Our Lady is on a mission.
Beating Navy, yes, but it’s been 11 years since Notre Dame last played in Ireland. There is a whole new generation of would-be enthusiasts to become the Emerald Isle and beyond. Notre Dame, which is already an iconic logo in the United States, has a chance to expand around the world when it faces Midshipmen at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium on Saturday.
“Our goal here is to expand the logo and put Notre Dame on the map of the world,” said Aaron Horvath, a sports spokesman and logo specialist.
Making it less difficult to watch games is one way to do that, which is why Notre Dame offers foreign enthusiasts the ability to stream Irish home games for Fighting Irish TV, which last year charged $35 for the season.
Notre Dame, ranked 13th in the Top 25 AP, has already played twice in Dublin; This is the first “home” match that the Irish host abroad. They bring a touch of South Bend with more than 30,000 fans.
That doesn’t leave much room for Aviva locals, but hearts and minds can also be won at game week with quintessentially American activities, such as a lively rally and hatchback party, as well as a mass at Dublin Castle on Saturday mornings. stimulates the Irish economy.
For Europe – and probably outside the United States – football means the NFL. Most people probably know the Super Bowl, Tom Brady, the Dallas Cowboys.
Conference realignment, graduate transfers, and NIL? Not so much. Don’t expect the average European sports fan to know that Notre Dame’s 8 national football championships are second only to Alabama (12), although they would possibly recognize the nickname Fighting Irish or the goblin’s mascot.
“It is vital that the United States is literally the only country on the planet where higher education and high-performance sports are strongly linked. Therefore, it is fundamentally contrary to the nature of a European or an Asian to associate Notre-Dame with any kind of “This makes it much more complicated to use athletics as a symbol of the university in Europe. “
Also, let’s not forget that football is the star sport everywhere. French striker and World Cup star Kylian Mbappé has 107 million followers on Instagram; Notre Dame football has fewer than 395,000.
Still, Fighting Irish is a brand.
“Our competition in brands is the Yankees, it’s the Lakers, it’s the Cowboys,” Horvath said. “The Notre-Dame monogram is one of the most powerful logos in the United States and in the world if you think about it from a sporting standpoint. “
Notre Dame is personal and does not disclose sales of its products. Fanatics’ figures show that in 2023, Notre Dame, the second-best-selling NCAA university (Georgia, back-to-back national champion, is number one) across the company’s sites, spokesman Seth Schlechter said.
Fighting Irish has been sold in 50 countries, he added. Neither Fanatics nor Notre Dame presented further figures indicating foreign trends.
Soccer is the only American game that has taken root in Europe. Major League Baseball has held games in London and is targeting Paris for 2025. Yankees caps are the best sellers in all of Europe.
Irish journalist Michael McQuaid said NFL products dominate American football games and he watches parties he attends in Ireland. He estimated that universities account for 10% of jerseys and caps, but that “the vast majority of them are Notre Dame teams. “
“Even the layman. . . chatting with friends and family, he heard about Notre Dame,” said McQuaid, founder of the Pro Football Ireland podcast.
Horvath said Notre Dame has been contacted to play its next match.
“It can be Ireland, it can be somewhere else,” he said. We are excited to play this match here this year and know what the next step will be in Notre Dame football abroad. “
It’s not just football, either. Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team will open its season in Paris against South Carolina on Nov. 6 in what will be the first game of the NCAA regular season in the French capital.
Notre Dame football hasn’t created country-specific social media accounts like some NFL groups do, and they post only in English (Gaelic speakers noted a rare exception before the start of the season), though Horvath said that could replace it in the future. .
This is the third clash in Ireland between Notre Dame and the Navy. The Irish beat the Midshipmen 52-27 in 1996 and 50-10 in 2012. Since then, the football program has taken additional steps to broaden its appeal abroad. He brought Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund together for a pre-season football match at Notre Dame Stadium in the summer of 2019. Liverpool’s internal media featured the university’s campus in a post on its website.
Later, Notre Dame signed a long-term partnership with Irish brewer Guinness.
In addition to expanding its fan base, the university hopes the action will ensnare other people in South Bend or foreign scholars to participate in an exchange program.
“We just hope that Ireland will open people’s eyes a little bit towards Notre Dame, school football and school athletics,” Horvath said. “We think that’s the case. “