Just like in the rest of the United Kingdom, football is a very popular sport in Northern Ireland. The highest football league is the Irish Premiership, for which the most expensive season tickets were sold by Glentoran, Ballymena and United Ards, with 160 British pounds each in 2018. As of March 11, 2020, the most attended match of the national football team of Ireland was against the USSR on October 16, 1985 in Lenin Stadium, Moscow (Luzhniki Stadium), with approximately 100 thousand attendees.
The national governing body for sport is Sport Northern Ireland and Sport Ireland in the Republic of Ireland. These organisations oversee and partly fund the development of sports. One of the primary aims is to assist the development of sustainable and effective structures to increase the number of participants and volunteers in sport. In 2020 Sport Ireland committed to investing over 13.8 million euros across a variety of non-governmental organisations, with the largest single investment of 1.4 million euros going towards Special Olympics Ireland.
