Movement Profile
Why should respectable social scientists waste time and energy on a subject as trivial and futile as football? You’d think they have more important things to do! And why should any public funding body provide money for the study of such an inappropriate and marginal topic? Surely there are plenty of more “serious” academic endeavours to support, aren’t there?
Well, for some of us, there aren’t. And it’s not a question of liking the game. Nowadays even the most sceptical intellectual must admit that football – Europe’s most widely shared social practice and popular passion, capable of reaching out to hundreds of millions of individuals – has something to say about contemporary European society. If the social sciences are about gaining a better understanding of the society that surrounds us, about questioning what “goes without saying”, about searching for coherent explanations for the “strange” behaviour patterns and often contradictory actions of different social groups, then football stadiums, sports bars and giant screens are excellent places to start.
Imagine, as the anthropologist Desmond Morris did 30 years ago, arriving on planet Earth in a UFO from outer space. If you happened to land in Europe in June 2012, how would you explain the bizarre behaviour of all these humans gathering in huge roofless temples or huddling in open spaces with painted faces and weird hats, waving colourful pieces of tissue? You’d probably interpret it as a kind of sacred dance, religious ritual or magical invocation. You’d probably shake your head (or whatever it is you’d have as an alien) in disbelief about these savage terrestrials and their obsessions, but you’d nevertheless give this ritual called “football” a very close look.
The FREE Project
The European Commission recently issued a call for innovative, collaborative European research projects that would focus on “day-to-day lives, experiences, perceptions, values and identities of citizens” and “look from different disciplinary perspectives at cultural, social, behavioural formations and transformations of everyday life in the context of European integration”. A group of nine scholars, including me, from four different academic disciplines and eight countries – convinced that there could not be a better subject for studying perception patterns and identity dynamics outside the political sphere – decided to draft and submit a project on “Football Research in an Enlarged Europe” (FREE). Apparently, our efforts to persuade the scientific evaluators that a football-focused research project was worth funding bore fruit. The FREE project obtained the top score under the topic “The Anthropology of European Integration”, was selected for funding and has now started off on an academic journey through European football that, like Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle, will last several years.
Football and Citizenship
Where is the link between football and citizenship? True, football is “only a game”. It does not seem to say much about citizens’ rights and duties or the social contract they are supposed to have consented to (or not). Then again, citizens are not abstract social agents whose attitudes and actions are determined according to principles of rational choice and theories of political philosophy in a perfect setting of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary: Their motivations and decisions seem to be driven mainly by their feelings and perceptions, by irrational reactions and behaviour patterns, by deeply rooted sentiments of belonging and identity. Citizens are emotional beings, and social groups are “sentimental crowds”, as the French singer Alain Souchon called them, with a strong desire to express their collective feelings and narratives.
Football provides a space to express these emotions, belongings and narratives. And it’s spectacularly omnipresent across the continent, with 62 million players, 224,000 clubs, 53 officially recognised national teams and literally hundreds of millions of supporters, spectators and followers – to whom this game means a lot. Football touches people. It is a field of expression of everyday culture, and, contrary to other such forms, it has a genuine European dimension and truly Europe-wide outreach across linguistic, political and social borders. Even a highly praised mobility programme like the ERASMUS student exchange does not concern more than roughly 1% of the European student population. In comparison, a major football event like Euro2012 is followed, interpreted and discussed in a never-ending flow of discourse by over half the European population of all age groups and socio-economic categories.
Football is a remarkably powerful and reliable producer of strong collective emotions. Due to its very simple design with two emblematic teams confronting each other, it invariably produces “imagined communities” of “us” and “them”. It inevitably draws on and updates existing auto-stereotypes and hetero-stereotypes, shaping perception patterns and creating positive or negative emotional bonds between peoples across Europe.
Of course, it can be argued whether such horizontal bonds between Europeans do have a major impact on the construction of a supranational polity. It might even be considered desirable that they should have none, and that this political project be supported by reason and common interest only. History tells us, however, that mutual and reciprocal perception-patterns between European nations — be they positive or negative — are to a very large extent dominated by emotional factors. These perceptions are shaped and re-shaped not only in the political arena, but also through images and representations that are produced by widely spread social practices outside the political or institutional context.
The FREE project is a unique opportunity to explore in an innovative manner to what extent the fundamental question of perception and acceptance of “the others” within Europe can be answered through an in-depth analysis of an already existing sub-cultural European public sphere of communication. That is European football and its role in the day-to-day life of an immense number of European citizens.
The Missing European Perspective
Football is a child of modernity: Its emergence and institutionalisation since the end of the 19th century have been contemporary to (and closely involved in) what George Mosse aptly named the “nationalisation of the masses”. It has contributed in its own way to the “invention of tradition”, to quote the famous expression of Eric Hobsbawm. Its history now spans almost one and a half century — an era during which the European continent, its nations and its self-perception have undergone dramatic changes, as has the very concept of “nation”. This era is long enough to produce a multitude of images linked to the Europeans’ favourite sport and anchor these images in collective memory.
Today football is firmly embedded in the Europe of the 21st century and has successfully adopted several of its “post-national” features. Some major trends have given football a media presence second to no other cultural activity: the introduction of the Champions League; intensified commercialisation and professionalisation of the game; increased power struggles between governance structures and other stakeholders; the liberalisation of the European media landscape; the growing interest of European policymakers in football governance since the 1995 Bosman ruling; the feminisation of football crowds and the emergence of women’s football.
Most of all, football has over the last 15 years become an unequalled outlet for the massive display of feelings of belonging. Each major international tournament invariably triggers gigantic public celebrations of national “pride”. Pictures from the World Cups in France (1998) and Germany (2006), as well as from the European Championships in Portugal (2004), Austria/Switzerland (2008) and, recently, Poland/Ukraine (2012), have gone around the globe.
Yet football has remained curiously under-researched in a European perspective. All too often the multiple sociopsychological implications of football are studied through the national prism or in a comparative perspective that remains limited to the juxtaposition of national case studies. This regrettable situation is due to a combination of multiple factors. It can be explained by the material constraints implied by empirical football research beyond the national level (not to mention the linguistic difficulties arising in such a dense deliberative environment), but also by the historical fact that the memory of international football has been recorded since the beginning of the 20th century in almost hermetically closed national spaces of communication. It is therefore not surprising that only a few individual researchers have tried to adopt an explicitly European approach to football, with very limited results.
The FREE project is an opportunity to design and carry out research that transcends these limits, taking football studies beyond the state-of-the-art and adding the missing European perspective. Rather than consider football a mere producer of cultural singularity and thus a driver of diversity, it takes into account its ambiguous nature as both an outlet for particular identities that re-enact traditional antagonisms and a shared passion that impacts attitudes towards these very identities and may produce unexpected commonalities.
Bringing the Disciplines Together
Football is a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted social phenomenon that can only be made sense of through a truly interdisciplinary approach. For this reason, FREE is composed of several complementary research strands. Two historical approaches focus on the history and impact of European football competitions, their contribution to a Europeanisation process that has both a top-down and a bottom-up dimension and also their role as producers of collective memory through transnational media events. These findings will feed the sociological and anthropological work of two other thematic areas dealing with football as a symbolic domain that offers strategies of action for the construction of social identities at various levels. This includes both primary and secondary fandom, with a special focus on East-West perceptions within Europe, but also a new look at performance practices and identification processes, which could be filed under the “feminisation of European football”.
The research carried out within the above-mentioned thematic areas is expected to inform two other fields of research from the political sciences. On the one hand, the FREE project aims to redefine and widen the concept of a European public sphere – which is very often limited to purely political and economic issues, but whose popular culture dimension deserves to be studied more closely. On the other hand, the project will take the research of football supporters’ networks to a distinctly European rather than national level, studying implications of the concept of “stakeholder empowerment” in relation to the oft-quoted “European Model of Sport”, and thus produce new findings on changing perceptions of the transformed governance structures of European football as a legitimacy-enhancing project.
An ambitious scientific undertaking? No doubt.
An innovative research project? Hopefully.
An exciting European adventure? Definitely!
If this passionate plea for the scientific legitimacy of football studies and the underlying assumptions of football’s relevance in research about European citizenship have raised your interest, feel free to follow us on our academic journey by browsing the project website www.free-project.eu or by contributing as guest author to our blog http://www.free-project.eu/Blog/.
Tags: Movement Profile