Florida State will face Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday for the first overseas football game in university history.   

The 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic kicks off at noon ET at Aviva Stadium. The game will be broadcast live on ESPN. 

Dublin will welcome over 27,000 international fans for the event. FSU’s presence in Dublin represents an effort to deepen connections between the university, the state of Florida, and Ireland, and for students, faculty, alumni and football fans to participate in this historic event and experience Irish culture. 

Multiple events will take place across the city leading up to the game, including pep rallies, Irish cultural experiences, and business and academic events. 

The FSU Marching Chiefs will deliver a halftime performance that includes a rendition of the classic Irish song, “Danny Boy.” The Marching Chiefs will also perform at the Irish Immigration Museum, Slane Castle, the Royal Dublin Society and the FSU Pep Rally in Dublin’s Smithfield Plaza. 

The FSU Men’s Rugby Club will take on Trinity College in Dublin for another historic sporting event on Friday. The event is the first European match in the club’s 52-year history and the second time the club has traveled abroad since playing a match in the Bahamas in the 1980s. FSU alumni, fans and family raised more than $56,000 to help send the team to Dublin for the match.  

Days before the game, four students from the FSU College of Business — Sean Cliff, Mason Pollum, Sebastian Mehlum and Daniel White — will participate in the Future Leaders Challenge, a Shark Tank-like competition that culminates students’ work and pairs them with representatives from Grant Thornton and Eversheds through the summer. Students will face a judging panel that includes College of Business alumni. 

The FSU College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences is making an appearance overseas through its Project ElevatED, which will honor teachers from Florida, Georgia and Ireland on Friday. The football game isn’t the only thing bringing FSU to Ireland this year. Other notable connections include: 

• FSU’s College of Social Work offers internships in Dublin through International Programs.  
• FSU’s College of Music has an Irish Ensemble, which focuses on traditional and neo-traditional Irish fiddle repertoire taught in a traditional oral-aural manner. Singing and dance traditions are encompassed in the repertoire, and other instruments used in Irish traditional music are included in the ensemble as well.
• Last spring, the FSU Museum of Fine Arts brought Irish contemporary art to Tallahassee through a multidisciplinary exhibition that considers relationships between people, language, land and sea through the work of 10 Irish artists. Associate Professor of Indigenous Art & Film Kristin Dowell, a proud speaker of the endangered Irish language, curated the exhibition, “Talamh agus Teanga: Land and Language in Contemporary Irish Art”.
• Over the summer, the FSU Global Scholars Program participated in Alanna Desmore’s project at University College Dublin, where she conducted research on integrating Large Language Models into digital forensic investigations.