Garth Brooks sold 400,000 tickets for five nights at Dublin’s Croke Park in 2014 and then played none of them. Eight years later he went back to the same stadium, played five nights in September 2022 and drew 401,000 people, the biggest attendance figure on the venue’s entire concert list. Now Ireland is buying again. Brooks announced a ten-concert Irish tour across five cities for 2027 on November 5, 2026, and his own website says more than 300,000 tickets went on November 12, the first day of sales, with demand strong enough that he added another show in Belfast.
The bond between Ireland and an Oklahoma country singer looks odd on paper. The history explains it.
The first visit, 1997
Brooks first played Croke Park, the Dublin home of the Gaelic Athletic Association and a stadium that now holds 82,300 people, on three straight nights from May 16 to 18, 1997, during his 1996 to 1998 world tour. Trisha Yearwood and Susan Ashton were on the bill. There is a family thread too: his mother, Colleen McElroy Carroll, was a 1950s country singer of Irish descent who recorded for Capitol Records.
The 2014 collapse
In February 2014, Brooks announced two Croke Park shows for July 25 and 26. Demand was so heavy that three more dates were added, taking total sales to 400,000 tickets for what was meant to be his comeback from more than a decade away from full-scale touring.
Then it fell apart. After objections from people living near the ground, a licensing dispute meant only three of the five concerts could go ahead. Promoter Aiken Promotions and stadium management were pushed to drop two nights. Brooks refused to play three shows when five had been sold, and every one of the concerts was canceled. At a press conference on July 10, 2014, where he also announced a new deal with Sony Music Nashville and a world tour, he spoke of his regret over the Ireland affair.
The 2022 return in numbers
The Garth Brooks Stadium Tour closed at Croke Park with five dates, on September 9, 10, 11, 16 and 17, 2022. The stadium’s own records describe them as the replacement for the five shows lost in 2014. The tour totals show what Ireland meant to the run:
- Croke Park attendance: 401,000, or roughly 80,200 a night
- Croke Park gross: $28,621,080
- Whole tour, 42 shows: 2,836,637 tickets and $230,551,257
On Badiyaa’s arithmetic, five Dublin nights, about 12% of the tour’s 42 dates, delivered 14.1% of all the tickets the tour sold and 12.4% of its gross. The average Dublin ticket worked out at about $71.
For scale, U2 drew 246,743 people over three Croke Park nights on the Vertigo Tour in 2005, and Coldplay sold 329,200 tickets for four nights in 2024. Coldplay’s four nights grossed more, at $49.5 million, but no act on the stadium’s list has matched Brooks for sheer numbers through the gates.
Why it still matters
Ticket demand has become a running story wherever Brooks goes. Last month we reported how he scrapped a third Kansas City show after bots flooded a 90,000-strong ticket queue. Ireland’s own stadium giants have new music out too, as covered in our story on U2’s new album Carnaval De Luz.
Brooks’s current run, The Blame It All On My Roots Tour, began on August 20, 2026, and is built to echo the staging of the 1996 to 1998 tour that first brought him to Dublin. The 2027 Irish dates break his old pattern: instead of one stadium, the shows spread across five cities, and the extra Belfast night takes the run past its original ten concerts.
Further reading
Image: Metro Centric, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
