This shirt has no club: it has an entire country. It is the Celtic Cross Jersey from O'Neills' Irish Pride and Heritage Collection, green and white hoops with gold everywhere, the high Celtic cross embroidered on the chest, another as a watermark filling the whole back and a Gaelic motto repeated on the hem, the sleeve and inside the collar: In Éirinn tá Neart, in Ireland there is strength. The fabric is Koolite, the same used in GAA match jerseys.
O'Neills designed it for the diaspora and for anyone who wants to wear Ireland without a county crest or a flag, and the result condenses fifteen hundred years of iconography into a football shirt: the stone high crosses that inspire the embroidery have stood since the ninth century. The hoops are far younger, but they promise to last as long.
Here at Hoopster this piece opens a drawer of its own: shirts that dress not a club but an identity. Among all the children of the hoops scattered across the world, this one dresses the root.