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Ireland fell just short of qualifying for this year’s expanded World Cup, a loss felt acutely in Atlanta, where its team would have played in the group round.
But the country’s efforts to use sports as an entree for building diplomatic and commercial ties in the city recently crowned No. 1 for sports business haven’t slowed down.
“For Ireland, sport is an emerging and very exciting area of diplomacy in an increasingly complex world. Sport provides an important space for dialogue, connection and partnership,” said Nicole Sheils, deputy consul general at the Consulate General of Ireland in Atlanta.
During a panel discussion on sports diplomacy organized by the Irish American Chamber Southeast, Ms. Sheils noted that sports bring not only economic benefits — like the 115 million euros of impact estimated from the 27,000 visitors who came from abroad to see Georgia Tech’s football team beat Florida State in Dublin in 2024 — but also cultural and heritage links.
“It is a powerful point of connection with Irish communities overseas, an opportunity to raise awareness of and showcase modern Ireland, and … an increasingly important platform to promote Ireland to international audiences as a location for investment, trade, and to visit,” Ms. Sheils said during the event at the Capital City Club weeks ahead of the city’s first FIFA World Cup matches.
Now, Ireland has formalized its sports diplomacy strategy, and its new Enterprise Ireland office in Atlanta is capitalizing on the appetite for sports tech innovation to help Irish innovators in the industry expand across the pond.
Growing up in Ireland, executive coach and moderator Claire O’Connor said Gaelic athletics helped build a sense of cultural belonging, but they also instilled valuable life lessons.
“That sense of being a sportswoman and existing in the sports world, it’s just phenomenal, and as a woman who works with a lot of executives, 94 percent of women credit their expertise in leadership to playing sports,” she said.
She added that the economic impacts of matches extend far beyond the stadiums where the games are played, radiating out to pubs, parking lots and other arenas where local residents feel the benefits.
That’s where Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, is focusing as eight matches of the FIFA World Cup present unprecedented opportunity for the city.
Kelsey Maynor, director of small business engagement at Showcase Atlanta, the mayor’s effort to ensure large-scale events benefit local small businesses, said many want to cash in on the spotlight without taking the time to prepare themselves with inventory, digital marketing techniques, payment platforms and other infrastructure for scaling up.
For some, the legacy of the World Cup will show up in how these changes have set them up for future success from sporting events like the 2028 Super Bowl, he said.
“As we continue to get these accolades to the city, as we start getting this global attention, World Cup is an opportunity that some people are going to be able to take advantage of as a launching board to be global superpowers in business,” Mr. Maynor said.
For Laurie Prickett, senior vice president at Invest Atlanta in charge of economic development, including foreign investment, the matches are also a unique chance to tell Atlanta’s story to inbound international visitors.
“I can sell Atlanta all day and rival the other cities, but this is the opportunity to get everybody in a room to show the benefit of relationships and what separates us from everywhere else,” she said, noting that “intentionality” and the city’s charms as a “soft landing” for foreign companies are its differentiators.
That was the pitch when Mayor Andre Dickens visited the Guinness Enterprise Centre, a Dublin incubator attached to the mega brewery, to meet with fintech and sports tech companies around the Georgia Tech game two summers ago.
The following year, Enterprise Ireland opened an office in Atlanta and is now helping companies like Orreco, a centralized platform for teams to capture, house and analyze their performance data, break into the U.S.
“We’re mandated to partner with plenty of cities and regions across the U.S., but Atlanta stuck out in terms of their warmth, their welcome, their mentors, and the helping hand they brought to make Irish companies feel at home here,” said Jane O’Sullivan, who handles sports tech and travel tech out of Enterprise Ireland’s New York office.
Football games and other major events can be catalysts for investment conversations simply because they bring people together, she said.
“It’s an excuse, it’s a date in the calendar, everyone makes themselves available, and there’s a ton of media and press,” she said.
During a visit to Atlanta ahead of St. Patrick’s Day, Patrick O’Donovan, Ireland’s minister for culture, communications and sport, told Global Atlanta that Ireland’s participation in international sporting tournaments in the late 1980s helped unleash the outward focus that led to its Celtic Tiger economy in the ‘90s.
Sports also create bonds between people that can drive international engagement, and ultimately, peace, and that’s what he hopes for the World Cup, a first test of Ireland’s recently unveiled five-year sports-diplomacy strategy.
“You’ll have world leaders, you’ll have diplomats and people in from all over the world,” Mr. O’Donovan said. “All conflict at the end of the day is restored by dialogue; conflict doesn’t just fizzle out. Somebody actually has to bring it to an end, and for that to happen, people have to meet and they have to discuss, and they have to agree, and they have to, in some cases, resile from their positions. And so I would hope this opens that door.”
–With reporting by Michal Jensby
