Shamrock Rovers

Before Celtic Park filled with green and white, Ringsend already knew the hoops. Shamrock Rovers were born in 1899 in that Dublin dockland neighbourhood and became Ireland's most decorated club, with more than twenty championships and an outright record of FAI Cups. Their story has everything an epic requires: the dominance of the 1920s and 30s, the four in a row of the 1980s, and then the fall, when the sale of beloved Glenmalure Park in 1987 threw the club into more than two decades of wandering, forever close to the edge and saved by their own supporters, who took over and turned Rovers into a member owned club. The resurrection took shape in Tallaght, the stadium opened in 2009, and had its greatest moment in 2011: Michael O'Neill's Rovers became the first Irish club ever to reach a European group stage, hosting Tottenham in the Europa League. Today, serial champions once again, the Hoops are at once the aristocracy and the survival story of Irish football. Nobody on the island has worn hoops for longer, or with more right to them.