Look to your right for a stadium defined by its tall metal floodlight pylons, a long block wall perimeter, and a large, sloping roof over its main concrete stand. This is Markets Field.
Since we just came from Saint John's Cathedral, you might find it fitting that one of the banked standing areas inside this very stadium is named the Cathedral End. It is a nice little nod to the neighbors. Markets Field is essentially the chameleon of Limerick sports. Today, it is a UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, category two stadium and the home ground of Treaty United, holding about three thousand five hundred fans. But its soil has soaked up the sweat of almost every sport imaginable.
For decades, this was a rugby fortress for the Garryowen club, serving as their home from eighteen eighty-six until nineteen fifty-seven. Around the early nineteen hundreds, it also served as a Gaelic games ground, hosting intense hurling and Gaelic football matches. But for many locals of a certain generation, Markets Field means only one thing... greyhounds.
From nineteen thirty-seven all the way to two thousand and nine, the roar of the crowd here was directed at mechanical hares and racing dogs. It was a massive operation. In nineteen sixty, the owners installed a new totalisator system, a massive mechanical computer that calculates betting odds and payouts for the track, alongside a brand new stand that cost over sixty thousand pounds. That translates to well over a million euros today. It was also here that a young man named J-P McManus started out as a bookmaker, calculating odds and taking bets from the crowds in the stands. He was so successful he earned the nickname the Sundance Kid, long before he became one of Ireland's most famous billionaires.
Of course, we cannot forget the football history. The legendary Liverpool team played a friendly match here against Limerick F-C, the city's former football club, in nineteen sixty-two. The English giants won that one five to three. Limerick even hosted European cup ties here against Southampton in nineteen eighty-one, and the Dutch side A-Z Alkmaar in nineteen eighty-two.
When the greyhound racing moved to a new venue in two thousand and nine, Markets Field fell quiet. But in twenty eleven, L-E-D-P, the Limerick Enterprise Development Partnership, purchased the ground, backed by funds from none other than that former track bookmaker, J-P McManus. They poured four hundred thousand euros into a brand new playing surface. Take a glance at your app to see a shot of that very pitch gleaming under the lights. That vibrant green grass actually won the F-A-I, the Football Association of Ireland, Pitch of the Year award in twenty sixteen.
Markets Field has survived shifts in culture, changes in ownership, and the rise and fall of entirely different sports. Reflect on that rich sporting history. When you are ready, we can head to the next stop.
