Northern Ireland qualified by finishing at the top of its group, overcoming the obstacles inherent with being the second-smallest nation by population at the tournament after Iceland. The Northern Ireland Football League Premiership is only semiprofessional, leaving O’Neill with a tiny pool of players.  “We are a country with less than 40 professional players to choose from,” O’Neill said. Most are drawn from the lower reaches of the English and Scottish league system.  “I’ve been everywhere looking for players: Fleetwood Town, Burton Albion, Doncaster, Luton, Morecambe,” he said. “At times, it is not the most glamorous.”  Player recruitment is complicated further by Northern Ireland’s history. FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, has a unique eligibility provision that allows players born in Northern Ireland to play for Ireland if they choose, so despite the 1982 team’s containing several Catholic players — notably Armstrong and Martin O’Neill, who is coaching the Republic of Ireland at Euro 2016 — representing Northern Ireland remains problematic for some players.  Two members of the Ireland squad competing in France — Shane Duffy and James McClean — were born in Northern Ireland and played for its youth teams before switching to the Republic for their senior debuts.  McClean’s decision led to his receiving several death threats. Representing Northern Ireland, with its historically pro-British supporter base, had become too difficult, he explained. “You are looking around as a Catholic and seeing all the Union Jacks and listening to the fans’ songs, and I just didn’t feel at home at all,” he said at the time. Neil Lennon, a Catholic who once captained the Northern Ireland side, also retired as a player after receiving death threats and later received them anew as a coach at Glasgow Celtic.  Yet Northern Ireland today, O’Neill and others said, is almost unrecognizable. The Good Friday Agreement that brought peace has been in place for nearly two decades. And the Irish Football Association, the governing body for soccer in Northern Ireland, now runs youth tournaments every Saturday on the grounds of Stormont House, the seat of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, that bring together children from Catholic and Protestant areas.  “We have a very mixed squad, in terms of religious backgrounds and where they come from,” O’Neill said of the national team. “Northern Ireland is a different place to the Northern Ireland I grew up in, and this team is a reflection of that.”  Even in the most traditionally fraught areas, attitudes appear to have changed. On a Saturday afternoon in March in south Belfast, the biggest soccer match of the N.I.F.L. Premiership season — the Belfast derby between Linfield and Glentoran — took place at the home of the national team, Windsor Park. The match is referred to as the Big Two, and it regularly attracts the league’s biggest crowd of the season, about 5,000 fans.  “This is always a big game,” said Drew McCoubrey, the president of the Linfield Supporters Trust. “This would be a strongly Unionist, Protestant area, and that ethos is sort of in the club. This is a spiritual home to us.”  Belfast remains a patchwork of allegiances and murals, but the streets no longer contain the guns and the British troops that characterized the worst of times. Many of the walls around Windsor Park are painted with murals supporting loyalist paramilitary groups, alongside the faces of Northern Irish sports heroes like the snooker player Alex Higgins, known as Hurricane, and the former Manchester United star George Best.  But the teams themselves believe they no longer represent that divide. Glentoran is from the heavily Protestant area of East Belfast, in the shadow of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, which built The Titanic. It once counted Best as a boyhood fan and Michael O’Neill as a late-career player, but it has long been a mixed side.  “Half the team is Catholic, the manager is Catholic,” the club’s secretary, Ricky Rea, said of the current Northern Ireland team. “I don’t care if it’s the pope and 10 cardinals playing, as long we’re winning every week.”  Many have the same opinion of the national team.  “It is a country we can all be proud of — look at the different backgrounds of the players,” said Linfield’s coach, David Healy, after his side’s 3-0 victory in the derby. Healy had himself only recently retired from playing for Northern Ireland, and he still holds the national team’s scoring record, including a 2006 hat trick against Spain.  “People made a deal of it years ago that it used to only be Protestant players selected and Protestant fans watching,” he said. “The fans, they’ll forgive you anything on the pitch if you are 100 percent committed.”  Northern Ireland dropped its opening match in France on Sunday, falling by 1-0 to Poland, and it will look to regroup against Ukraine on Thursday in Lyon. But it is the final game against Germany that revives memories of Valencia 34 years ago.  “If we go into that last game and we are still in it anything can happen,” O’Neill said. “I hope the whole country will be behind us.”  For those who remember the brief respite the long-ago victory against Spain provided during the Troubles, the European Championships in France feel like similar territory.  “People talk about the spirit of ’82,” Armstrong said. “I think Michael has the spirt of ’82 back again.”
A boy who watched the biggest soccer match in his country’s history in 1982 is now the coach. He hopes to replicate the team’s success in the European Championships.