Original Umbro football shirt Ireland 2004/06

The Irish national football team is a team of football players representing the Republic of Ireland in international competitions and competitions, such as the preliminary rounds for the football world cup and the European football men's championship. Ireland usually plays its home matches at the Avivastadion in Dublin and is known for the 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 top scorer of all time 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 one 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 five hundred games, first as an Irish Free State and from 1938 as an independent Republic. For decades, Ireland participated in the qualification tournaments for the Football World Championship and the European Football Men Championship, but it was - often hardly - unsuccessfully.

In the 1980s, the Irish team had a golden generation, which, under the leadership of the Englishman Jack Charlton, managed to secure a first international tournament in 1988. The success under Charlton continued until 1994. For more than fifteen years, Ireland returned to the role of mediocre member of UEFA, which failed to perform in the qualifications for the major championships several times in a row. Under Giovanni Trapattoni, in 2012 it qualified for the second time for a European Championship; Ireland also qualified for the following tournament, which took place in France in June 2016.