In 1951, the Mayo football team won the Irish football final for the fifth and last time. It was the second year in a row they were victorious, and it looked like Mayo was set to dominate for years to come. But they didn’t. The curse of County Mayo.
The All-Ireland football competition is probably the most important national sporting event in Ireland. Every year, the Irish tribally follow their local team in a competition where the 32 counties plus a team from London and New York compete for the national Gaelic football prize, the Sam Maguire trophy.
For 38 years after 1951, the Mayo team never even reached the final until they lost to Cork in 1989. In the last 34 years, they have reached the final 11 times, drawing twice only to lose the subsequent replays as well. There had also been a few horrendous beatings at the hands of County Kerry, the team that has won the competition the greatest number of times.
In the 1996 final, against Meath, Mayo was leading by five points, only to see the lead diminish in the last ten minutes and a speculative long ball bounced in front of the goalkeeper and over the bar to level the game and force a replay. In the replay, a 30-man brawl broke out after five minutes, and each team had a player sent off. Mayo unfortunately lost their best player, who was probably the most talented in the country at the time. Still, they managed to squander another five-point lead to lose by a point.
And in the last ten years, there have been some very close games against the Dublin team, arguably the greatest ever to play the game, winning the competition six times in a row between 2015 and 2020. Twice, Mayo brought them to a replay in the final and twice in the semi-finals. For the first time ever in senior county football, a team (Mayo) scored two own goals in one game to throw away a chance to win. Scoring an own goal in Gaelic football is a rare thing. It is much harder to do than in soccer. To do it once is unlucky. To do it twice is farcical.
In the 2017 final, Mayo self-sabotaged against Dublin again. Mayo was trailing by a point in the 48th minute, was about to have a kickable free, and their opponents were about to be reduced to 14 men because a Dublin player had committed a dangerous foul. However, a Mayo player, in a fit of pique, retaliated and got himself sent off. Mayo lost their numerical advantage, and the referee overturned the free kick awarded to Mayo. Dublin went on to win. And Mayo lost again.
The curse of County Mayo. The litany of defeats and errors would make you think the team was cursed. Maybe they are. The story goes—whether real or apocryphal—that after the 1951 victory, the team was returning from Dublin to Mayo to celebrate in their home county when they came upon a funeral just outside Foxford, a small town in north Mayo.
Nobody does funerals like the Irish. In 1951, they were sombre occasions, and respect and reverence were expected and demanded. But the story is that the Mayo team, in their exuberance, did not stop and pay their respects, overtaking the funeral procession, much to the ire of the local priest.
“Damnation be upon every one of you,” he said. “As long as you all shall live, County Mayo will never win another All-Ireland.”
That was 72 years ago. And since then, Mayo has never won an All-Ireland. They have come close. They have been the architects of their own downfall. They have been extraordinarily unlucky. But they have never won since the day of the curse.
What was once only a local legend became a national one as the country watched on, almost embarrassed for Mayo, willing them to win but, somewhat ironically, in a country that has been losing the Faith, wanting them to lose, to keep the idea alive that the curse was real.
No one knows for sure if the funeral ever took place, if the team was disrespectful, or if a priest ever issued the curse on County Mayo. It seems impossible to confirm, but the story has become a national curiosity in Ireland. In recent weeks, the legend has gone global as the BBC broadcast a three-part podcast covering the curse of County Mayo.
One by one, over the years, the players of 1951 have passed away, and the legend has grown. The last remaining member of the 1951 team, Mick Loftus, died on April 22, 2023. Just a few weeks before this, Mayo won the National League title, an important but secondary competition for the counties, beating local rival Galway. Ostensibly, Mayo was the best team in the country and was expected to challenge for the All-Ireland once again.
If they were to win the All-Ireland immediately after the death of Dr. Mick Loftus, surely this would confirm the curse as real rather than folklore, as many assume it to be. Unfortunately for Mayo, in the quarterfinals they were roundly hammered by Dublin (once more), and the wait goes on.
It may not be the final nail in the coffin for the curse. It has been fulfilled in full since Mayo did not win another All-Ireland while the team was alive. Surely, to win immediately after its fulfilment would have been too much for secularised Ireland to handle. Like Jesus walking on water, the Shroud of Turin, or the miracle of the sun at Fatima, it would need to be rationalised away as a coincidence or a form of scientific anomaly.
It is said that God never gives a cross so great that we cannot bear it, and that includes people of faith or none at all. Perhaps a Mayo success in 2023 would have been just too much to bear so possibly 2024 will be Mayo’s year, and for believers and unbelievers alike, the curse will be a matter of faith. We live in hope.
