College football in Ireland () began initially in 1988 as part of a promotional campaign to mark the Dublin millennium celebrations. Dubbed the Emerald Isle Classic, it was the first NCAA-sanctioned American college football game played in Europe. The game was played at Lansdowne Road in Dublin, Ireland in the years 1988 and 1989. The event was first proposed and arranged by Aidan J. Prendergast and Jim O'Brien. Prendergast, who was a former president of the Irish American Football Association conceived the idea of bringing a major NCAA game to Ireland in the mid-1980s and started pitching the idea on both sides of the Atlantic. Prendergast promoted both the 1988 and 1989 games. The game was intended as an annual event to attract some of the 40 million Americans of Irish descent back to Ireland. College teams with particularly Irish or Catholic background were chosen in an effort to attract Irish nationals to the games. 1988 The inaugural Emerald Isle Classic was held at Lansdowne Road with a crowd of 42,524 in attendance. It featured a 2–7 Boston College team led by Mark Kamphaus beat the 8–1 Army Black Knights 38–24. 1996 In 1996, Notre Dame and the United States Naval Academy began a second American football event in Ireland called the Shamrock Classic. The event, played at Croke Park, drew a slightly smaller crowd than the first Emerald Isle Classic. Notre Dame won the game over Navy, setting the record for the longest winning streak over an annual collegiate opponent at 33 wins (Notre Dame added 10 additional wins to the streak, which remains the all-time record at 43 consecutive victories). 2012 A return trip by the teams in 2012, held at Aviva Stadium, was confirmed by the two schools and stadium management in September 2010. The Emerald Isle Classic was tied to the Irish tourism initiative The Gathering, which sought to encourage members of the Irish diaspora (especially in the U.S.) to visit their ancestral home in 2013. The first advance sellout for a sporting event in the two-year history of Aviva Stadium, 15,000 tickets sold in less than two hours, and about 35,000 Americans went to Dublin. The 2012 game aired live in parts of Europe as well as the U.S. The U.S. Navy docked an amphibious-assault warship in Dublin before the game. While the event was successful from a tourism perspective, it was marred by the