'The most depressing game in football history' - What it's like to attend a game no one wants to play in

Ronan Murphy

• 1 Apr 2026 03:37 CDT
• 5 min read

Analysis

“The most depressing matches in football history” is a tweet that went viral following the UEFA playoff semi-finals for the World Cup. Wales vs Northern Ireland. Ukraine vs Albania. Slovakia vs Romania. Republic of Ireland vs North Macedonia. Eight losers who would rather anything than have to play meaningless friendlies five days after seeing their World Cup hopes obliterated.

Both Wales and the Republic of Ireland played 120 minutes in their semi-finals before losing in penalty shootouts, an extra half an hour of wear and tear in tired legs and bodies for players who no doubt would prefer to be back at their clubs despite any claims to the contrary they made when a microphone was pointed in their direction.

Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson summed up his side’s approach to the friendly with North Macedonia by claiming the best way to move on from a car crash is to get back behind the wheel.

Presumably not immediately and probably not in the same battered motor, but psychologically, you still remember the moment of panic as your car careens off the road, and physically, you definitely feel the damage it has done to your body.

North Macedonian media had less time for analogies, bluntly headlining an article after their 4-0 exit at the hands of Denmark by calling the Ireland friendly “the most unimportant match in our football history.”

Hallgrimsson was luckily able to keep most of his squad together rather than suffer a litany of withdrawals through alleged injuries, but no such luck befell his opposite number Goce Sedloski who saw his most experienced player Aleksandar Trajkovski immediately retire from international football with the forward’s wife criticising the country’s new head coach, while Rangers forward Bojan Miovski asked to be released back to his club after only featuring as a substitute in the semi-final.

With two of Sedloski’s senior players suffering head losses in public, the pressure is already on the former Dinamo Zagreb defender whose first game in charge was that dismal defeat to Denmark. The quick turnaround between the Thursday semi-final and the Tuesday friendly also meant that neither manager had time to overhaul their squad for the Nations League or Euro 2028 qualifying, leaving the teams in a strange limbo of having panels filled with senior players who are unlikely to play at the next major championship in two years’ time.

As a result of those awful results, the bright spots for the future for both teams were Ireland’s promising QPR utility man Harvey Vale and late call-up Millenic Alli, a 26-year-old journeyman who was playing non-league football three years ago. Macedonia looked to naturalised defender Sebastian Herrera who was originally from Colombia and at 31 was receiving his first call-up for his adopted nation as well as MLS recruit Danny Musovski who was born in Nevada and also only received his first call-up this month aged 30 in the hope he might get a chance to play in a World Cup in his home country.

Such was the belief, or the disbelief, that Ireland could beat Czechia and reach the playoff final, the game in Dublin to face Denmark was sold out weeks in advance. Instead, tickets for a friendly with North Macedonia were being offered for free by Ireland fans left bereft ahead of a summer of warm-up matches against Grenada and Qatar in preparation for nothing.

The Macedonian fans in attendance were not actually in attendance. Who would have booked a last-minute flight from Skopje to Dublin for this game and even if someone was that much of a sadist, they would not have been able to get a visa in time.

After a bright start which produced a cross and little more, the fans who actually did turn up collectively lost their voice as Ireland reverted to type and started hoofing aimless long balls to nobody. Winning a corner briefly woke some people up with the atmosphere less lively than in the Trinity College Library a few miles away where American tourists squeezed in to get a look at the Book of Kells.

The fancy illustrations drawn by Irish monks there would undeniably have been more entertaining than what was served up on Lansdowne Road as club managers must have been praying that none of their players received an injury in a match of no significance whatsoever.

Library corridor silence was such that the players could be heard barking orders at each other with clarity not experienced since the coronavirus pandemic left the 51,000-seater Aviva Stadium empty for lockdown games.

With absolutely nothing at stake, there was no sense of urgency from the players on the pitch, and the only activity seemed to be in the media tribune where journalists were fabricating stories for their 'Things We Learned' and 'Player Ratings' articles that were as contractually obligated as these most depressing football matches ever. Those who had never used AI before were probably hoping that ChatGPT could hallucinate some sort of match report that might contain some action and perhaps mistakenly qualify one of the two teams for the 2026 World Cup.

But it would have been hard for a machine to produce a ‘not just, but’ paragraph when there was no onlys or justs to be found. The referee, even, could not wait to get off the pitch, blowing for half-time as soon as he could, three seconds after 45 minutes had elapsed. A raft of second-half substitutions strangely improved the quality from the first-half which proved far too industrial as neither side could make their craft work.

One of those second-half substitutes was James Abankwah for his Ireland debut, but exactly what his Watford manager would have wanted not to happen happened with less than 10 minutes remaining as he was forced off through injury. Ireland talisman Troy Parrott twice had the ball in the net but saw the assistant referee raise his flag for offside on both occasions, but luckily escaped injury himself after taking a heavy knock in the first-half.

With time running out, the only action seemed to be on the stairwells as the 39,000 brave souls headed for the exits having watched 84 minutes of no goals and not even considering the possibility that one might come in one of the most depressing games of football ever. They were right. Of course they were. We shouldn’t have bothered. Nobody should.

The FootballTransfers app

Check out FootballTransfers' new app for all of football's big storylines, transfer rumours and exclusive news in one convenient place directly on your mobile device.

The FootballTransfers app is available in the Apple App Store. Download here:

•App Store