Meant to say, the one town you missed out was Bangor, which has a population of around 60k - hadn't thought it so big myself, tbf. As well as football, the town used to have a thriving senior rugby club, but like numerous others, they've suffered very badly since the advent of professionalism. Hockey is also quite big, I believe.
Anyhow, Bangor FC were long a senior team in the old Irish League, without ever doing very much at all. Then they seemed to hit all sorts of financial troubles in more recent years, eventually withdrawing voluntarily from the Premiership in 2009. Although it spared them the embarrassment of going bust, they soon dropped right down into Intermediate football, where they languished for a few years.
The good news, however, is that they're now showing a bit of ambition and talking about getting back into senior football:
Bangor were traditionally a permanent part of the Irish League's top-flight, but the last decade has seen the Seasiders plummet down the divisions and out of senior football.
They are now back in the Irish League's third-tier and [manager Lee] Feeney has not shied away from setting his new players very definite targets.
"Bangor is a big club, I understand the pressure that will come with the job and I will embrace it. First and foremost we have to get out of this Premier Intermediate. I believe it's possible to get back into the Premiership within three years."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/53093786
Meanwhile, from this list of Irish towns (NI and ROI), you'll see that two other NI towns break the 30k mark. However, Newtownabbey (65k) is more an administrative concoction than a "town" proper (it's all Belfast, really), whilst Lisburn (45k) is morphing into Belfast by the day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._by_population
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