The Irish Football Association is the governing body of the beautiful game in Northern Ireland and has previously been in charge of football in the Republic of Ireland.
From 1880 until 1950, the organisation was in charge of the Ireland national football team. However, in 1954, the Ireland team became the Northern Ireland team.
The early beginnings of the Irish FA
The IFA was formed in 1880 by seven clubs, who were mostly based near the Belfast area of Northern Ireland, in order to organise football in Ireland as a whole. It all began after Cliftonville called a meeting for all the other clubs to start following the football rules set out by the Scottish FA.
The seven clubs formed the Irish Football Association at their meeting on November 18th. The association is now regarded as the fourth oldest of its kind in the world, with only England, Scotland, and Wales acknowledged as older.
The seven founding clubs of the IFA were Alexander, Avoniel, Cliftonville, Distillery, Knock, Moyola Park, and Oldpark. Many of these clubs are no longer at the forefront of football in Northern Ireland.
One of the organisation’s first big decisions was to establish an annual cup competition similar to the FA Cup or Scottish Cup, called the Irish Cup.
Two years after the establishment of the Irish Football Association, Ireland played their first friendly against England. To say things didn’t go well on their debut international outing would be an understatement, as Ireland went down to a 13-0 defeat.
The result is still in the record books as the Three Lions’ biggest international win and Northern Ireland’s worst-ever defeat.
A divide in the country
In 1921, things in Ireland changed forever as the country was partitioned into Northern Ireland and what is now known as the Republic of Ireland.
Shortly after the partition, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) was established in the south of the country, which was then known as the Free State, now the Republic.
The new association complicated matters as both organisations claimed that they represented and governed the whole of the island. In fact, both organisations still had teams playing simply as ‘Ireland’. The two teams also still selected players from rival national leagues.
However, football’s governing body, FIFA, stepped in and gave the FAI the organisational rights to 26 counties of Ireland. These were in the south of the country, leaving the IFA with the counties in Northern Ireland.
Things were cleared up slightly in the 1950s, as IFA no longer claimed that it represented the whole of the Island. The 1960s saw the IFA move to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.
The IFA moved once again in 2016, as they relocated to the National Stadium, Windsor Park, which is where they remain at the time of writing. The results obtained by the Irish National team and in the Irish Football League and cup competitions are still considered to be Northern Irish records rather than those of a united Ireland.
The IFA, of course, still controls the Northern Irish national team. As Northern Ireland, the team made the quarter-finals of the World Cup in 1958, made it to the second group stage at the 1982 edition, and played at the 1986 World Cup.
In recent years, Northern Ireland also reached the last 16 of the European Championships in 2016, but it lost to Wales, another home nation team.
Although its history has been complicated, much like that of Ireland as a whole, the Irish Football Association is now in a far more stable state than in the past. Without stability, organisations can crumble, so the IFA deserves credit for surviving through the trials that partition brought to everybody in Ireland.
