and re-turfing because the London and Dublin venues are multipurpose.

When Spurs appointed Populous to design their stadium, their specific brief was to revolutionise the build to create a space where multiple professional codes could play. It begs the question of what constitutes a football stadium.

It hasn’t been all plain sailing. Plans to build the new Casement stadium were announced in 2009. But the project has faced delays including legal challenges from residents.

Planning permission was granted in 2021, although no commencement date for the expected £110 million redevelopment has been confirmed.

Just over 10 years ago, Stormont committed money to the redevelopment of Windsor Park, Ravenhill and Casement Park. Only Casement Park is unfinished, while Stormont remains collapsed.

With local elections coming up, unionist parties are strongly against any additional funding for the project.

“When we met the IFA some weeks ago, we explained that we do not support additional funding for the building of Casement Park in Belfast beyond what was originally allocated by the NI Executive to the three sporting bodies,” said Stephen Dunne, the DUP’s spokesperson on sport.

Looking in you must wonder if the posture is another petty anti-GAA tiff, a continuation of the degradation in the relations of some sporting beings to others.

Either way, the mood music of AOINISC’s choice seems venal and depressingly everpresent in Northern Ireland discourse. It is divisive and widens the same old fault lines.

A football tournament that would light up the city but is not supported by supporters. Why? Because some time in the future the prospect could exist of a Northern Ireland football team playing, not in Windsor Park, but Casement Park in west Belfast?

Trying to look beyond the fatuous: football tournaments should be hosted by football stadia – and it’s difficult not to see tribal bias at its heart.

It is showing us intolerance and fear of the GAA, without actually saying.