Original Umbro Ireland 2012/13 football shirt

The Ireland national football team is a team of football players that represent the Republic of Ireland in international matches and competitions, such as the qualifying rounds for the FIFA World Cup and the European Men's Football Championship. Ireland usually plays its home games at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin and is known for its large group of regular supporters, nicknamed The Green Army.

Robbie Keane, played the most matches of all internationals: more than 146 international matches in eighteen years. He is also the all-time top scorer with 68 goals, more than forty more than the number two on the top scorers list, Niall Quinn. Ireland has no particular rivalry with the British countries, apart from Northern Ireland, with which it formed a single national team in the early twentieth century; most often it hit the national teams of Poland and Spain in an official international match.

The country played its first official international match in March 1926 and has since played more than 500 matches, first as the Irish Free State and from 1938 as an independent Republic. For decades, Ireland participated in the qualifying tournaments for the FIFA World Cup and the European Men's Football Championship, but was – often narrowly – unsuccessful.

In the 1980s, the Irish national team had a golden generation, which, under the leadership of Englishman Jack Charlton, was able to force placement for an international tournament for the first time in 1988. Success under Charlton lasted until 1994. For more than fifteen years, Ireland returned to the role of mediocre member of UEFA, failing several times in a row in qualifying for the major championships. Under Giovanni Trapattoni, it qualified for a European Championship for the second time in 2012; Ireland also qualified for the subsequent tournament, which took place in France in June 2016.