A Shirt, a Song, an Island: Bohemians and Massive Attack’s Cuba Story

Some football shirts disappear into the back of a wardrobe when the season ends. Others survive long after the matches they were made for, because they come to represent a time, a city and something people believed in.

Bohemian FC’s 2026 FAI Cup shirt belongs to the second kind.

For this one, the Dublin club joined forces with Massive Attack. What emerged was more than a special-edition football shirt: it became a small story stretching from Dublin to Bristol and on to Havana, bringing football, music, art, history and solidarity onto the same piece of fabric.

The shirt, designed by Bohemians and Massive Attack, draws on historic Cuba national team kits and on the long connections between Ireland and Cuba. Broad khaki and black stripes are crossed by a red V, with the white star of the Cuban flag sitting at its centre. The Irish-language version of the Bohemians crest appears on the chest, while Massive Attack’s logo takes a prominent place on the front. Woven into the fabric are extracts from Che Guevara’s speech to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference in Algiers in 1965.

Look a little closer and the smaller details begin to tell their own story.

Inside the collar is a line from Massive Attack’s Teardrop: “Love is a doing word.”

Near the bottom of the shirt, an embroidered label carries Dublin artist Jim Fitzpatrick’s famous portrait of Che Guevara alongside Fitzpatrick’s signature. His artwork was based on Alberto Korda’s Guerrillero Heroico, the photograph of Guevara taken in Havana on 5 March 1960.

It creates an unusual circle. A photograph taken in Cuba, an image reinterpreted by an Irish artist in Dublin, and the language of a band formed in Bristol meet decades later on a football shirt.

The back of the shirt brings the story towards Ireland once again. Beside Massive Attack’s flame symbol is a line attributed to Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch: “In my son’s veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels.”

The Guevara family’s Irish ancestry is therefore not simply part of the background to the collaboration. It has been stitched into the shirt itself.

Yet the project was never intended to be only a historical or aesthetic tribute. Thirty per cent of the profits from shirt sales will go towards medical aid for Cuba, divided equally between two organisations. Cuba Vive Medical Aid Appeal, chosen by Massive Attack, and mediCuba-Europe, chosen by Bohemians, will each receive 15 per cent of the profits. Both organisations provide support to Cuba’s health system through areas including medicines, hospital supplies, medical equipment and energy infrastructure.

Daniel Lambert, Bohemian FC’s Chief Operating Officer, said the shirt was the result of months of work with Massive Attack’s team. He explained that the connection between the two sides was about more than a shared love of music. Both have used their platforms to engage with social issues, and the club wanted the collaboration to draw attention to the pressure on Cuba’s health system while also generating tangible medical support.

For Bohemians, the relationship between football and music is hardly new. Dalymount Park and the club itself have long had a place in Dublin’s musical culture. Lambert has also spoken about the importance of working with artists who share a wider sense of social responsibility.

Massive Attack described the collaboration in similar terms. The group said it was proud to stand alongside a supporter-owned football club while continuing a tradition of musicians using their work to engage with social and political questions. The references to Guevara’s Irish roots, Jim Fitzpatrick’s Dublin-created image and Guevara’s anti-imperialist speeches were all deliberate parts of the design.

For them, those words and images were not added simply as decoration from the past. They were intended to carry an idea of solidarity into the present.

The organisations receiving the proceeds brought the project back to something much more immediate. Natasha Hickman of Cuba Vive spoke about the growing need for medicines and essential medical supplies in Cuban hospitals, and about the direct impact that shipments of aid can have. Professor Franco Cavalli, President of mediCuba-Europe, recalled the emotional response of the director of Havana’s Juan Manuel Márquez Children’s Hospital when told about the initiative. Beyond the material assistance, he said, there was value in Cuban healthcare workers knowing that they had not been forgotten.

Bohemians and Massive Attack also accompanied the launch with two short films produced by Bristol-based Unit 3 Films.

The first places Guevara’s words on imperialism alongside football imagery from places including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Algeria, Ireland and Palestine. The second is set to Teardrop, bringing Jim Fitzpatrick’s artwork together with close-up images of the shirt, its fabric and the details built into the design.

Perhaps that is why this shirt does not really feel like a conventional cup kit.

There is Dublin on one side of it and Bristol on the other. Somewhere in its story is a photograph taken in Havana more than six decades ago; somewhere else are a few words from a song released at the end of the 1990s. A football club, a band, an artist, a political history and two medical aid organisations all meet in the same place.

That is one of the enduring beauties of football. A club cannot change the world on its own. Neither can a football shirt.

But football can make people notice one another’s stories.

And sometimes, it does not even take ninety minutes.

Sometimes, a shirt is enough.