2015–16 Irish Cup
football tournament season
The 2015–16 Irish Cup (known as the Tennent's Irish Cup for sponsorship purposes) was the 136th edition of the Irish Cup, the premier knockout cup competition in Northern Irish football since its introduction in 1881. The competition began on 18 August 2015 with the first round and concluded with the final at Windsor Park on 7 May 2016. The cup was sponsored by Tennent's Lager, the competition's first title sponsor since 2012.
Glentoran were the defending champions, after they lifted the cup for the second time in three seasons and for the 22nd time overall by defeating Portadown 1–0 in the 2015 final. Their defence of the Cup ended in the sixth round after falling to a 4–1 home defeat against 2013–14 winners, Glenavon.
Glenavon who were the eventual winners after beating Linfield 2-0 in the final, qualified for the 2016–17 UEFA Europa League first qualifying round
Format and schedule
129 clubs entered this season's competition, an increase of four clubs compared with the 2014–15 total of 125 clubs. 82 regional league clubs from tiers 4–7 in the Northern Ireland football league system entered the competition in the first round, with a further seven clubs receiving byes to proceed directly into the second round as necessitated by the number of participants. These clubs contested the first three rounds, with the 12 surviving clubs joining the 28 NIFL Championship clubs in the fourth round. The 12 NIFL Premiership clubs enter the competition in the fifth round, along with the 20 winners from the fourth round matches. All ties level after 90 minutes used extra time to determine the winner, with a penalty shoot-out to follow if necessary.
“2015–16 Irish Cup” enters the record as football tournament season. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Irish, football and tournament can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20925674. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015, 1881, 2016 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “2015–16 Irish Cup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.