The Political Football Stadium: Identity Discourses and Power Struggles 3031291433, 9783031291432

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FOOTBALL RESEARCH IN AN ENLARGED EUROPE SERIES EDITORS: ALBRECHT SONNTAG · DÀVID RANC

The Political Football Stadium Identity Discourses and Power Struggles Edited by Başak Alpan Albrecht Sonntag · Katarzyna Herd

Football Research in an Enlarged Europe

Series Editors Albrecht Sonntag ESSCA School of Management EU-Asia Institute Angers, France Dàvid Ranc ESSCA School of Management EU-Asia Institute Angers, France

This series publishes monographs and edited collections in collaboration with a major EU-funded FP7 research project ‘FREE’: Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. The series aims to establish Football Studies as a worthwhile, intellectual and pedagogical activity of academic significance and will act as a home for the burgeoning area of contemporary Football scholarship. The themes covered by the series in relation to football include, European identity, memory, women, governance, history, the media, sports mega-events, business and management, culture, spectatorship and space and place. The series is highly interdisciplinary and transnational and the first of its kind to map state-of-the-art academic research on one of the world’s largest, most supported and most debated socio-­ cultural phenomenona. Editorial Board: Richard Giulianotti (Loughborough University, UK) Kay Schiller (Durham University, UK) Geoff Pearson (Liverpool University, UK) Jürgen Mittag (German Sport University Cologne, Germany) Stacey Pope (Durham University, UK) Peter Millward (Liverpool John Moores University, UK) Geoff Hare (Newcastle University, UK) Arne Niemann (Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany) David Goldblatt (Sports writer and broadcaster, UK) Patrick Mignon (National Institute for Sports and Physical Education, France).

Başak Alpan Albrecht Sonntag  •  Katarzyna Herd Editors

The Political Football Stadium Identity Discourses and Power Struggles

Editors Başak Alpan Middle East Technical University Ankara, Türkiye Katarzyna Herd Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences Lund University Lund, Sweden

Albrecht Sonntag EU-Asia Institute ESSCA School of Management Angers Cedex 01, France

Football Research in an Enlarged Europe ISBN 978-3-031-29143-2    ISBN 978-3-031-29144-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Katarzyna This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Mysterious  Places, Political Spaces  3 Başak Alpan, Katarzyna Herd, and Albrecht Sonntag 2 Take  Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance Across Europe: A Cross-­Country Description 25 Özgehan Şenyuva and Ramón Llopis-Goig Part II Historical Case Studies  45 3 The  Stadio Mussolini Between Fascisisation and Commercialisation of Football (1933–1945) 47 Paul Dietschy 4 What’s  in a Name? The City of Stuttgart and the Toponymical Journey of Its Football Stadium 67 Albrecht Sonntag

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5 Political  Emotions in the Post-War Stadium: A FrancoGerman Perspective on the 1950s and Early 1960s 83 Philipp Didion Part III Contemporary Case Studies 105 6 Politics,  Identity, Global Branding, and the Stadium: FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou107 Hunter Shobe 7 Spatial  Aspects of Identity Differentiation—Stadiums in Sarajevo131 Özgür Dirim Özkan 8 Pitch  Fever: Swedish Football and the Politics of Grass151 Katarzyna Herd 9 Stade  de France and Wembley as Social Space: A Tale of Two Stadiums171 Hugh Dauncey Part IV Protest Cultures 199 10 Football  Fans, Social Movements and Contentious Politics: Cairo and Istanbul201 Burak Özçetin and Ömer Turan 11 Places  of Resistance and Right-Wing Ideologies: The Politics of Polish Football Stadiums223 Radosław Kossakowski

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12 Stadiums  as the Sites of the Political: The Case of Passolig in Turkey241 Başak Alpan and Bora Tanıl 13 The  Football Stadium as a Space for Protest: The Case of Iranian Female Supporters of FC Persepolis263 Caroline Azad Part V Outlook 281 14 The  Post-Pandemic Football Stadium In 2050283 Jean-Michel Roux, Natalia R. de Melo, Cristiane R. de S. Duarte, and Elson M. Pereira I ndex301

Notes on Contributors

Başak Alpan  is an associate professor and Lecturer in European Politics and Political Sociology in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham with her research on the Turkish discourses on “Europe” in the post-1999 period. She conducts research and extensively writes on European integration, discourse theory, post structuralism, Turkish-EU relations and football and identity. Recent articles include “Turkey and the Balkans: bringing the Europeanisation/de-Europeanisation nexus into question” (with E. Öztürk, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2022) and “Hegemonic Masculinity in Times of Crisis: 15 July Coup Attempt and Turkish Football” (2019). Alpan worked in many EU-funded projects as a researcher, including FREE (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) and FEUTURE (the Future of Turkey-EU Relations). She is currently the coordinator of the JM Network LEAP (“Linking to Europe at the Periphery”). Caroline Azad  is a PhD researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. After studying political science and journalism in Brussels and London, she moved to Iran in 2012. That was a crucial time characterized by several major social, economic and political crises unprecendented since the revolutionary upheaval of 1979. For for years, she was based in Tehran ix

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and worked as a journalist correspondent for several foreign media. This experience led her to focus on various social and political areas in order to understand this very complex and - still - misunderstood country. As well as the contradictions of a society and culture often characterised by the Western media as frozen in its Islamic revolution or stuck between modernization and its ancestral and multidimensional traditions. In addition to having witnessed the deep issues faced by Iranian women in their daily life, the rise in power and visibility of high-level Iranian female athletes on the international sports scene then led her to a doctoral thesis in sociology based on the development of Iranian women’s football. Hugh  Dauncey  is a visiting research fellow at Newcastle University, England, UK.  He works on the history and present of French and Francophone popular culture, with a particular focus on sport. Previous publications have analysed the 1998 soccer World Cup held in France (with G. Hare: France and the 1998 World Cup: The National Impact of a World Sporting Event. London, 1999), the Tour de France (with G. Hare: The Tour de France, 1903–2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values. London, 2003.) and cycling in France (French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History. Liverpool, 2012). He is currently working on French sporting trophies as material culture, on the cultural geography of sport in Paris and on the history of a major French cycling club. Natália  R.  de Melo  is a professor in the Department of Science and Technology of Physical Activities and Sports (STAPS) specializing in sports management at Orleans University, France, where she is an associate researcher at the CEDETE Laboratory (Center of Studies for the Development of Territories and Environment). She received her PhD in Architecture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she was an affiliated researcher at the Laboratório de Arquitectura Subjectiva e Cultura (LASC). She was also an associate researcher at the PACTE Laboratory, anchored at the University Grenoble Alpes. She mainly teaches courses on sports marketing and territorial sports policies. Her research on the transformations of soccer stadiums focuses on the perspective of urban atmospheres, groundhopping and accessibility for people with disabilities.

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Cristiane de S. Duarte  retired in 2018 from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro with the title of Full Professor of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. She gained her PhD from the Université de Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne in 1993, following degrees in architecture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1981), the École d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette (1983), as well as the Universite de Paris XII (1985). An expert in Urban Space Design, her research focuses mainly on cultural aspects of the construction of space, accessibility and ethnography of the city. She has received an international award from the Association Européene pour l’Enseignement de l’Architecture for the best methodology in architecture teaching in 2003-04, as well as several prize-winning publications. Philipp  Didion  has studied history and French at the Universities of Metz and Saarbrucken since 2014. In 2019, he submitted a thesis (Staatsarbeit) entitled “‘Gute Deutsche in Paris’: Fußball-Länderspiele zwischen Frankreich und der Bundesrepublik in den 1950er Jahren und die Wiederaufnahme der bilateralen Sportbeziehungen” (“Good Germans in Paris”: International Football Matches Between France and the Federal Republic in the 1950s and the Resumption of Bilateral Sports Relations). Since 2020, he has been a research assistant in the Chair of Contemporary European History and the Centre for French Studies at Saarland University and is working on a doctoral project entitled “Football Stadiums in France and West Germany from the 1950s to the 1980s” (supervised by Prof. Dr Dietmar Hüser and Prof. Dr Paul Dietschy). Since July 2022, he has also served as coordinator of the DFG/FNR research group “Transnational Popular Culture—Europe in the Long 1960s”. Paul Dietschy  is Professor of Contemporary History and director of the Lucien Febvre Centre at the University of Franche-Comté, France. A specialist in the history of sport, football and Italy, he has, among other and numerous books, chapters or articles, written Histoire du football (Perrin 2010, Tempus 2014), The origins and Birth of “l’Europe du football” (Routledge, 2017), with Stefano Pivato Storia dello sport in Italia (Il Mulino 2019), and papers in Soccer & Society, Journal of Sport History or

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Journal of Global History. He is the editor of the journal Football(s). Histoire, culture, economie, societé. Katarzyna  Herd  received a PhD in Ethnology in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies from Lund University, Sweden, in 2018. Her dissertation was titled “We Can Make New History Here: Rituals of Producing History in Swedish Football Clubs”. Herd conducted a postdoc project at the Åbo Akademi University, Finland, financed by the Swedish Literature Society. The project concerned Swedish-speaking football clubs in Finland. Herd also conducted a project on transfer patterns in Swedish football and is currently involved in a project about bad atmosphere in work places and in a project about perception of the police forces in the broader public. Herd works as a lecturer and researcher at Lund University, Sweden. Radosław  Kossakowski is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. His research fields are the sociology of sport, football studies, qualitative research and masculinities studies. His articles have been published in many well-recognized journals: Sport in Society, Sociology of Sport Journal, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, East European Politics and Societies, Revista de Psicología del Deporte. Soccer & Society and Problems of Post-Communism. His books have been published by renowned international publishing houses: Routledge, Manchester University Press and Palgrave Macmillan. Ramón Llopis-Goig  holds a PhD in Sociology and is a professor at the University of Valencia, Spain, where he teaches sociology of sport and social research methods. He is also the vice-dean of Academic Planning of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the same university and vice-president of the Spanish Association of Social Research Applied to Sport (AEISAD). He has written extensively in academic journals as well as contributing chapters to several books and his substantive research interests include sport, consumption and health from a sociological perspective. In 2015, he published his book that compiled his research on Spanish football over the previous ten years, entitled Spanish Football and Social Change (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015).

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Burak Özçetin  is a professor and dean in the Faculty of Communication at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. He received his doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at Middle East Technical University. He was a visiting researcher at the New School for Social Research Department of Political Science, New  York, in 2006–2007 with a Fulbright Scholarship. Özçetin’s basic areas of interest are communication theories, political communication, Ottoman-Turkish political life, cultural studies and political and social theory. Özçetin’s book, Mass Communication Theories: Concepts, Schools, Models, which systematically deals with the theories of mass communication, was published in 2018 (5th Edition 2022). He has written articles in various journals including International Review for the Sociology of Sport, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Relations and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. He is currently working on a book on the historical trajectory of election campaigns and political communication in Turkey. Özgür Dirim Özkan  was born in Bolu, Turkey, in 1976 and holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and a Master’s Degree in Urban Policy Planning and Local Administrations from the same university. He got married and settled in Sarajevo after he prepared his PhD dissertation on “Football Fandom as Means for Cultural Differentiation: A Comparative Study on FK Zeljeznicar and FK Sarajevo Fans in Bosnia and Hercegovina”. Özkan gave lectures on “Football Culture and Society” at Yeditepe and Yeni Yüzyıl universities. He currently works in Ankara in a consulting sector and lives in Sarajevo. He is a desperate supporter of Gençlerbirliği. Elson  M.  Pereira  is Full Professor of Urban Planning at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil, and a researcher at CNPq, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazil. He was an executive secretary of the National Association for Research and Graduate Studies in Urban and Regional Planning—ANPUR.  He is an ad-hoc reviewer for CNPq, Scientific Electronic Library Online—SciELO Brasil, CAPES, FAPESP and scientific magazines Geosul and REBEUR; he was a visiting professor at the Institute of Urbanism of Grenoble and at the University of Québec in Montreal (UQAM). He has written four books and dozens of articles. He

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has experience in the area of geography, with an emphasis on urban geography, working mainly with urban planning, popular participation and housing policies. He was the head professor of the Capes/CES Chair at the University of Coimbra. He was the coordinator of the Postgraduate Programme in Geography at UFSC. Jean-Michel Roux  is a habilitated associate professor at the Planning & Alpine Geography Institute (Institut d’Urbanisme & Géographie Alpine de Grenoble—IUGA), Grenoble Alpes University, France, and a researcher at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (research unit PACTE). He has been the director of the Planning Institute and deputy director of the research in social sciences at Grenoble Alpes University. He is also a qualified planner at the Office Professionnel de Qualification des Urbanistes (OPQU). He teaches international cooperation in urbanism studios in France and abroad for which he was awarded in 2019 the AESOP Excellence in Teaching Prize (Association of European School of Planning). His researches about stadium focus on history of the relationship between the city and the stadium, ambiances and publics (ultras and groundhoppers). Cf. https://stade.hypotheses.org Özgehan Şenyuva  is an associate professor in the International Relations Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where his scholarly work focuses on youth, public opinion, Turkey-European relations and the politics of European football. He has extensive experience in research projects, and was a principal investigator for the FREE—Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, a pioneer FP7 project that was completed in 2015. Coming from the field of learning mobility, he also has worked for more than two decades as a youth worker/trainer. He is an advisory group member of the European Academy on Youth Work, and an advisory committee member of Kadir Has University Sports Studies Research Centre, as well as a regular contributor to its training and education programs. Hunter Shobe  is a cultural and urban geographer. He is a professor in the Department of Geography at Portland State University, Oregon, USA, where he has taught since 2006. His research focuses on the intersection of popular culture, identity and place. Hunter’s work explores the

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cultural and political dimensions of how people connect to and create meaning in different places through studies that include football, graffiti and music. Much of his football research centres on the place identity roles of FC Barcelona. Hunter is the co-author of Upper Left Cities: A Cultural Atlas of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle (2021) and Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas (2015). He supports the Portland Thorns and the Portland Timbers. Albrecht Sonntag  is Professor of European Studies at ESSCA School of Management, Angers, France. He holds a doctorate in sociology, and has published extensively on various aspects of international football over the last decades, in both academic and general media outlets. Albrecht has been the initiator and coordinator of a variety of interdisciplinary research projects. He is the author of a UNESCO report on the fight against racism and was invited to sit on the European Commission’s High-Level Group on Sport Diplomacy. He is also one of the editors of the “Football in an Enlarged Europe” book series. On weekends, he suffers silently with the VfB Stuttgart. Bora  Tanıl was born in Ankara in 1963. He graduated from the Department of Political Science and Public Administration in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University, Turkey, in 1984. Bora has been the editor of non-fiction books and the series editor of books on football at İletişim Publishing House since 1988. He edited the nine-volume encyclopaedic book, Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düşünce (Political Thought in Modern Turkey), to which more than 300 writers contributed. He is the editing coordinator of the monthly socialist culture journal Birikim. His main areas of interest are political thoughts in Turkey, right-wing ideology, nationalism and football. For 15 years, he has given graduate lectures in the Faculty of Political Science at Ankara University on these subjects. He has written several books including Takımdan Ayrı Düz Koşu (Flat Racing Apart from Team, 2001), Cereyanlar—Türkiye’de Siyasi İdeolojiler (Currents—Political Ideologies in Turkey, 2017) and Ankara Rüzgârı—Gençlerbirliği Tarihi (Wind of Ankara: The History of Gençlerbirliği, 2019).

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Ömer Turan  is a professor and chair in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University. His academic interests include social theory, historical sociology, intellectual history, Turkish politics and social movements. He co-edited the volume The Dubious Case of a Failed Coup: Militarism, Masculinities and 15 July in Turkey with Feride Çiçekoğlu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He edited the volume 1968: İsyan, Devrim, Özgürlük (1968: Revolt, Revolution, Freedom) (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2019). He has written articles in various journals including Focaal: The European Journal of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Criticism, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Turkish Historical Review and European Journal of Turkish Studies.

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Stadium attendance figures for 2017/2018 season in the main European leagues Table 2.2 Attending home games Table 2.3 Travelling to follow the team Table 2.4 Form of attendance at the stadium Table 2.5 Difference in governance attitudes between attenders and not-­attenders to home games Table 3.1 Average number of spectators attending the match of serie A games in Turin

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Part I Introduction

1 Mysterious Places, Political Spaces Başak Alpan, Katarzyna Herd, and Albrecht Sonntag

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better, Some have gone, and some remain. —John Lennon/Paul McCartney, 1965

B. Alpan (*) Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] K. Herd Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] A. Sonntag ESSCA School of Management, Angers Cedex, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_1

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Magic, Myths and Memories What is a football stadium? A structure that is most of the time empty in everyday life, but bursts with energy on matchdays. Its construction and maintenance cost a fortune, it occupies a lot of precious urban space and most often seems to facilitate undesired behaviour, such as letting off flares and smoke bombs, throwing chairs or water bottles, abusing and disparaging adversaries in any imaginable way. But for supporters, their grounds are sacred. They are never empty as they store individual and collective memories, emotions, identities, histories made of triumph and trauma. In 2013, a Swedish club from Stockholm, AIK, moved from their old, worn-out stadium Råsunda to a bright new, modern national arena located in the same area. The move was long planned and prepared, the grounds of the iconic Råsunda dating from the 1930s were to be utilised for new housing, the new stadium was up to every UEFA standard, big, comfortable and with a roof. Pure luxury. Yet, a massive sense of loss, betrayal and emptiness continues to linger with AIK fans. Supporters talk of ‘an open sore’, whisper of corrupt politicians, of secret negotiations to destroy their stadium. An employee from the Stockholm City Museum remarked that there had been discussions to somehow save a bit of Råsunda, but the plans were abandoned because it was ‘just a stadium’. Her sons, however, managed to get a seat and a patch of grass from there. Unfortunately, the grass started to rot and had to be thrown away. A heartbreak. The memory of Råsunda lies now with the supporters. There are banners and T-shirts, there are tattoos of the now annihilated structure. There is a book with pictures of a slowly disappearing arena. For a long time, a sprayed message featured in the underground passage near the former stadium: ‘Burn in hell you Råsunda’s murderer!’ A stadium is never ‘just a stadium’. Råsunda was a point of reference for several generations and its demise is a story that might sound familiar in many cities across Europe, where beloved football spaces are sacrificed on the altar of modernisation or urban development. Yet, the stadium is where magic happened, where history was written, and memories engraved. It is where our heroes were hailed, and invaders punished. It is

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where old myths can be awakened, where David may kill Goliath over and over again. It is where we feel peak emotions, moving from utter despair to jubilant ecstasy and back within a few minutes. And the football arenas are also where citizens can confront the state, where those without money or influence can make themselves heard, where order can be challenged, and old ghosts called back to haunt the modern society. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1909-1991) wrote about the production of social space: It is not the work of a moment for a society to generate (produce) an appropriated social space in which it can achieve a form by means of self-­ presentation and self-representation—a social space to which that society is not identical, and which indeed is its tomb as well as its cradle. This act of creation is, in fact, a process. For it to occur, it is necessary (…) for the society’s practical capabilities and sovereign powers to have at their disposal special places: religious and political sites. (…) such sites are needed for symbolic sexual unions and murders, as places where the principle of fertility (the Mother) may undergo renewal and where fathers, chiefs, kings, priests and sometimes gods may be put to death. Thus, space emerges consecrated—yet at the same time protected from the forces of good and evil: it retains the aspect of those forces which facilitates social continuity, but bears no trace of the other, dangerous side. (1991, p. 34)

A football stadium can still serve as such a space. As Lefebvre remarked, it does take some time, but even our modern, sleek steel arenas can eventually store dreams and emotions. At AIK’s new stadium, a piece of grass from Råsunda is incorporated into the new pitch. It is referred to as ‘the lucky patch’ and, as the local folklore has it, a free kick from that patch always ends with a goal. The stadium magic continues.

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 he Football Stadium as Object of Social T Sciences Research Football stadiums may have long been considered a ‘neglected cultural heritage’ (Karlsson 2004), but they have nevertheless been the topic of a wide range of academic works emanating from a variety of social sciences and the humanities. This is understandable. First of all, because football stadiums are consubstantial to the emergence of modern football as a popular spectator sport. The speed with which the aristocratic pastime of 1863 became a professional business that required revenue-generating premises for ever-­ increasing crowds was vertiginous (Mason 1980; Holt 1989; Dietschy 2018). As a result, football stadiums have become indissociable from the game itself, and for many die-hard football fans (including researchers who made an academic career studying this strange phenomenon) the first visit to the football stadium remains a major ‘rite of passage’ in their biography (as in Nick Hornby’s falling in love with football in Fever Pitch). It is not surprising that the most famous (and with a price of £7.8 million also most expensive) football painting is LS Lowry’s ‘Going to the Match’ from 1953, which does not even include a football or a player, but captures the moment of growing excitement triggered by the physical convergence of thousands of spectators on their way to the stands. A poetic equivalent of this piece of art would be the Legend of football of Swiss author Georges Haldas (1981), a melancholy recollection of emotions linked to the game. Football stadiums are mysterious buildings, massive and intimidating, inward-looking fortresses, separated from the external urban space both physically and symbolically. They are ‘extra-ordinary’, in the very sense of the world: once you are inside, you have left the ‘ordinary’ environment, having entered a zone where things ‘out of the ordinary’ are bound to happen. Where some social norms of contemporary civilisation seem to be suspended—in an almost hygienic process of ‘de-controlling of emotions’, as Norbert Elias famously put it (Elias and Dunning 1986)—but where other rules and rituals command strict obedience. Where archaic psychosocial needs, hardwired into the human brain but no longer

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compatible with contemporary behaviour patterns, can be satisfied through symbolic re-enactment. Football stadiums are not just functional constructions designed to host ball games in regular intervals, but sites where ‘imagined communities’—without doubt the most-quoted concept in international football research—reunite in order to verify and confirm their very existence. In promising peaks of massively shared collective emotions—‘rituals of intensity’, as Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht called them in the title of his recent book on the topic (2021)—football stadiums provide today’s individuals with a space where they can lose their individuality and fulfil needs of belonging without lasting commitment or consequences on their daily lives (Sonntag 2008). Outside the stadium, life is ‘ordinary’ again, and social norms and behaviour patterns fall back into place. What happens in a football stadium is enigmatic, unfathomable, multifaceted. Despite the numerous attempts, following the pioneering works of Gabriel Tarde (1901), Gustave Le Bon (1896) or Elias Canetti (1960), to untangle and decipher the observable behaviour, unconscious motivations and underlying mechanisms of large crowds—an essentially modern phenomenon, indissociable from industrialisation and urbanisation (Gellner 1983), just like football—the almost physical fusional experience remains a mystery. The interaction between the stadium and the crowd has simultaneous cultural and anthropological, social and psychological, economic and political dimensions; and while one single disciplinary approach may provide analytical understanding of one aspect, it cannot do justice to the complexity of the whole experience. The metaphor of the ‘burning glass’, used by several authors among whom Noyan Dinçkal (2013) in his historical work on the period 1880-1930, seems particularly apt at describing the concentration or bundling in one limited space (and a short moment of time) of all these larger processes. Not the least because the term ‘burning glass’ also has a connotation of ‘heat’, producing a ‘spark’ that sets things on fire. Which is very evocative of other widely used metaphors for the football stadium such as ‘bowl’ or ‘cauldron’. Needless to say, this book is not the first to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to what is in all evidence a multidimensional object, calling for complementary approaches. It will not be the last one either. In

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presenting a wide-ranging collection with contributions by 19 scholars from ten different nationalities and all career stages, we walk in the footsteps of some remarkable edited volumes, such as Das Stadion. Geschichte. Architektur. Politik. Ökonomie (Marschik et al. 2005), the title of which already confirms the comprehensive interdisciplinarity of the project, laid out in 18 chapters on 450 pages. More recently, a French-German editorial team presented a remarkable collection of 21 dense chapters on the historical evolution of football stadiums, explicitly adopting ‘German, French, and European perspectives over the “long” 20th century’ (Hüser et al. 2022). Traditionally, the most prominent strand of the literature on football stadiums in English-speaking academia is no doubt inspired by the field of human and social geography. It revolves largely around the path-­ breaking works of John Bale who published extensively on the matter (Bale 1993, 1994, 2000). In his seminal Sport, Space and the City (1993)—still a classic thirty years after being first published—and throughout his later works, Bale explained how a stadium is at the same time inscribed in a place (outside) and exists as a space (inside), and how this ambivalence interacts with the football crowd. The crowd may, for instance, derive certain characteristics from the place where the stadium is located, especially from its constituent communities—all the more so if the neighbourhood is (or is becoming) ethnically diverse—or from the urban landscape in which it is set (in the vicinity of a large industrial centre for example). But the place may equally be shaped by the stadium: this is particularly patent when the building is part of wider urban regeneration programmes, but due to the sheer size of stadiums actually inevitable in most cases. As a space, a stadium may be described in a number of ways. Sometimes as a jail (‘imprisoning’ those who entered for the time of the match), sometimes as a stage (where the main actors may be both the players and the crowd, complemented by ‘supporting actors’ like managers and presidents) or even as a church (hence the omnipresent ‘temple’ metaphor, referring to a ‘sacred’ space with its own mass liturgies). Bale’s original concept of the ‘topophile triangle’, which describes how the stadium mediates the attachment of the supporter to the club, has

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been vindicated by the evidence provided of football’s transformation since the 1990s. On the one hand, by the sense of loss with the advent of what may be referred to the ‘post-modern’ period in football (Giulianotti 1999; Sonntag 2016), characterised by the modernisation or replacement of time-honoured and beloved stadium places in the process of transformation/standardisation of football stadiums into ‘event venues’. In numerous cases, all across the continent, this lost pride in place has often been made up for by various forms of supporter activism within the stadium, making use of its potentiality as political space (Numerato 2018; Cleland et al. 2018; García and Zheng 2017). On the other hand, football supporters have developed a significantly higher level of reflexivity about their own needs and feelings of belonging (Numerato 2018; Sonntag 2008), and there is a growing awareness of just what the stadium means to them in terms of emotional attachment. Today, on the lucrative, always updated market of football club ‘biographies’, clearly targeted at a supporter public, not a single book can afford to do without an in-depth account of the local stadium’s life and, occasionally, its death, too, as a whole new nostalgia-­serving literature strand on ‘lost grounds’ attests (Skrentny 2016, Mester 2016, Coton and Plumb 2017, Claydon and Taylor 2020, see also Hüser et al. 2022). This edited volume will primarily focus on the stadium as a space. More precisely: as a space of what we refer to as the political. The book is not about the segmentation or socio-economic characteristics of football crowds, nor is it about traditional behaviour patterns of football supporters and their impact on the dramaturgy of the match. These issues have been covered by extensive (and often excellent) research since the middle of the twentieth century, in contributions from history, sociology, anthropology or political science. What this book sets out to study are the various ‘faces of politics’, of which football stadiums may be both objects and catalysts.

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Stadiums as Terrains of ‘The Political’ Stadiums stand out in the urban landscape. They are landmarks, gathering points of large communities, and as such of formidable interest to those who hold power over these communities, or aspire to do so. It is only coherent that the large stadium infrastructures built in the interwar period were quickly perceived by the totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany as primordial sites where the nationalisation of the masses (Mosse 1975) could be made physically palpable and where the ‘new man’ of the fascist era (Bolz 2008) could be shaped, in all senses of the word. While liberal democracies may not attribute the same purpose to stadiums, their elected leaders still appreciate them for the symbolic connection to the positive, unifying values of sport in general and football in particular. Their physical and widely visible presence in the football stadium provides an opportunity of showing their closeness with ‘the people’s game’ and participating in identity construction (whether with the national team or with a club side). The picture of French President Emmanuel Macron jumping up celebrating from his seat in the official box during the 2018 World Cup final is a perfect illustration of such ‘imagined proximity’, as was the famous photo of the handshake between Angela Merkel and Mesut Özil in the Berlin Olympic Stadium’s changing room (2010). Similarly, for emerging politicians, engaging in football and being seen in the stadium has often served as a means to court the support (and, eventually, the votes) of the tens of thousands of spectators who attend the matches. Guschwan tells us the emblematic story of Silvio Berlusconi who has gone to great lengths to associate himself with and, at one point, embody the success of AC Milan (Guschwan 2014: 889), paving his way to political leadership and going so far as to borrow the very name of his party from a football chant. The chapters of part two of this book, which adopts a historical approach, deal with what may be called the ‘traditional’ political instrumentalisation of football stadiums in different kinds of regimes of the twentieth century.

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Another traditional interpretation of the political dimension of football stadiums may be found in the French movement of radical critique of football (and sport in general), which emerged in the wake of the 1968 student revolution. For the most prominent authors of this strand, such as Jean-Marie Brohm (1993), Michel Caillat (1995) or Patrick Vassort (1999), modern sport is an ideological tool at the service of the logic of capitalism and the hierarchical structures of society, disguising its indoctrination of permanent competition and pseudo-meritocratic domination behind treacherous values like fair-play or patriotic fervour. A contemporary incarnation of the ‘opium of the masses’ doctrine, sport is consciously used by the dominant classes to manipulate the masses and divert their attention from their fundamental interests of class struggle. In this perspective, the stadium becomes, somewhat unsurprisingly, the profane equivalent of places of religious worshipping. For Marc Perelman, one of the most virulent voices of this school of thought and, being a trained architect himself, also one of the most interesting ones to follow, stadiums are at the same time ‘irresistible’ and ‘barbaric’ (Perelman 1998), they ‘confine the individual in a pathological behaviour linked to an ideal of the person of archaic nature, in which the individual is subject to a powerful technical and organisational order, (…) a total order that is of fascist impregnation’ (ibid.). While such publications always tend to have more of a political manifesto than a differentiated study of a multifaceted phenomenon, they reveal nonetheless how open to interpretation the ambiguous stadium environment is. The understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘power’ has, however, evolved over time, and the book strives to take this evolution into account. First, football crowds themselves—and the individuals that make them up—have changed significantly, especially over the last thirty years. They have become more heterogeneous in many aspects, more fluid, performative and, as already pointed out above, more reflexive. Their demands and expectations towards football have evolved in line with the massive changes that contemporary football landscape has undergone over the same period. Second, there has also been a shift in the understanding of ‘politics’. Starting from the 1980s and 1990s, political science literature has laid great emphasis on re-conceptualising the notions of ‘power’ and ‘politics’.

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After the end of the Cold War, the drastic transformations of the social structure and emerging (or re-emerging) social and political identities required new approaches and explanations. New forms of identification developed, involving novel conceptions of ‘identity’ and extending the scope of ‘the political’, which is no longer confined to ballot boxes and representational democracy but is seen as permanently constructed by protest, dissent and deliberation in civil society and in public space. Political practice no longer consists in simply defending the rights of pre-­ constituted, stable identities, but rather in permanently constituting and negotiating these identities in a precarious and always vulnerable sense. In the redefinition of ‘the political’, Lukes’s ‘Faces of Power’ theory (Lukes 1974) is highly relevant, as is Foucault’s understanding of power. According to the conceptual framework developed by Lukes, the first face of power could be defined as A’s ability to make B do something that they  would not otherwise do, and in this picture, politics is all about decision-making and taking action. The second face of power is about the influence exerted over the very process of decision-making. It refers to the power to constitute and steer the political agenda—in other words, it is actually about ‘non-decision-making’ (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). In the third face of power, politics is about preference-shaping and institutionalised persuasion (Hay 2002). This version of politics is reminiscent of the Gramscian conception of hegemony and Marxist concept of false consciousness, interpreting politics as strategy and struggle. Foucault’s famous conception of ‘power’ could be added as a fourth dimension to this framework, with power constructing and disciplining subjects (Foucault 1983). In Foucault’s picture, politics is less about voting preferences or politicians’ strive for power than about what people eat, drink, consume and how they posture their bodies. Rather than about politics per se, the second and the fourth face of power deal with the political in the contemporary world. In our understanding, the football stadium is therefore a space of the political. It offers a stage for what Laclau (1990) named moments of ‘antagonism’, often expressed in the display of dissent, the transgression of existing norms and the refusal of forthcoming ones, as well as the negotiation of social identity. The manifestation of the political in contemporary football stadiums has many faces. It can be seen in the ongoing discontent of the supporter

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movement across Europe and a wide variety of supporter activism (García and Zheng 2017) that may lead to various forms of club ownership (Porter 2019); it can be heard in controversial local debates about mega-­ events (Kowalska 2017); it can be observed in the delicate negotiation of dual identities conducted by migrant fans (Szogs 2017); it can be discerned in the efforts of self-regulation in the fight against racism and discrimination (Sonntag and Ranc 2015); it can be perceived among fan groups in political uprisings like in the 2013 Gezi protests in Istanbul (Turan and Özçetin 2017) or during the events of what is known as the Arab Spring (Dorsey 2016); and it can be easily spotted in the ‘holy alliance’ of football and nationalist backlash after the 15 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey (Alpan 2019). It can also be detected in the tension between the desire of control and surveillance through technology-based security crowd control operations (e-ticket, seat allocation, etc.) and the anarchical insistence on ownership of a space that is meant to be ‘uncontrollable’.

Political Dimensions of Supporter Behaviour The obsession with crowd control is, of course, nothing new: UK football supporters—within and outside the stadiums—have been subject to crowd control policies long before the 1990 Taylor report which followed the 1989 Hillsborough disaster (see e.g.: Lewis 1982; Williams et  al. 1984). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the increasing number of violent events connected to football, which culminated in the 1985 Heysel disaster, led the literature to focus in a great number of cases on the most turbulent supporters among the audience. The study of the so-called hooligans or casuals who had arguably developed whole subcultures of violence has led to the fundamental works by Elias and Dunning (1986), and of what was called the Leicester school. Today, the violent history and turbulent present of football crowds have served as pretext for increasingly sophisticated forms of crowd control. Violence or turbulent behaviour, as well as the ensuing crowd control in all its forms, is undoubtedly related to some basic characteristics of the game, which Roger Caillois (1967) calls ‘agôn’: football is at its core about

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competition. On the surface, this competition is primarily between the two teams engaged on the pitch. But as Christian Bromberger (1995) has shown, this characteristic has left a strong mark on the culture of football supporters, which has become essentially agonistic. Competition may exist either within the group (intragroup) or between different groups (intergroup). However, the definition of the group itself is fluid and subject to changes, depending on who is seen as the outsider. Intragroup competition may be within a specific group of supporters of a specific team. Intergroup competition may be between supporters of different teams, or different groups (formally organised or not) supporting the same teams. As pointed out above, it is wrong to assume any homogeneity among football crowds in the stadium. In Janet Lever’s 1983 ground-breaking study of Brazilian football the heterogeneity of the crowd is perceived as a unifying force. For Lever, the stadium is the very place where conflict between different social groups can be expressed safely, without threatening Brazilian society, therefore strengthening its unity. The expression of discontent makes the stands look politicised but leads eventually to a pacification of society. Later studies focused in more detail on the social and topographical segmentations of the stadium. Dal Lago (1990), for instance, showed that in 1980s Milan the most committed supporters sat in the two ends while the most devoted sat at the bottom of the stands: as close to the players as possible. Bromberger (1995) enriched the findings of Dal Lago and provided detailed empirical evidence from various Mediterranean cities for the assumption that the grounds are indeed socially and topographically separated. Mignon (1998a) takes this further in contending that, since confrontation is an integral part of partisanship itself, it leads to a systematic rebellion against authority. This rebellion is expressed through a large variety of phenomena often and wrongly put together in catch-all categories like ‘hooligans’ or ‘Ultras’, which are used with a pejorative connotation and blur differentiation between discrete phenomena like individual fights, mass rioting, sexist or racist acts and anti-social behaviour, including drunkenness or the breaking of accepted rules (invading a football field for example, or using pyrotechnic devices). What all of these have in common is that they are about contesting established forms of authority.

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Unruly stadium crowds are first and foremost political because they are about opposition, chiefly about contesting the authorities, whichever they may be. These ‘enemies’ may indeed be different for various groups of supporters: local dominant figures (club presidents, politicians, potential investors, media representatives, the head of the police, etc.), but also increasingly the football authorities (leagues, federations). The forms this opposition will take are multifarious: demonstrations within or outside the stadium, songs, banners, silence during the game. These are forms of militant action imported from political power struggles outside the stadium, adapted to the grounds and adopted into football culture. They are used with varying intensity: by the ‘official’ supporters as well as by the ones which are more independent of the club, therefore more vehement (Nuytens 2004). The stadium crowds are political because they use what Hourcade (2000) calls collective forms of actions. These actions are used to support a cause. Indeed, Mignon (1998a) insists that being a committed supporter always involves having a ‘cause’ to defend. Most interestingly, this cause is not always seen as political because academics traditionally (and conveniently) conceptualise it in terms of identity. Following Bale, Mignon contends that, for the football crowds, this cause is always anchored in a place (first and foremost local, but also regional or national). However, Mignon also emphasises that the ‘cause’ may equally include a strong class component, following the argument of many British social historians like Mason (1980, 1988), Holt (1989) or Walvin (1994). In this view, the construction or defence of identities is a political cause. There are cases when the causes defended are more explicitly political. As Mignon (1998b) makes clear, stating an interest (or indeed a love) for football has often been a way for some (in his analysis, skinheads in the 1980s) to claim both their belonging to the proletariat and their opposition to middle-class lifestyle. In this perspective, following football may be a political stance on its own. Meticulous observation must, however, also take into account the obvious presence of various forms of humour that punctually relativise some political causes. Humour has never been absent from the stands and terraces since the very beginnings of modern football. Anthropologists

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like Marc Augé or Christian Bromberger identified a self-mocking ‘tongue-in-cheek attitude’ (Augé 1982) towards one’s own expression of partisanship, as well as the socio-linguistic mechanisms (metaphor, hyperbole, dysphemism) that traditionally give voice to it (Bromberger 1995; see also Sonntag and Ranc 2015) that allows to adopt a critical distance to the transgressive unbridling of emotions in the stadium. In the wake of Nick Hornby’s 1992 bestselling novel Fever Pitch, this self-­reflective irony found a sustained literary expression in a whole new strand of fictional representation of football (Sonntag 2023; Piskurek 2018). Concrete examples of ironical distance abound. The ‘anti-Englishness’ of Swansea City supporters studied by Martin Johnes (2008), an essential component of local fan culture, could be interpreted as a serious form of xenophobia—quintessentially a political issue—but is conducted playfully, with a kind of routine mock aggressiveness, thus depoliticising it at least partly. In other words: football crowds are not necessarily most political when they express apparently ideas and beliefs—this can be in jest. The ‘causes’ may be taken more or less seriously; they are probably different from one group of supporters to the other. What always remains political is at the core of the supporters’ experience: the ingrained culture of protest, the fight against an ‘enemy’ (Kuper 1994) and the opposition to established forms of authorities served by collective forms of action.

The Structure of the Book The academic prose of the previous pages is one approach to introduce the contributions to this edited volume, but it also makes sense to complete it with hard data. For this reason, Part One of this book comes in two complementary chapters: the conceptual framework is followed immediately in Chap. 2 ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ by comparative data on stadium attendance across Europe compiled by Ramón Llopis-­ Goig and Özgehan Şenyuva, who draw on the findings from the large-­ scale surveys they conducted for the FREE project, the transnational research project that gave the name to this book series. After this double introduction, the volume unfolds in twelve different chapters structured in four different parts.

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Part Two adopts a historical perspective on how stadiums were designed and instrumentalised for political purposes. The first two studies, by Paul Dietschy and Albrecht Sonntag respectively, focus on two arenas created in the interwar years and indicating their instrumentalisation by fascist regimes in their name already: while Chap. 3, ‘The Stadio Mussolini Between Fascisisation and Commercialisation of Football’ concentrates on the years 1933–1945, Chap. 4, ‘What’s in a Name? The City of Stuttgart and the Toponymical Journey of Its Football Stadium’ covers the entire lifespan of a public space that was inaugurated in 1933 as the ‘Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn’. The concept of instrumentalisation, however, is not a preserve of totalitarian dictatorships and ‘the nationalisation of the masses’ they pursue. It can also be applied to well-meaning, humanist purposes targeted by democratic states, engaged in a process of reconciliation and friendship. This is what Philippe Didion shows for the case of French-German rapprochement in Chap. 5, ‘Political Emotions in the Post-war Stadium’, with a focus on bilateral football encounters in the 1950s and early 1960s. What all three chapters of this part have in common is the suggestion that football stadiums, as highly visible public spaces staging highly visible public events, can never fully escape politicisation and instrumentalisation, but that these processes, whatever their underlying values and purposes, are less straightforward than they appear at first sight. Part Three shifts to the present, offering four different case studies of contemporary football venues, taking the reader on a ride across Europe from Catalonia to Bosnia, and from Sweden to France and England. All of them are political, albeit in very different ways. The journey starts off in Barcelona (Chap. 6), with a detailed study by Hunter Shobe of how the famous home ground of one of the best-known football clubs in the world served and still serves as a ‘site of resistance’ in a fully explicit political sense, even in the age of hyper-commercialisation of football by transnational corporate actors: ‘Politics, Identity, Global Branding, and the Stadium: FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou’ shows that local and global narratives are not mutually exclusive. Writing from the Bosnian capital, Özgür Dirim Özkan sums up long years of anthropological observation in Chap. 7 ‘Spatial Aspects of Identity Differentiation—Stadiums in Sarajevo’. His case study illustrates

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how football stadiums, the space they occupy in the local topography and the meaning ascribed to both by the football community strongly contribute to the identity construction of social groups, despite the coexistence of modern and post-modern forms of fandom. In a totally different, quite literally ‘ground-breaking’ approach, Katarzyna Herd shifts our regard in Chap. 8 from traditional focal points of stadium research—architecture and urban topography, social stratification on stands and terraces, fan behaviour and rituals, violence and crowd control and so on—to the under-explored central element of it all: the playing field. In ‘Pitch Fever. Swedish Football and the Politics of Grass’, she shows that even a seemingly innocuous, bland surface, naturally taken for granted by all, can become an issue loaded with political signification. The journey ends in Chap. 9 in two terminus stations that mirror each other, Paris and London respectively, with the comparative study of ‘Stade de France and Wembley as Social Space: A Tale of Two Stadiums’. In tracing the history of the two venues, based only 350 km from each other in the capitals of two former colonialist empires, across the epochs from the (inevitably politicised) choice of location and name to their contemporary use (and mishaps) and the debates surrounding their function, Hugh Dauncey explores the role and meaning of explicitly national stadiums without residence clubs. Part Four of the book is dedicated to different contemporary football protest cultures. Chapter 10 offers a revealing comparative study of ‘Football Fans, Social Movements and Contentious Politics in Cairo and Istanbul’. Ömer Turan and Burak Özçetin explore how football fan groups became unusual, but crucial agents of ‘contentious politics’ and, eventually, social uprising in the context of the so-called Arab Spring and the Gezi Protests respectively. It turns out that their main motivation, rather than a distinctly ideological orientation, appears to be an accumulated contention culture and experience. In Poland, however, ideology seems to play a much more important part in the construction of a national fan culture that stands apart in Europe for its strong right-wing tendencies. In Chap. 11, drawing on long years of field study among supporters, Radosław Kossakowski proposes a differentiated insight into Polish football stadiums as ‘Places of

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resistance and right-wing ideologies’. He retraces the evolution of a very particular fan scene shaped by the numerous hiccups of recent Polish history, which have left a strong emotional footprint on many citizens, including Ultras. He thus explains attitudes and behaviour patterns that are dissimilar to the mainstream of European football stadiums but may be understood in their very specific context. Chapter 12 moves back to Turkey, where the Passolig ID-card system introduced in 2014 provides an edifying case study of new methods of crowd control and surveillance. As Bașak Alpan and Tanıl Bora put it in their analysis that draws on Michel Foucault and the Paris School, the Passolig strategy reveals ‘Stadiums as sites of the political’, a concept referring to a wider process in which the apparent objective of providing and increasing security allows systemic power and control to permeate every sphere and particle of society. At the same time, the football stadium, in becoming an emblematic space where this process is visible, is also a place where resistance can be articulated and counter-strategies emerge. Part Four concludes with an anthropological study from Iran, where football stadiums have been for decades already a site for the expression of frustration with restrictions imposed by the regime, especially the sexual segregation enforced in the public space. Chapter 13, based on extensive fieldwork, proposes a focus on ‘The case of female supporters of FC Persepolis’, who have become famous for actively challenging the ruling authorities by imposing their presence in the football stadium through elaborate ‘cross-dressing’ strategies. Written before the major social uprisings in autumn 2022, Caroline Azad’s contribution shows how women become main advocates of their own rights by subverting and transgressing the constraints inflicted on them. Part V closes the book, yet is not a conclusion. How could it be? It imagines the future of the football stadium, and the future, by definition, cannot have a conclusion. Instead, Chap. 14 offers much more, in drafting two very different scenarios for ‘The post-pandemic football stadium in 2050’. What will football stadiums be like three decades after football’s abrupt interruption by the COVID-19 lockdowns? In a provocative and stimulating approach, Jean-Michel Roux, Natalia R. de Melo, Cristiane de S. Duarte and Elson M. Pereira bring together their knowledge from geography and architecture, urban planning and sport studies with the

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aim of drafting two competing visions for football stadiums, between highly controlled venues for events cut off from the public and urban spaces that are managed as common good for the population. Make your choice—or imagine an in-between future. The richness and complementarity of this volume’s contributions should be sufficient to help you extrapolate from the present.

References Alpan, B. 2019. ‘Hegemonic Masculinity in Times of Crisis: 15 July Coup Attempt and Turkish Football’, in: Çiçekoğlu, F. and Turan, Ö. (eds). The Dubious Case of a Failed Coup. Militarism, Masculinities, and 15 July in Turkey, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 71-90. Augé, M. 1982. ‘Football—De l’histoire sociale à l’anthropologie religieuse’, Le Débat, 19, Feb. 1982, pp. 59-67. Bachrach, P. & M.S.  Baratz 1962. ‘Two Faces of Power’, American Political Science Review, 56, pp. 947-52 Bale, J. 1993. Sport, space and the city. London: Routledge. Bale, J. 1994. Landscapes of modern sport. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Bale, J. 2000. ‘The changing face of football: Stadiums and communities’. Soccer & Society, 1(1), pp. 91-101. Bolz, D. 2008. Les arènes totalitaires. Hitler, Mussolini et les jeux du stade. Paris: CNRS Editions. Brohm, J.-M. 1993. Les meutes sportives. Critique de la domination. Paris: L’Harmattan. Bromberger, C. 1995. Le match de football: ethnologie d’une passion partisane à Marseille, Naples et Turin. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Caillat, M. 1995. L’idéologie du sport en France (Race, guerre, religion). Paris: Editions de la Passion. Caillois, R. 1967. Les jeux et les hommes: le masque et le vertige. Paris: Gallimard. Canetti, E. 1960. Masse und Macht. Hamburg: Claassen. Claydon, P. and Taylor, V. 2020. The Cemetery End. 25 Years of Lost Grounds and Stands. Wickford: Groundtastic. Cleland, J., Doidge, M., Millward, P., and Widdop, P. 2018. Collective action and football fandom: A relational sociological approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Coton, K. and Plumb, M. 2017. Lost League Football Grounds (2nd edition). Shepperton:Ian Allen Publishing. Dal Lago, A. 1990. Descrizione di una battaglia. I rituali del calcio. Bologna: Il Mulino. Dietschy, P. 2018. Histoire du football. Paris: Perrin. Dinçkal, N. 2013. Sportlandschaften: Sport, Raum und (Massen-) Kultur in Deutschland 1880–1930. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Dorsey, J. 2016. The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elias, N. & Dunning, E. 1986. Quest for excitement: sport and leisure in the civilizing process. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, M. 1983. ‘The Subject and Power’, in: H.  Dreyfus & P.  Rabinow (eds). Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. The University of Chicago Press, pp. 208-226. García, B. and Zheng, J. (eds) 2017. Football and Supporter Activism in Europe: Whose Game Is It? London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Giulianotti, R. 1999. Football. A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge, Polity Press. Gumbrecht, H. U. 2021. Crowds: The Stadium as a Ritual of Intensity. Stanford University Press. Guschwan, M. 2014. ‘Stadium as public sphere’, Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics,17:7, pp. 884-900. Haldas, G. 1981. La Légende du football. Lausanne : L’Âge d’Homme. Hay, C. 2002. Political Analysis: a Critical Introduction, New York: Palgrave. Holt, R. 1989. Sport and the British. A Modern History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hornby, N. 1992. Fever Pitch. A Fan’s Life. London: Victor Gollancz. Hourcade, N. 2000. ‘L’engagement politique des supporters «ultras» français. Retour sur des idées reçues.’, Politix, (2), pp. 107-125. Hüser, D., Dietschy, P; & Didion, P. (eds) 2022. Arènes du sport—Cultures du sport—Mondes du sport. Perspectives franco-allemandes et européennes dans le ‘long’ XXe siècle. Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag. Lever, J. 1983. Soccer Madness. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Johnes, M.2008. ‘We Hate England! We Hate England? National Identity and Anti-Englishness in Welsh Soccer Fan Culture’. Cycnos, vol. 25/2 (http:// revel.unice.fr/cycnos/?id=6224. Karlsson, H. 2004. Försummat kulturarv: det närliggande förflutna och fotbollens platser. Gothenburg: Bricoleur.

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Kowalska, M. 2017. Urban Politics of a Sporting Mega Event: Legitimacy and Legacy of Euro 2012  in Anthropological Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuper, S. 1994. Football against the enemy. London: Orion. Laclau, E. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. London, New York: Verso. Le Bon, G. 1896. Psychologie des foules. Paris: F. Alcan. Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, J. M. 1982. Crowd control at English football matches. Sociological Focus, 15(4), p. 417-423. Lukes, S. 1974. Power: a Radical View. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Marschik, M., Müllner, R., Spitaler, G., & Zinganel, M. (eds.) 2005. Das Stadion. Geschichte. Architektur. Politik. Ökonomie. Vienna: Kant & Turia. Mason, T. 1980. Association football and English society 1863-1915. Brighton: Harvester. Mason, T. 1988. Sport in Britain. London: Faber. Mignon, P. 1998a. ‘Supporters ultras et hooligans dans les stades de football’. Communications, 67(1), pp. 45-58. Mignon, P. 1998b. La passion du football. Paris: Odile Jacob. Mosse, H. 1975. The Nationalization of the Masses. New York: Howard Fertig. Numerato, D. 2018. Football fans, activism and social change. London: Routledge. Nuytens, W. 2004. La popularité du football: Sociologie des supporters à Lens et à Lille. Artois Presses Université. Perelman, M. 1998. Le stade barbare. Paris: Editions Mille et une nuits. Piskurek, C. 2018. Fictional Representations of English Football and Fan Cultures: Slum Sport, Slum People? London: Palgrave Macmillan. Porter, C. 2019. Supporter Ownership in English Football: Class, Culture and Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Skrentny, W. (ed.) 2016. Es war einmal ein Stadion. Verschwundene Kultstätten des Fußballs, Göttingen: Die Werkstatt. Mester, K.H. 2016. Vom Stadion zur Arena—Wenn Herz und Seele verschwinden. Eine Hommage an Pilgerstätten des deutschen Fußballs. Hildesheim: Arete. Sonntag, A. 2008. Les identités du football européen. Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. Sonntag, A. and Ranc, D. 2015. Colour? What colour? Report on the fight against racism and discrimination in football. Paris: UNESCO. Sonntag, A. 2016. Smart consumers and hopeless romantics, in J. Bangsbo et al. (eds. Science and Football VIII. London: Routledge, pp. 161-169.

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Sonntag, A. 2023. ‘L’embourgeoisement par l’humour. Fever Pitch et le football anglais’. Football(s). Histoire, culture, économie, société, 2, pp. 55-68. Szogs, N. 2017. Football Fandom and Migration: An Ethnography of Transnational Practices and Narratives in Vienna and Istanbul. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tarde, G. 1901. L’opinion et la foule. Paris: F. Alcan. Turan, Ö., & Özçetin, B. 2017. ‘Football fans and contentious politics: The role of Çarşı in the Gezi Park protests’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, DOI 1012690217702944. Vassort, P. 1999. Football et politique. Sociologie historique d’une domination. Paris: Editions de la Passion, Walvin, J. 1994. The People’s Game—The History of Football Revisited. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Williams, J. M., Dunning, E., & Murphy, P. J. 1984. Hooligans Abroad (RLE Sports Studies): The Behaviour and Control of English Fans in Continental Europe. London: Routledge.

2 Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance Across Europe: A Cross-­Country Description Özgehan Şenyuva and Ramón Llopis-Goig

Take me out to the ball game,Take me out with the crowd;Just buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,I don’t care if I never get back —Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, Tin Pan Alley (1908)

Introduction ‘Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd’—if the classic vaudeville tune was initially inspired by a baseball ground billboard

This chapter has been carried out as part of the FREE project. The FREE project (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 290805.

Ö. Şenyuva (*) Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey R. Llopis-Goig University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_2

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(Anton 2010), its few words include three key elements of the modern sport experience. The first one is the request ‘take me out’, which implies that there is a special place where special things will happen, and to which people converge in order to be part of it. The second one is the reference to the ‘ball game’, which hints at a collective sport, with teams that provide identification offers for spectators and require collective support. And the third one is, of course, ‘the crowd’, capable of multiplying the emotions that only the ball game can produce, a crowd so big it needs a huge infrastructure of a very peculiar kind: the stadium. Though football can be and is still often played in informal settings, such as improvised yards, back streets and parks, with little or no set parameters and boundaries (Giulianotti 1999, 66), today, the venues in which contemporary elite football are played are often highly developed structures designed specifically to host tens of thousands of supporters (Crawford 2004, p.  65). Not for nothing, for many fans the stadium itself can constitute one of the primary attractions to attending live sport (Inglis 2001, p. 18). The atmosphere within a stadium and the emotions that ‘being there provokes make the experience of the game more pleasurable’ (Giulianotti 1999, p.  69). These stadiums in which supporters gather in a massive way are the focus of this chapter. Relationships between football fans and stadiums as well as the role that the latter play in football cultures have been the subject of a wide number of essays and investigations in the field of the social sciences (Bale 2000; Inglis 2001). Much of this work focused on the social meaning and emotional importance of stadiums, the very special place they hold in the hearts of football fans who refer to them as their home. The relation established with the home stadiums is profoundly emotional, even including an element of sacredness. If football—following Bale’s arguments (1993)—without being a religion in itself, shares many similarities with religious rituals, stadiums could be seen as its temples. As found in the classic motto of Boca Juniors fans from Buenos Aires: Boca es mi religión, Maradona es mi dios; la bombonera es mi iglesia.1 The numerous international case studies of ‘memorial culture’ in and around  This could be translated into English as: ‘Boca is my religion, Maradona is my god, la Bombonera— home stadium of Boca Juniors—is my church’. 1

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clubs and stadiums gathered by Herzog (2013) give evidence to the universal dimension of these rituals. Since the 1990s, in addition to the construction of a significant number of brand-new football arenas, many stadiums have witnessed extensive redevelopment and rebuilding, to the extent that one may be easily impressed with the increased architectural appeal of the high-tech venues that are even becoming tourist attractions. They are now offering supporters safe and more comfortable environments and amenities. The older stadiums in Europe, whose original structures often dated back to the early part of the twentieth century, were piles of cement with minimal comfort and almost no amenities offered to the fans. For some authors, this process of refurbishing and rebuilding of the stadiums constitutes a part of a general progression in the nature of leisure spaces, away from the overcrowding and dangers of past eras towards a more comfortable and reliable environment (Crawford 2004; Inglis 2001). On the other hand, football needs to attract new audiences in order to prosper in a competitive market (Gruneau and Whitson 1993), and the process of redevelopment has made the stadiums more accessible and attractive to other target groups than traditional supporters. That said, some authors have written that ‘football stadiums have been sanitized and—in a spatial sense—privatized’ (Inglis 2001, p. 39). This has led some authors to talk about a loss of authenticity as a consequence of an increasing disconnect from their sense of place and history. At the same time, sociologists such as Anthony King (1998) have suggested that many academic writers have the tendency to over-romanticise their own early experiences of football and often, if only implicitly, refer to a golden age of football that has now been lost with the gentrification and commercialisation of football (Crawford 2004, p. 75). Considering the context and the trends outlined in this introduction, this chapter does not attempt to make a theoretical contribution but provides an empirical approach to the evolution of attendance to football stadiums in different European countries over the two pre-COVID-19 decades. Our aim is to make an analysis of stadium attendance, identifying the difference between European countries in terms of sociodemographic profile of spectators and forms of attendance. To do so, we will use data from two surveys about football culture carried out under the

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FREE project: a survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE 2014a) and a survey of European Football Fans (FREE 2014b). In a first step, however, we will have a short look at the main official figures regarding stadium attendance in the ten major leagues in Europe and this will give us a clear idea of patterns concerning average attendance rates and their evolution over the last two decades.

 tadium Attendance in the Main S European Leagues Going to the stadium to watch a football match remains a popular activity throughout Europe, despite the increased technology and media coverage of the game and the trends pointed out above. Attendance rates, however, display significant differences not only between countries, but also between teams competing in the same leagues. A quick review of the figures for ten European men’s football leagues shows that there has been an increase in the average stadium attendance for the 2000/2018 period in seven of the ten European countries included in Table 2.1. According to the data compiled by European Football Statistics (EFS), the three countries in which the average attendance has decreased are Italy, Austria and Scotland. It should be noted that the increases registered for Denmark, France and Spain are only one point or less than one point. In the remaining four countries, however, increases have been considerable since in all cases are above 20%, with Poland, Turkey and Germany standing out with increases of 104.2%, 43% and 42.7% respectively for the 2000/2018 period. In the 2017/2018 season, the German Bundesliga had the highest average number of attendees with 44,511 spectators per match. This represented an increase of 42.7% with regard to 1999/2000 season when the average reached 31,182 spectators. It is difficult not to relate this significant increase to the massive wave of stadium refurbishment or new stadium constructions around the 2006 World Cup, in not only the 12 official venues, but also almost a dozen additional cities.

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Table 2.1 Stadium attendance figures for 2017/2018 season in the main European leagues Highest match (2018)

2018 2000 2018 versus average average 2000

2017 occupancy average

League

Country

Bundesliga Premier League Liga Santander Serie A TIM Ligue 1 Conforama Ladbrokes Premiership Spor Toto Süper Lig Lotto Ekstraklasa Tipico Bundesliga Alaka Superliga

Germany 79,496 England 74,976

31,182 30,757

44,511 38,310

42.7% 24.6%

91.27% 94.95%

Spain

66,603

26,984

27,068

0.3%

67.50%

Italy France

57,529 46,929

29,908 22,314

24,706 22,548

-17.4% 1.0%

57.11% 70.67%

Scotland 57,523

17,902

15,929

-11.0%

61.89%

Turkey

40,778

9004

12,874

43.0%

37.33%

Poland

20,544

4622

9436

104.2%

49.73%

Austria

18,791

7702

6394

-17.0%

46.09%

Denmark 15,685

5815

5871

1.0%

47.21%

Source: StadiumDb.com and http://www.european-­football-­statistics.co.uk/attn. htm. Data referred to 2017 occupancy average came from soccerstats.com.

The German league also holds the first place concerning the match with the highest attendance (79,496 spectators). The highest occupancy average, however, belongs to England with a share of 94.95% for the 2016/2017 season. As Kuper and Szymanski (2018) point out, England’s attendance figures are also higher than Germany’s when compared to the overall population. When it comes to average attendance, the English league is the second with 38,310 spectators in the 2017/2018 season, 24% more than 18 years before. It is followed by the Spanish La Liga with an average attendance of 27,068, only marginally higher than the one of 1999/2000 season. Then, the Italian Serie A TIM is in fourth place with an average attendance of 24,706 spectators, but losing 17.4% compared to two decades before, the strongest decline in the analysed period. In fact, the occupancy average of the Italian stadiums is clearly the lowest among the so-called Big-five football leagues. Presumably, this may be

30 

Ö. Şenyuva and R. Llopis-Goig

related not only to recurrent scandals and problems linked to match-fixing and corruption, but also to the abandonment of stadiums and lack of renovation of their structures which have been gradually affecting Italian football in the years preceding the undertaking of the surveys (Doidge 2015). The fact that Italy lost the organisation of Euro2016 to France slowed down the renovation process even further (with the notable exception of the brand-new Juventus arena in Turin). The fifth component of the Big-five, France, comes out in the fifth position of the ranking with an average attendance of 22,548 spectators, one point more than 18 years ago. All other leagues have a lower average attendance and less than half of the occupancy average with the exception of Scotland, whose Ladbrokes Premiership reached a 61.89% in the 2016/2017 season. Overall, three insights are provided by the analysed data. Firstly, there are big differences with regard to the major trends detected in the main European leagues: Big-five leagues register more than 20,000 attendees on average while in the rest of the countries the average is lower. Secondly, the average attendance to the stadiums has increased over the two pre-­ COVID decades in the top Big-five countries—Germany and England— but not in the rest. Spanish and French leagues do not move from their previous levels, and the Italian league is even the one that lost the highest number of attendees in the analysed period. Two non-Big-five countries—Poland and Turkey—record the highest growth rates while Austria and Scotland are accompanying Italy in the descending line. Thirdly, the occupancy average of the Big-five leagues is always—with the exception of Italy—above 50%, just the opposite of what happens in the rest of the leagues.

Which Fans Go to the Stadiums? The data analysed in the previous section have provided an accurate picture of the current reality of the football stadium attendance in ten football leagues in Europe. However, these data do not tell us anything about other aspects of sociological relevance such as the profile of the people who attend home matches or those who travel to follow the team. Neither

2  Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance… 

31

do they tell us anything about other practices and patterns related with attendance to the stadiums nor about the attitudes towards the clubs and their governance adopted by those attending football matches at the stadiums. To address this kind of issues in the rest of the chapter, we use data from the two surveys mentioned in the introduction: the survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE 2014a) and the survey of European Football Fans (FREE 2014b).2 For many, going to the stadium may be seen as the litmus test for determining whether one is or not a true fan. Tales from stadiums, enduring unpleasant weather conditions, waiting in queues for long hours, losing one’s voice over singing, preparing and participating in choreographies are all considered important merit badges that a true fan carries with pride. This can only be beaten by travelling to away games and supporting the team in other stadiums. However, going to the stadium is only one of many activities that football fans can carry out. Talking about people who support a football team in Europe—which is 49.8% of the total population aged 15 or more years—nearly three out of four said they usually watch football on TV at least once a week (71.7%). Buying club-related items obtains a high rate as well (60.1%), almost the same level with reading football news and stories in the press and internet (60%). Slightly below is the rate of people attending home games (58.2%), while paying to watch matches on TV or the internet is mentioned by 42.2% of the people who support a football team. In addition to these activities we can find visit football-related websites (33%),  The survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE, 2014a) was conducted by phone (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview, CATI) among a sample of Europeans residing in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom and Turkey. The fieldwork was conducted by BVA (France) in December 2013. The final sample was composed of 7245 Europeans representative of the population aged 15 or more. The representativity of the sample was guaranteed by the use of the quota method applied to gender and age. The sampling error in each country (sample size of 800 interviews per country) was ±3.4 (95% confidence interval). The survey of European Football Fans (FREE, 2014b) was an online survey aimed at reaching a very specific target group composed of an attentive football public. The link for the survey was launched in August 2013 for testing purposes and was promoted from September 2013 to February 2014. The collected data set composed of 17,516 responses was subjected to a data cleaning process, as a result of which the number reached was 11,384 (3490  in Poland, 3120  in France, 1804  in Turkey, 1800 in Spain, 635 in the United Kingdom and 535 in Germany). The numbers for the rest of the countries were lower and, therefore, were not included in the final sample. The final data of both surveys have been weighted, taking into account the population over 15 years in each of them. 2

32 

Ö. Şenyuva and R. Llopis-Goig

travel to follow the team (28.2%) and listen to football on the radio (27.4%). The lowest percentages of team-related activities of fans come out as discussing football in the social media (22%), following football in foreign media (20.8%), buying a season ticket (19.8%), being a member of a fan group (17%) and watching football on the internet (16.7%). Obviously, differences can be detected between countries, but in any case, this description represents a picture of the position of stadium attendances in European fan cultures. When it comes to the attendance of home matches at football stadiums, the differences between countries are worth noting as we can see in Graph 2.1. The average level of attendance is around two-thirds of the people who declare supporting a football club with the exception of France and Turkey where the percentages are 51.8% and 43.7% respectively. (Note that France Home matches

69.9

66.1

Away matches

68.3 62

61.4

65.8

65.4

51.8 43.7

45.1

37.4 33.1

29.4

AT

25

24.7

23.2

DK

DE

17.4

17.3

FR

IT

PL

ES

TR

UK

Graph 2.1  Attendance to home/away matches among people who support a football club. Unit: percentage. Base: respondents who support a men’s football club in their country of residence. Question: As a supporter of this club, do you engage in the following activities? Attend home game. Travelling to follow the team (n = 3608). AT = Austria; DK = Denmark; DE = Germany; FR = France; IT = Italy; PL = Poland; ES = Spain; TR = Turkey; UK = United Kingdom. Source: FREE (2014a).

2  Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance… 

33

and Turkey are the two countries with the largest surface and, therefore, with long travel distances for supporters who do not live close to the city that hosts their ‘home’ team.) In the rest of the countries, approximately six of each ten persons who support a football club are engaged in the activity of attending home games of their clubs. Poland, Austria and Denmark are the countries with the highest levels of home matches attendance while France and specially Turkey have the lowest. Spain and the United Kingdom have also high levels of home games attendance with at least two-thirds of supporters state that they attend home matches. In the case of attendance of away matches, the country with the highest level is clearly the United Kingdom, with a rate of 45.1%, followed by Poland at a distance by almost eight percentage points. On the other hand, France and Italy have the lowest levels of attendance to away games while Spain and Denmark place in mid-level positions.

The Profile of Fans Who Go to the Stadiums Going to a match is still a popular activity in Europe as we have pointed out in the previous section but the question that arises is who are those people who attend football matches? What are their main characteristics? Can one speak of a particular football stadium crowd? According to the findings of the survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE, 2014a), it can be concluded that on the one hand the stadium crowds are not homogenous—football brings together different groups of people—and on the other hand (and more interestingly), the composition of people attending the matches is also specific and it changes from country to country. Regarding home games, male attendance is higher than female in the nine countries analysed (see Table  2.2). In general, they stand at 70% with the exception—with the same explanation as above—of France and Turkey with the lowest (59.3% and 58.1% respectively). Female attendance of home matches is approximately 20 points lower than male attendance, with Spain and Turkey as the countries with the highest and the lowest rates (59.1% and 25.8% respectively).

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Ö. Şenyuva and R. Llopis-Goig

Table 2.2  Attending home games Countries Sex

Male Female Age Under 25 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65 or over SocioHigh economic Medium-­high Medium status Medium-­low Low

AT

DK

DE

FR

IT

PL

ES

TR

UK

77.0 56.5 87.0 78.8 63.2 72.5 61.8 55.6 64.7 75.0 71.9 74.1 63.6

74.5 52.2 84.1 75.6 62.3 66.1 56.3 50.9 60.0 62.3 57.0 76.0 62.1

68.1 52.5 66.0 68.2 71.9 64.8 50.0 39.0 71.7 70.0 52.6 70.4 42.1

59.3 37.7 61.3 46.4 56.1 45.7 57.6 45.3 45.9 52.1 52.0 52.9 56.7

64.7 72.4 70.4 58.1 72.8 56.8 51.7 59.1 25.8 55.4 55.7 66.7 62.7 50.0 69.0 72.2 72.5 74.0 48.0 73.2 61.4 71.4 65.5 46.9 63.2 67.2 75.0 61.5 43.8 65.9 52.6 55.0 62.5 38.7 68.7 61.1 58.8 63.8 9.3 56.2 70.3 100.0 71.2 48.1 61.4 53.8 78.6 66.0 47.5 71.3 58.8 69.5 68.3 43.2 64.8 76.3 65.5 63.6 39.3 73.3 52.9 44.4 60.7 27.3 57.4

Unit: percentage. Base: respondents who support a men’s football club in their country of residence. Question: As a supporter of this club, do you engage in the following activities? Attend home game (n = 3608). AT = Austria; DK = Denmark; DE = Germany; FR = France; IT = Italy; PL = Poland; ES = Spain; TR = Turkey; UK = United Kingdom. Source: FREE (2014a)

When stadium attendance is analysed according to the age of the people, the assumption of high mainstreaming is confirmed. The stadium attendance rates are very similar in the six age groups analysed, with the exception of Germany and Turkey where the rates of people of 65 or over descend in a significant way with regard to the rest of the age groups. In general, the youngest groups of the population—that is, people under 25 and those between 25 and 34 years old—are the ones that obtain the highest stadium attendance rates. This is true for Austria, Denmark, Turkey and the United Kingdom. In Germany and Spain, however, there is a different pattern and the highest rates move to the groups between 25 and 34 years and between 35 and 44 years. On the other hand, in Italy and Poland, the two age groups with the highest stadium attendance are the ones between 25 and 34 and between 45 and 54 while in France are people under 25 and those between 55 and 64. The analysis of stadium attendance rates according to socio-economic status reveals interesting patterns as well. There are five countries in which the highest stadium attendance rates correspond to high or medium-high socio-economic status people and in which, at the same time, the low

2  Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance… 

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socio-economic status presents the smallest stadium attendance rate. This is what happens in Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain and Turkey. The patterns of these countries are clearly different from the one identified in Denmark, Italy, the United Kingdom and France. In the first three, the highest rate corresponds to people from medium-low socio-economic status while in France it is the lowest groups that have the highest attendance rate. This is an observation that confirms traditional French perceptions of football within the sports hierarchy, according to which football has long been considered a ‘proletarian pastime’, popular with the working classes and met with a certain contempt by the intellectuals and academics of the influential Parisian microcosm (Sonntag 2008). When it comes to the attendance of away games, the results are not very different from those aforesaid. Beyond some general coincidences, we can point out the following findings. First, the United Kingdom and Poland have the highest rates of travelling to follow the team in away matches with 51.9% and 41.8% respectively (see Table  2.3). On the other hand, the lowest correspond to Italy (17.2%) and France (19.1%) while the rest of the countries vary between 24.2% of Austria and 38.3% Table 2.3  Travelling to follow the team Countries Sex

Male Female Age Under 25 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 65 or over SocioHigh economic Medium-­high status Medium Medium-­low Low

AT 24.2 21.2 30.4 33.3 12.8 25.5 30.3 11.1 23.1 35.0 24.1 18.5 18.6

DK 36.5 17.2 46.0 52.4 22.6 23.2 20.8 13.0 10.5 28.8 23.5 38.8 17.2

DE 26.6 21.7 17.0 22.7 39.1 25.9 25.0 12.2 30.0 20.0 23.1 29.6 26.3

FR 19.1 13.3 17.5 18.8 17.1 13.0 26.5 13.2 13.5 12.5 15.3 23.5 23.3

IT PL 17.2 41.8 17.9 17.2 14.8 45.2 20.0 42.5 19.5 42.9 15.2 35.7 15.8 30.0 18.7 17.6 33.8 100.0 17.3 57.1 8.8 35.4 16.2 32.7 5.9 44.4

ES 38.3 26.3 33.9 34.3 31.8 30.8 36.1 33.3 23.7 29.2 34.0 38.7 31.4

TR 36.8 9.8 24.6 27.5 27.1 26.3 28.6 --34.0 30.3 21.2 27.9 27.3

UK 51.9 34.7 45.2 45.7 41.3 48.8 55.9 36.7 33.3 49.4 42.8 48.5 46.1

Unit: percentage. Base: respondents who support a men’s football club in their country of residence. Question: As a supporter of this club, do you engage in the following activities? Travel to follow the team (n = 3608). AT = Austria; DK = Denmark; DE = Germany; FR = France; IT = Italy; PL = Poland; ES = Spain; TR = Turkey; UK = United Kingdom. Source: FREE (2014a)

36 

Ö. Şenyuva and R. Llopis-Goig

of Spain. Second, men’s rates are always higher than women’s but the differences between countries are rather significant. In Poland, Turkey and Denmark there are close to 20 percentage points of difference or even more between men and women. The differences are lower but also relevant in Spain and the United Kingdom while in Austria, Germany, Italy and France they are around five points or less. The age group analysis of travelling to follow the team reveals some clear social patterns. Austria, Denmark and Poland have the highest rates of attending away games among people aged less than 35 years. Italy has a similar profile to these countries although its groups with the highest travelling rates are between 24 and 45 years. In the case of Germany, these move to the range of 35 to 55 years. In the rest of the countries, attendance of away matches is very similar in the six age groups. The exception is the United Kingdom, where the highest rates are placed between 45 and 65 years, most likely due to the high ticket prices. Finally, the rates of away matches attendances according to socio-­ economic status lead to interesting findings as there are countries in which travelling to follow the teams seems to be more related with medium-high and high status while in others this pattern is more associated with medium-low and low groups. Among the former we can find Italy, Poland and Turkey while in the second category the most obvious case is France. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, Austria and Germany show more equitable patterns.

 oing Solo or with Brothers in Arms? Stadium G Attendance Group Patterns Having analysed the sociodemographic profile of those attending home and away matches through the nine European countries, our interest now shifts to other aspects that can qualify the detected patterns. In this sense, this section covers the topic of who accompanies the supporters to the stadiums. Our analysis is based in the second survey mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that is, a survey focused on football fans in six European countries. As Table  2.4 shows, the main form of attendance to the stadium is with ‘one or a group of male friends’, mentioned by more than 40% of

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Table 2.4  Form of attendance at the stadium Country of residence With one or a group of male friends With family members With a group of mixed (male and female) friends On your own Part of group of supporters organised by themselves Among a dedicated and unorganised group of supporters With one or a group of female friends Part of a group of supporters organised by the club I never go to the stadium Total

FR

DE

PL

ES

TR

UK

46.8 22.3 11.8

40.4 17.2 16.0

33.8 19.0 12.7

42.3 27.1 7.2

42.0 10.5 17.1

40.1 30.4 9.6

6.2 2.4

6.7 6.7

5.4 3.4

8.2 4.1

6.6 8.9

11.2 2.7

1.3

4.6

2.8

1.5

5.6

2.3

0.6 0.5

1.4 0.3

4.9 3.5

1.9 0.6

1.4 1.7

1.0 --

8.1 100

6.7 100

14.4 100

7.1 100

6.1 100

2.7 100

Unit: percentage. Base: total number of respondents (n = 11,384). Question: When you are in a stadium, you are generally…? FR = France; DE = Germany; PL = Poland; ES = Spain; TR = Turkey; UK = United Kingdom. Source: FREE (2014b)

the football fans in all the countries with the exception of Poland, in which this form of attendance only reaches one-third of the football fans interviewed. The second most frequently chosen statement corresponds to ‘family members’. This one varies more clearly among the countries with the lowest share in Turkey with 10.5% and the highest in the United Kingdom with 30.4%. The number of people who go to the stadium with a group of mixed friends—male and female—varies between the 7.2% of Spain and the 17.1% of Turkey. Results included in Table  2.4 also show that the only country with more than 10% of spectators attending on their own is the United Kingdom, with 11.2%. On the other hand, Turkey is the one with highest share of people attending matches as a part of a ‘group of supporters organised by themselves’, a statement that receives 8.9%, as well as ‘among a dedicated and unorganised group of supporters’, which receives 5.6% of the mentions. Interestingly, Poland has the highest levels of football fans attending the matches with ‘one or a group of female friends’ (4.9%) and ‘as a part of a group of supporters organised by the club’ (3.5%). We can conclude that the stadium is still a masculine space since almost half of the fans watch the matches together with male friends.

38 

Ö. Şenyuva and R. Llopis-Goig

This is particularly true for France, where nearly half of the fans assert that they attend the matches at the stadiums with one or more male friends. In the United Kingdom, the efforts to reform stadiums into more social and family-friendly spaces seem to have yielded results: one out of three football fans in the United Kingdom attend matches with family members, which is significantly higher than the average. The United Kingdom is closely followed by Spain, where almost three out of ten fans watch games with family members. Turkish stadiums on the other hand appear as the least family oriented: only one in ten fans indicates that they go to football games with family members. However, Turkey also stands out as the country where football attendance in a mixed male and female group is the highest. In the United Kingdom and Spain, where stadium experience is mainly a male or family activity, watching matches within a group of mixed friends is below the average: in the United Kingdom, only 9% of fans and in Spain even less, 7% of fans, are in the stadium within mixed group of fans.

 hat Attitudes Towards Club Governance W Characterises Those Who Attend Matches on the Stadium? This section maintains the aim of deepening the characteristics of people who go to the football stadiums in order to watch matches but moves towards identifying traits in their governance culture. The challenge is to answer the following question: Are there significant differences between those fans who attend matches and those who do not attend regarding the attitudes towards governance of football? To answer this question, we have used a battery of seven items on football governance culture included in the aforementioned survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE, 2014a) as well as two questions in which respondents were asked about their trust in club management and fan groups/supporters organisations. To verify the existence of statistical differences between fans going to the stadiums and those who do not attend matches, we have applied the t-test for equality of means as can be observed in Table 2.5.

a

1779 901 1790 902 1776 896 1782 900 1766 900 1776 887 1777 899 1777 890 1770 881

Yes No Yes No Yes No

N

Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No 3.24 3.01 3.32 3.32 3.32 3.16

3.82 3.81 2.48 2.55 3.59 3.72 3.56 3.37 3.55 3.58 3.42 3.50

Mean (1-5)

1.276 1.288 1.085 1.041 1.149 1.138

1.152 1.169 1.178 1.156 1.148 1.045 1.207 1.198 1.254 1.238 1.244 1.205

SD

.030 .043 .026 .035 .027 .038

.027 .039 .028 .039 .027 .035 .029 .040 .030 .041 .030 .040

Std. error mean

2649

2661

−1.575

3.418

2663

−.609

2665

2680

3.676

.082

1951

−2.868

2674

2690

−1.435

4.560

2678

df

.202

t

.001

.935

.000

.115

.542

.000

.004

.151

.840

Sig.

t-test for equality of means

Equality of variances assumed in all items excepting ‘club owners/presidents are more interested in success than in what the club’. Base: respondents who support a men’s football club. Source: FREE (2014a)

My opinion has no influence on what club owners/presidents do We can be confident that club owners/ presidents will always do the right thing Club owners/presidents are more interested in success than in what the club represents a We cannot always trust what club owners/ presidents say Football is in need of more regulation by the authorities Club owners/presidents see and treat supporters like me as nothing more than customers As a supporter, I believe I should have a say on the affairs of the club How much do you tend to trust the club management How much do you tend to trust fan groups/ supporters organisations

Governance attitudes

Stadiums attendance

Table 2.5  Difference in governance attitudes between attenders and not-­attenders to home games

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The statistical analysis reveals the existence of significant differences in four of the nine items considered. According to these findings, fans going to the stadium may be said to have a higher degree of agreement with the assertion that they cannot always trust what club owners/presidents say as well as with the statement that, as supporters, they believe they should have a say on the affairs of the club. Likewise, they tend to trust fan groups/supporters organisations more than those fans that do not go to the stadiums. On the other hand, fans who do not attend matches agree more than those who attend with the statement according to which club owners/presidents are more interested in success than in what the club represents. In other words, regular attendees clearly seem to feel more entitled to have a voice in the management of the club and, at the same time, tend to see themselves as part of an in-group in which members trust each other. On the other hand, less dedicated supporters seem to presume that club owners or presidents are, like them, in a more opportunistic, ‘glory-hunting’ posture. No significant differences have been detected concerning the rest of the items included in the survey, that is, the fans influence on what club/ owner do; the guarantee that club owners/presidents will always do the right thing; the statement that football is in need of more regulation by the authorities; the perception that club owners/presidents see and treat supporters as nothing more than customers; and the trust in the club management.

Conclusions This chapter has provided some empirical evidence with regard to stadium attendance in different European countries. The analysis has focused on the main sociodemographic characteristics of those fans who follow their teams to home and away matches as well as other patterns and traits like the form of stadium attendance and attitudes towards the governance of football clubs. In order to contextualise the subject matter and highlight the importance of the data offered in the main sections, the chapter has begun with a brief consideration of the principal topics on which the attention of

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social researchers has focused in the pre-COVID-19 decades. These topics include issues like the social significance and emotional meaning of stadiums, their redevelopment and rebuilding, the improvement in safety, comfort and amenities, and the perceived sanitisation and loss of authenticity that go with it. The evolution of the attendances to the stadiums in the main European Leagues—with the exception of the Italian league—has shown a general increase or stabilisation in the average number of attendees per match. The increases registered in countries like Turkey and Poland are outstanding while small leagues like the Austrian and Scottish ones experience clear decreases. Data from a European survey, on the other hand, has shown that more than a half of the people who support a football team normally attended its home matches. In fact, two out of each three supporters pursue this practice in Austria, Denmark, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. The only exception to that trend is found in Turkey where the rate decreases to four out of each ten supporters. Attendance of away matches is much lower—two to three times less—with the United Kingdom being the country with the highest rate and France and Italy the ones with the lowest. The analysis of the profile of those who attend home games has shown that men’s rates are clearly higher than women’s, a trend that can be observed in all the countries included in the survey with the exception of France and Turkey. The attendance rate is rather homogeneous between the different age groups, even though in Germany and Turkey it goes down in older age groups. Finally, considering the social class of the fans relevant differences between countries have been detected. While in Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain and Turkey the higher the social class, the higher the attendance rate; in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Italy the higher rates can be found among the medium-low classes and in France among the lower classes. Broadly speaking, these conclusions are transferable to the attendance of away games. Then, the analysis has expanded to the forms of attendance to the stadiums. This has allowed to verify the assumption that stadium attendance is still a predominantly male activity, since four to five out of each ten attendees go there with one or a group of male friends. Attendance within

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mixed groups—male and female—was stated by only one out of ten attendees while attendance with family members was the second one, with higher rates in the United Kingdom and Spain. The analysis offered in this chapter has been completed with a final topic that goes beyond the sociodemographic and behavioural patterns. A statistical analysis of the differences between fans who attend and do not attend matches in governance attitudes has been carried out. This analysis has revealed that those attending to stadiums tend to agree more than those who do not that they can trust what club owners/presidents say and that they should have a say on the affairs of the club. Likewise, they tend to trust fan groups/supporters organisations more than those fans that do not attend to the stadiums.

References Anton, M. 2010. ‘They’re still belting out his 102-year-old hit’, Los Angeles Times, 12 July. Bale, John. 1993. Sport, Space and The City. London: Routledge. Bale, John. 2000. The Changing Face of Football: Stadiums and Communities. In Garland, J., Malcom, D. and Rowe, M. (eds.): The Future of Football. Challenges for the Twenty-First Century. London: Frank Cass. Crawford, G. 2004. Consuming Sport: Fans, Sport and Culture. London: Routledge. Doidge, M. 2015. Football Italia: Italian football in an age of globalization. London: Bloomsbury. FREE. 2014a. Survey on Football in European Public Opinion. FREE Project (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe). FREE. 2014b. European Football Fans Survey. FREE Project (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe). Giulianotti, Richard. 1999. Football: a sociology of the global game. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gruneau, R. & Whitson, D. 1993. Hockey Night in Canada. Toronto: Garamond Press. Herzog, M. (ed). 2013. Mémorialkultur im Fussballsport. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Inglis, S. 2001. Sightlines. A Stadium Odyssey. London: Yellow Jersey Press.

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King, A. 1998. The End of the Terraces. The Transformation of English Football in the 1990’s. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Kuper, S. and Szymanski, S. 2018. Soccernomics. London: Hachette UK. Sonntag, Albrecht. 2008. Les identités du football européen, Grenoble: PUG.

Part II Historical Case Studies

3 The Stadio Mussolini Between Fascisisation and Commercialisation of Football (1933–1945) Paul Dietschy

Introduction If there were a historical tour of Turin during the fascist era, the visitor would have to walk along via Roma, which runs from the Porta Nuova train station to Piazza Castello, to the former Lingotto factory on the southern outskirts of the city, and then on to the nearby Stadio Olimpico. Only the modernist and monumental architecture today recalls the historical origin of these places now dedicated to mass consumption and globalised culture. In the case of the sports stadium renovated for the 2006 Winter Olympics, it is the third incarnation of a facility completed in 1933. Before becoming an Olympic venue, the Stadio Comunale was the scene of the feats of Omar Sivori, Francesco Graziani and Michel Platini. But this is not the first name either, since from 1933 to 1945 its original name, inscribed in luminous letters on the Marathon Tower, was simply Stadio Mussolini. P. Dietschy (*) University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_3

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Beyond a building name that is paradoxically rare in fascist Italy, the Stadio Mussolini is one of the large stadiums built as part of the public works aimed at providing Italy with modern sports infrastructures. As such, its design should be seen in the context of the regime’s main architectural achievements and their sporting and political functions. If the architectural and ideological aspects of such a stadium have been studied (Dietschy 1993; Martin 2004; Bolz 2008), its uses and functions have been much less investigated, with the exception of its economic dimension (Varrasi 1997). In this sense, the aim of this article is to answer the following question: did the Stadio Mussolini meet the needs of sport and football in Turin in terms of infrastructure? Beyond the ideological purpose of a political system increasing its totalitarian grip, did it not rather mask the limits of the regime’s sports policy and reveal its contradictions?

 he Mussolini Stadium, Sport Facility T of the Fascist Ventennio While it brought to heel the civil society of sport by taking control of the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) and organised sports leisure activities through the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), the fascist regime carried out a vast campaign to build large and small stadiums from 1927 to 1934. The Campo Littorio, a standardised model of sports equipment including changing rooms, stands, athletic tracks, soccer fields and playgrounds, was intended to encourage mass practice in small towns and rural communities. From October 1928 to the early 1930s, more than 3283 such communal grounds were built. On the outskirts of large cities, reinforced concrete stadiums with a capacity of up to 60,000 seats were built in Bologna, Milan, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Turin and Naples. Often supplemented by the addition of indoor swimming pools, these facilities were above all intended to be omnisport, but were also distinguished by the comfort offered to spectators. The Stadio Mussolini was obviously one of them.

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 ncient and Modern: Italian Stadiums A of the Fascist Era On 28 May 1927, King Victor-Emmanuel III and the Infant of Spain took part in the inauguration of the new stadium in Bologna, the Littoriale. About 194.45 metres long and 138 metres wide, the building corresponds to the monumentality sought by the architecture of the fascist era. In the shape of an amphitheatre that, before the bends, formed ‘a complete rectangle’ (De Finetti, p.63), the work signed by the engineer Costantini and the architect Arata was meant to, according to Leandro Arpinati, podestà (mayor in fascist language) of Bologna and president of the Federazione Italiana Giuco Calcio (FIGC), ‘remind us of the great Roman arenas’ (Bolz, 228). Indeed, the official programme for the 1934 World Cup specified that its exterior façade was composed of two floors of brick arches ‘like the ancient buildings of Imperial Rome, whose powerful architecture with simple and severe lines it reflects’.1 The other historical reference is the Torre di Maratona built two years later. More than 42 metres high and surmounted by a mast, it refers to the Italy of the municipalities and the Middle Ages and, of course, to the medieval towers of Bologna. At its base was installed ‘a very beautiful equestrian statue of the Duce’. As elsewhere in Italy, the stadium could accommodate in normal configuration 36,300 people and 45,000 ‘in “supercapienza” condition’ (De Finetti, 64), which meant that you have to squeeze a little bit on the stands. The Stadio Mussolini partly followed the architectural programme of the Littoriale. Its main enclosure housed a soccer field and an athletics track. In addition, in 1936 the city council added a training pitch to ‘avoid the rapid deterioration of the playing field’.2 It did not have a cycling track, which was justified ‘only in minor stadiums where, by necessity, all needs had to be met by a single facility’ (De Finetti 1934, p. 64). Likewise, as in Bologna, an indoor swimming pool was added to the municipal facilities. The comparison, however, stopped there. From an aesthetic point of view, the reference to antiquity was hardly followed in Italy, with the exception  Campionato mondiale di calcio. Programma ufficiale, edito a cura della F.I.G.C., Roma 1934, p. 59.  Archivio Storico della Città di Torino (ASCT), Atti del municipio di Torino, decision of 18 April 1936, § 40 ‘Stadio Mussolini. Formazione di campo per allenamento gioco del calcio’. 1 2

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of the Foro Mussolini with its marble bleachers and statues, but whose functionality was not the first of its qualities. The Stadio Mussolini belonged rather to the futuristic vein of the Italian stadiums the first example of which was the Stadio Berta designed and built in the outskirts of Florence by the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi between 1929 and 1932. In the capital of the Italian Renaissance, no brick nor marble but reinforced concrete was used to facilitate public circulation by means of external stairs and build a self-supporting roof over the official tribune and a Torre di Maratona in tapered shape like an airplane wing. ‘Indisputably, it was a shining example of modernity, which had superseded the Littoriale and taken stadium design to a new level’ (Martin 2004, p.161).

The Stadio Mussolini: A ‘Città sportive’ The same can be said for the Stadio Mussolini according to the official programme of the 1934 World Cup as ‘the largest and most modern among Italian stadiums’3. Both statements do not seem to be usurped. It could accommodate 50,000 people in ‘basic capacity’ and up to 70,000 in ‘supercapienza’. The architect Raffaello Fagnoni, assisted by engineers Enrico Bianchini and Dagoberto Ortensi, had chosen an elliptical plan 224.24 metres long and 145.50 metres wide, which offered seats in two parterres, while ‘the curvilinear arrangement of the bleachers offers the best visibility of the extremely mobile show taking place in an omnisport stadium’ (De Finetti 1934, p.74). Even if the self-supporting roof covering the official tribune did not have the finesse of its counterpart in Florence, and even if the Torre di Maratona had neither the medieval look of the Littoriale’s tower nor the sharpness of the Stadio Berta’s, the Stadio Mussolini prevailed with the comfort of the press tribune and dressing rooms. Above all, it was a part, albeit a central part, of a sport facility area which also included a basketball court, a training football pitch and an athletics track, bordered by a rectangular tribune that could hold 3000 spectators and contained the changing rooms and a centre for experimental sports medicine under the stands. As in Bologna, there were two swimming pools, one covered, the other open-air. According to La  Campionato ufficiale di calcio. Programma ufficiale, edito a cura della F.I.G.C., Roma 1934, p. 55.

3

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Stampa, the first would have been ‘one of the best of its kind to have been built’4. Even if the Turinese daily may be suspected of local patriotism and had to praise the work of the local fascist podestà, the construction is certainly among the most remarkable at a time when indoor swimming pools were rare. Its changing rooms were large enough to accommodate more than 100 swimmers, while 800 spectators could watch the competitions from the stands. The pool was 33.33 metres long and 18 metres wide and its walls were equipped with lamps to illuminate it. Its water was heated by an electric heating system and its complete filtering took about 10 hours. The pool also had a 10- and 5-metre diving board and two 3-metre diving boards. From the football pitch to the swimming pool, the Mussolini stadium really deserved to be called ‘Città sportiva’ (Sports City) by the newspaper La Stampa.

A New Stadium for Turin The Mussolini stadium had not just a sports purpose. Its construction was part of an urban and political project that applied to a city that was not the most fascist in the peninsula, as evidenced by Mussolini’s three trips to the city and his confrontation with the Fiat workers, who opposed the Duce’s defiant tone with significant reserve and silence (Passerini 1984). Just as the modernisation of Via Roma or the construction of the Torre Littoria was intended to impose the mark of fascist modernity on the baroque and risorgimental historical centre of the Savoys’ Turin, the Stadio Mussolini planted the emblematic fascist lictor beam in the industrial and working-class outskirts of the city.

 tadio Mussolini and the Urban Planning Policy S of the Municipality of Turin Like other Italian cities, Turin’s urban planning and architecture still bear the marks of the fascist era. To start with, in a major place of the city centre: the via Roma. In addition to the desire to fight unemployment  La Stampa, 3 May 1933.

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through a policy of major works, the widening of this central artery was based on goals that combined hygienic, urbanistic and political concerns. The architectural rationalism applied to the second section of via Roma, built between 1935 and 1937, clearly reflects the ideological project. It was a question of breaking with the bourgeois eclecticism of the nineteenth century and imposing fascist modernity in the heart of the former capital of the Savoy. The Littoria Tower, a ‘small self-sustaining skyscraper’ (Re 1993, p. 1908) designed in the shape of a lictor beam and completed in 1933 on a metal structure near piazza Castello, and the massive and austere Hotel Principi di Piemonte inaugurated in 1936 near piazza San Carlo, completed the imprint of fascist rationalism in the centre of Turin, the Turin per bene, in other words, of the bourgeoisie. According to Count Thaon di Revel, then podestà of Turin, the Duce himself ordered him to make Via Roma ‘the street par excellence, the main artery of rich commerce, elegant shops, luxurious fashion houses; where all the splendours of the true national centre of the automobile are gathered as in a permanent exhibition, a living and perennial testimony to the infinite resources of its industrial production’.5 Fascist urbanism also wanted to be part of the Turin periphery. Along with the Mercati Generali, the Lingotto underground tunnel and the motorway to Milan, the Stadio Mussolini marked this design that oscillated between utilitarianism and propaganda (Re 1993, p. 1096). What would today be a naming venture dedicated to the Duce added a political dimension to the choice of location. Few Italian monuments were named after Mussolini, except the Foro Mussolini in Rome. According to La Gazzetta dello Popolo, it was the dictator’s visit to Turin in October 1932 that was decisive in this respect. Passing through all the important places in the Piedmontese capital, from the Lingotto factory to Piazza Castello, the primo sportivo d’Italia passed the construction site of what was expected to become the Stadio del Littorio. He was recognised by the workers and the people and the procession stopped twice. Podestà Thaon di Revel took advantage of these more or less spontaneous stops to ask the question of the name of the stadium. ‘During the visit to the grandiose works the podestà, dottore Paolo Thaon di Revel, expressed to the Duce the desire to  La Stampa, 2 December 1932.

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dedicate the new sports ground to his name, which would be called Stadio Mussolini. The Head of the Government agreed, which will solemnly consecrate the sporting renaissance of our city: a magnificent breeding ground for young athletes, the flower of the university and the workshops’.6 The naming of the stadium after the Duce also had a political meaning in Turin itself, as a more or less spontaneous gesture of ‘devotion to the leader’, to use the fascist vocabulary of La Gazzetta del Popolo. Built near the working-class neighbourhoods of Borgo San Paolo and Lingotto, the large sports stadium represented the forced implantation of fascism in this area dominated by Fiat on the one hand and working-­class culture on the other. Maybe that’s why the Italian architect Giuseppe De Finetti considered ‘with frankness’ as he wrote, which was a rather courageous statement about a monument named after Mussolini, that this ‘città sportiva’, ‘town in the town’, wasn’t well integrated in its environment (De Finetti 1934, p. 78). However, if the urbanistic logic didn’t coincide with the political aim, the Stadio Mussolini as a place of socially mixed mass sociability par excellence wore the name of the Duce as a sort of nume protettore, the protective god of the fascist political religion (Gentile 1993, p. 287). This name, inscribed on the Marathon tower and illuminated at night, was as much a reminder of the control by the regime for the spectators as it was for the workers who walked along the stadium in their daily lives.

F irst Prestige and Propaganda Uses: Littoriali 1933 and the European Athletics Championships 1934 On 14 May 1933, at 4 p.m., Achile Starace, the secretary of the PNF, and Francesco Ercole, the Minister of Education, entered the main stand of the Stadio Mussolini accompanied by the fascist authorities. On their arrival, ‘the whole audience rose as one man, applauding wildly. The anthem “Giovinezza”, played by the orchestra outside the stadium, was taken up by the numerous groups in front of the tribune of honour, on a podium decorated in Turin’s colours. A tremendous Eja was launched by the students massed in the covered stand in the direction of SE Starace,  La Gazzetta del Popolo, 25 October 1932.

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and the name of the Duce, more present than ever in the minds of all, was shouted in an irrepressible burst of enthusiasm’.7 The parade then began: first the athletes of the various Gruppi universitari fascisti (GUF) of Italy, then ‘as an escort of honour’, young fascists in ten groups of hundred. According to La Stampa, the perfect order of these groups aroused the enthusiasm of the crowd: ‘Their entry and their parade provoke cheers, so great is the impression they produce on the crowd’. One crucial moment was the athletes’ oath to Duce, pronounced by Mori, ‘one of the best of the Turin GUF’.8 In the ceremonial of the Littoriali, the glorification of the PNF and Mussolini was therefore essential, as was the desire to shape the crowds by integrating the different social classes into the same political ‘faith’. The sporting event was in a way only a pretext for organising large choreographic parades, even if sport was also intended to contribute to the training of future soldiers (Fonzo 2020). The Stadio Mussolini was also used for international propaganda events such as the 1934 University Games, for which the municipality invested an additional 290,000 lire,9 and the first European Athletics Championships of the same year. For the organisation of this competition the municipality had to pay a subsidy of 180,000 lire to the FIDAL, the Italian athletics federation, while the various receipts brought in only 111,903 lire.10 One of the benefits expected by the regime was the favourable comments made by officials and foreign visitors, in particular observations on the modernisation of Italy and the efficiency of fascist organisation. Thus, according to La Stampa, the president of the International Athletics Federation, the Swede Siegfrid Edström, opening the European championships, ‘praised the Italian initiative, had words of great sympathy for Turin and the organisation, and solemnly recognised the vigorous rise of Fascist sport’.11 Even more significant in the eyes of the Italian press were the favourable comments of the Parisian newspaper that crowned the efforts of the organisers: ‘The European Athletics Championships, which took place in Turin, were followed with the greatest  La Stampa, 15 May 1933  Ibid. 9  ASCT, Atti del municipio di Torino, decision of 26 July 1933, § 24. 10  ASCT, Affari Gabinetto del Sindaco, cartela 579, Manifestazioni varie (1935), Relazioni sui campionati europei di atletica leggera del Settembre 1934-XII, 8 March 1935. 11  La Stampa, 8 September 1934. 7 8

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interest by the Parisian critics and technicians who, from the first day, were not sparing in their praise of the perfect [Italian] organisation’.12According to La Stampa, the daily Paris Soir even questioned the ability of the French to match Italian perfection, namely the comfort and modernity of the Stadio Mussolini and the dynamism of the students and young Italian fascists who were volunteer members of the organisation. This question remained valid when the 1938 World Cup was organised (Dietschy 2014, pp. 87-89), especially because the only match of the previous edition organised in the Stadio Mussolini was the match Austria-France.

 etween Business and Politisation: Juventus B and the Stadio Mussolini No matter how prestigious the Littoriali or the European Athletics Championships were, they did not fill the stadium every two weeks or even each month. Nor were they very lucrative. The Stadio Mussolini needed to host a football team, which was Juventus. But leaving the Juventus stadium to play at the Mussolini stadium was not entirely trivial. Watching the bianconeri players perform the fascist salute in front of the authorities’ stand before a Serie A match could be seen as one of the manifestations of the end of the civil society of sport. However, as Nils Haveman has attempted to show in the case of the Deutscher Fußball-­Bund under the Nazi regime (Haveman 2005), economic dimensions were not absent in the relationship between sports organisations and totalitarian regimes. Indeed, the municipality offered Juventus a modern stadium with a large capacity that the officials of the team didn’t have to build in the first place. In other words, the stadium dedicated to the Duce was also a good deal.

An Economic Choice? In May 1934, the director of the Mussolini stadium, il dottore Silvio Mugetti, drew up a first balance sheet of one year’s sporting activity. As a major competition, he placed the Littoriali in first place, for its 12

 La Stampa, 11 September 1934.

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importance as a political and sporting event. However, among the other events, Mugetti gave second place to the matches played by Juventus, first for European Cup matches against Hungarian and Czech clubs in the summer of 1933, and then regular use for league matches from 19 November 1933 onwards ‘in accordance with the agreements made between the City and FC Juventus’.13 According to Felice Borel, the former Juventus striker, it was the Federal Secretary Gastaldi who forced Juventus to leave the Corso Marsiglia pitch to play at the Stadio Mussolini.14 This version of events should probably be qualified, as the Campo Juventus on Corso Marsiglia was beginning to be obsolete. In July 1932, the podestà Thaon di Revel had stated that Juventus had ‘made a timely request to reserve the right of priority in the event that the Municipality wanted to concede the use of the stadium to private companies’,15 that is football clubs. For a club like Juventus, which was dominating Italian football at the time, it was preferable to invest in player capital at a time when the price of good players was constantly rising, rather than in concrete. Moreover, in order to accommodate the new record crowds, the club could probably not afford to invest ten million lire, despite its financial backing. In fact, the damage of the move was mainly to the sporting identity and sociability. Even if, as La Gazzetta del Popolo reported, Juventus returned to the same place where it played between 1909 and 1922, that is, near the Piazza d’arma, the club would no longer be playing in the ‘casa juventina’ as defined by its promoters in 1921–1922, a stadium where two international games had been played and four scudetti won, but would be integrated into the regime’s sports organisation. For the Turin daily: ‘It was therefore logical that the Juventus alumni should reluctantly abandon their old home to enter the sumptuous abode of the Mussolini Stadium’.16 In any case, it was not with athletics that the municipality could hope to justify the construction of the stadium, even if the aim of the work was  Torino, May 1934.  Interview of the author with Felice Borel, February 1991. 15  La Stampa, 10 July 1932. 16  La Gazzetta del Popolo, 18 November 1933. 13 14

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not to make money but to, in the words of Silvio Mugetti, ‘strengthen sport’ and ‘the well-being of the city’s population’. In reality, only calcio could regularly attract more than 10,000 people, as demonstrated by the Juventus-Ujpest European Cup match on 29 June 1933. A true ‘official inauguration for the calcio game’, the match attracted 20,000 spectators, that is, the attendance of derbies or big games played on Corso Marsiglia against Inter, even though the fixture was not exceptional. The Gazzetta del Popolo even remarked: ‘The crowd, partly out of curiosity and partly because of the importance of the game, welcomed Juventus’ invitation with an enthusiasm that could not have been more lively and spontaneous. (…) it is a sight to have succeeded in gathering such an imposing mass of spectators for a match that was not a meeting of national teams’.17 Yet, although it is not easy to reconstruct average attendance figures in Italian stadiums up to the 1940s, the data found in the Turin and sports press seems to show that despite the use of the Stadio Mussolini, the number of spectators attending Juventus matches remained average and rather comparable to that of its local rival Torino (Table 3.1).

Football at Stadio Mussolini The first advantage of the Stadio Mussolini was the comfort offered to spectators. According to La Gazzetta del Popolo, the stadium met the requirements of calcio, especially those concerning the maintenance of order: ‘a setting in which the spectator remains far away from the player and does not disturb him but surrounds him’.18 It is true that the height of the stands, the protective fences and the width of the athletics track helped to separate Table 3.1  Average number of spectators attending the match of serie A games in Turin 1936–1937 (10 matches) 1937–1938 (11 matches) 1939–1940 (11 matches)

17 18

Juventus

Torino

10,500 spectators 15,500 spectators 9200 spectators

14,800 spectators 17,000 spectators 10,600 spectators

 La Gazzetta del Popolo, 30 June 1933.  Ibid.

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players and supporters. In addition, underground passages allowed the athletes to access the pitch without coming into contact with the spectators. This was a far cry from the cut-throat stadiums of the early 1920s (Dietschy 1996), even if the behaviour of Juventus’ molto educata’ crowd did not require such precautions (Dietschy, 2001). For Felice Borel, this distance from the public made the games less warm and exciting than in the Corso Marsiglia stadium, where players could practically chat with the spectators at the end of the matches. It was undoubtedly a more impersonal and colder building, but also better equipped and more professional. The successful match trial of June 1933, which was attended by Edoardo Agnelli, who was exceptionally accompanied by his father Giovanni, committed both parties, the municipality and the club, to conclude an agreement for the duration of the championship. The long-­term contract was only established after a few years of transition in 1936. At that time Juventus had lost its president and patron Edoardo Agnelli, killed in a plane crash one year before, and was left with financial possibilities ‘which were, due to high expenses, extremely limited’.19 According to the agreement, Juventus undertook to play all its official games at the Mussolini Stadium (art. 2) for 12 years (art. 12) and to use its facilities only for matches, with training sessions taking place on an annexed pitch (art. 3) to which the public could not have access (art. 5). From a financial point of view, the municipality claimed the organisation of and income from the refreshment stands (art. 4) and required the club to pay a fixed sum of 10,000 lire per year plus ‘10% of the company’s heavy income exceeding 1,100,000 lire’ (art. 13). In other words, the municipality could withdraw about 100,000 lire per year from the concession granted to Juventus. These were advantageous conditions for the club, which thus had a very modern stadium without having to build it. For the city of Turin, the contract with Juventus, far from covering the cost of the construction (about 13 million lire), fulfilled one of the stadium’s purposes: to be a venue for mass sports events. As athletics only rarely fulfilled this function and the municipality incurred significant costs on these occasions, calcio became a necessity to fill the stadium. This was recognised by the vicepodestà Gloria in the preamble to the agreement: ‘The sports club FC Juventus, which for years has been a strong force in Italian football and has  ASCT, Atti del municipio di Torino, decision of 13 May 1936, § 58.

19

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also provided excellent athletes for international games, (…) has helped to bring a great many people from all parts of Italy and abroad to the stands of the magnificent Civic Stadium’.20 In short, football had retained its position, even if it had to accept the conditions of the regime. In fact, Juventus had to accept the end of the limitation on the number of discounted tickets granted to holders of the Dopolavoro and Gruppi universitari fascisti (GUF) cards, starting with the home match against Genoa on 19 November 1933. But what appeared to be a popolarissima measure heralded a strengthening of the regime’s grip on football.

 he Stadio Mussolini Versus Amateur Football T Pitches or the Contradictions of Fascist Sport Policy As previously mentioned, the Stadio Mussolini was part of the policy of building large stadiums dedicated largely to spectator sports. Was it accompanied by the construction of the Littorio stadiums for amateur footballers? This obviously raises the question of amateur football. A seemingly simple question, but one that is complicated by the regime’s initial mistrust of football. Augusto Turati, the secretary of the PNF, initially wanted to exclude calcio from the activities of the Dopolavoro, the regime’s leisure organisation. However, as the change in the name of the Unione Libera Italiana Calcio (ULIC) championships to Sezione Propaganda indicates, fascism also wanted to control amateur football. Did it work in Turin?

In the Shadow of the Professionals: The Teams of Sezione Propaganda When the work on the Mussolini stadium began, the ULIC teams had 13 playing fields installed mainly on the outskirts of Turin in November 1932, which were built by the members themselves.21 In these 20 21

 Ibid.  La Gazzetta del Popolo, 25 November 1932.

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working-­ class areas, the municipality had apparently done little to develop sports facilities. A small stadium was built in the Jérôme Napoléon Park in Borgo San Paolo in 1933. Inaugurated in May, it was intended for athletics and swimming and for the organisations of the fascist youth. As La Stampa hoped: ‘The air, the sun, the light and the rhythmic play of the muscles in the various sports exercises will make the Balilla [Fascist Youth members between 8 and 14 years old] of today the strong and courageous Soldiers of tomorrow in the service of the Duce’.22 For the rest, the podestà and the federal secretary of the PNF left it to the initiative of the societies and their members. However, it seems that the teams of the former ULIC, renamed Sezione Propaganda in 1935, experienced difficulties due to the scarcity of available land. In spite of the supports given by the press, such as a report by the leaders of the Piedmontese Sezione Propaganda to General Vaccaro, which attested to the good health of the organisation, its 156 societies and 3469 players in November 1937,23 and despite the seniority of certain amateur clubs in Turin, such as FC Taurinia, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in the second half of the 1930s,24 these associations only received formal support from the local authorities and the podestà. The Taurinia, for example, received prizes for its anniversary tournament from the federal secretary or the Podestà, while having to pay tribute during the competition to the ‘martyr’ Cesare Odone at the headquarters of the local fascist group. The AC Eridano, another small football club, was also honoured by the prefect and the federal secretary, who presented 11 sports medals in March 1937.25 Despite these honours, these clubs were not favoured by the fascist sports policy in Turin, as evidenced by the correspondence exchanged in 1939 between General Vaccaro and the prefect of Turin on the question of the football pitches used by the formations of the ‘Propaganda Section’.26 According to this letter, the question of football pitches had  La Stampa, 9 May 1933.  La Gazzetta del Popolo, 10 November 1937. 24  La Stampa, 11 September 1935. 25  La Stampa, 9 March 1937. 26  Archivio di Stato di Torino (AST), Fondo Gabinetto della Prefettura, Attrezzature, organizzazioni e manifestazioni sportive diverse, mazzo n. 230, Letter from general Vaccaro to the prefect of Turin 3 February 1939. 22 23

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already been raised a few years earlier with the former podestà, without anything changing. The solution was no less urgent because the reduced number of pitches risked to lead, in the long term, to reduce the practice of amateur football in the Piedmontese capital. In Turin, as in other large cities, complained Vaccaro, the needs of urban planning have eliminated certain areas that are very useful to the most modest categories of footballers, so that the sport practised by young people and workers has suffered greatly, to the point that the Sezione Propaganda’s games have been reduced by half. The few usable lots are used from the early hours of the morning until late in the afternoon, but they are not sufficient. In fact, the number of societies had fallen from 48  in 1932 to 35  in 1939,27 according to the list drawn up by the president of the local FIGC Board Franzoni. Moreover, fascisisation of the teams had been reinforced. While in 1932, the societies directly linked to the PNF were marginal, there were now 12 out of 35, the majority (8) dedicated to ‘martyrs’ of the cause, being the emanation of the young fascists28. If the totalitarianisation of the sports societies was well underway in the amateur sector, it had not led to any improvement in the sports facilities, as only five pitches were directly intended for them, while three others could be used from time to time by propaganda teams: the military stadium occupied by the ‘minor’ Juventus teams, the Campo Fiat and the Snia Viscosa pitch when the second team of this company club was not using it. This situation seemed particular to Turin, since at the end of the survey of available pitches, the FIGC manager in Turin, Franzoni, added: ‘N.B.: In Milan there are 34 sports grounds belonging to the Dopolavoro of companies and societies, not counting the various sports facilities belonging to the Municipality’.29 The federal protests were apparently not very effective, since Franzoni had pointed out to the prefect eight free or already equipped spaces that could have been used by the Propaganda Section, and the municipality’s Property and Public Works departments informed the podestà that four of them were part of plots rented to farmers and that  Ibid.  Ibid., documento non datato allegato a una lettera al Prefetto che elenca i campi sportivi esistenti a Torino utilizzati dalla Sezione Propaganda e dalle società affiliate durante la stagione 1938-1939. 29  Ibid., letter from the president of the board of the first zone of the FIGC to the prefect of Turin dated 21-06-1939. 27 28

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circumstances did not allow them to be used for any other purpose. ‘It is not possible to agree to remove them from agricultural use, especially at the present time, when all the activities of the nation are directed towards an effort to achieve self-sufficiency’.30 It was therefore a matter of accepting the shortage, since the only solution was to propose agreements between the neighbourhood associations and the football clubs to share the other four spaces, which were intended for recreational use. The podestà concluded: ‘In the current state of affairs, the podesteria (municipality) cannot do anything more to satisfy the aspirations of the FIGC’.31 However, football was not the only team sport to lack pitches. Rugby, the ‘official sport of the Fascist youth’, also had difficulties in finding suitable grounds. According to La Gazzetta del Popolo, the two teams still in existence in Turin on November 1939, the GUF formation and the Associazione Rugbi Torino, did not have a fixed pitch for the coming season. The GUF were using the old pitch on the Campo Juventus between the rubble of the newly demolished stands on a precarious basis, as the right could be ‘revoked at any time’.32

 eyond the Mussolini Stadium: Football B and the Totalitarian Turn Between Fascisisation and Commercialisation of Sport Until 1943, Juventus’ use of the Stadio Mussolini was part of the process of fascisisation of football in general, and the club in particular. This plan was extended at the beginning of the Second World War by the project launched by President Emilio de la Forest to transform the football club into a popular, all-sports club, offering a cheap subscription system for access to the Mussolini stadium during Juventus’ matches. During the 1930s, tickets were only sold at the match and only wealthy members of the club could benefit from regular access to the stands. In September 1940, the president of Juventus, Emilio de la Forest,  Ibid., letter from the podestà to the prefect of Turin dated 3 July 1939.  Ibid. 32  La Gazzetta del Popolo, 9 November 1939. 30 31

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announced the launch of the Juventus Universal Season Ticket. With 40 lire per year and the possibility of ‘payment in instalments up to the derisory sum of one lira per week’.33 This was an extension in wartime of the entertainment policy pursued by the fascist regime and, at the same time, a resounding offer aimed at attracting a popular audience. The initiative met with some success: by November 1940, with still the hope of 3000–4000 additional sales, more than 12,000 subscriptions had already been sold. According to La Gazzetta dello Sport, ‘it can be predicted that a total of 800 000 lires will be secured for the Juventus treasury from this form of season ticket. This constitutes a solid base for the year’.34 Obviously presenting the season ticket formula to the prefect of Turin, Emilio de la Forest used language in line with the anti-bourgeois turn taken by the fascist regime in the mid-1930s: Juventus is certain to have faithfully carried out, in its area of action, the Leader’s delivery: ‘going out to the people’. But the logic is first and foremost commercial. The local competitor, Torino, saw itself obliged to adopt the same season ticket system, at the same prices and conditions: 40 lire for the popular sectors if you were part of the Dopolavoro and up to 150 lire in the Tribuna with the reserved seat. This system was eventually adopted in the rest of Italy and became permanent after the end of the Second World War. Torino, for its part, although it used its Filadelfia stadium most often, was not immune to the intervention of fascism. It had even been the victim of political intervention when the Italian league title won in 1927 was revoked for alleged corruption. Humiliated, its president and patron, Count Enrico Marone, who was first banned for life and then amnestied because the club could not survive without him, quickly distanced himself from Torino, keeping his shares in the real estate company that owned the stadium. In the second half of the thirties, Torino was forced to embark on an early policy of training young players led by its former star Aldo Baloncieri. Thanks to its young players, the club won the 1936 Coppa Italia. The press celebrated the team of the people, made up of workers’ children who rode bicycles like their supporters and represented  AST, Gabinetto della Prefettura, mazzo n. 404, Lettera di Emilio de La Forest al prefetto di Torino, 5 November 1940. 34  La Gazzetta dello Sport, 24 October 1940. 33

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the revival of the Italian race (Dietschy 1997). The team also gained the support of the secretary of the PNF, Piero Gazzotti, who pressured the industrialists to accept the presidency (Dietschy 1997). The municipality also offered some modest subsidies to the club, which allowed it to survive before the arrival of Ferruccio Novo as president in 1939. At the beginning of the war, this small industrial boss launched a policy of expensive signings. On May 1943, the title won by Torino, the first after 1928, consecrated this policy that seemed to ignore the difficulties of war. At the end of this victorious season, an illustrated periodical, Il film del Campionato di calcio 1942-1943 noted: ‘They were all in agreement until 2.30 p.m. on 4 October 1942: critics, the public, the press, technicians, experts and fans, each one proclaiming to the four winds that the “third war championship” was born under the banner of that “Torino” which, after having been second in 1941-42, had become so strong that it had become an exaggeration’. It was right in the middle of the war that the ‘Grande Torino’ team was built, which would dominate post-war football before tragically disappearing in a plane crash, the ‘Superga air disaster’, in May 1949. In 1940 the directors of the ‘Granata’ (the club’s nickname referring to its traditional maroon colour) were initially parsimonious with the sole signing of winger Franco Ossola; a high schooler who played in the C series at Varese. In 1941, however, Juventus centre-forward Gabetto was bought for 330,000 lire and, the following year, it was the turn of the two Venezia interiors, Mazzola and Loïk, for 1,200,000 lire plus two players. In the midst of a war that was becoming increasingly disastrous for Italy, the ethical principles of fascist sport that the 1933 Littoriali had embodied were largely forgotten. It was the entertainment of footballing professionalism that was celebrated at both the Stadio Mussolini and the Stadio Filadelfia.

Conclusions Considering the conditions of construction, naming and use of the Stadio Mussolini allows us to historicise the history of football in the fascist era. It seems clear that the construction of this sports facility was intended to lay the foundations of fascism in the working-class (and largely

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anti-­fascist) areas of Turin. Similarly, the move of Juventus from its home ground in Corso Marsiglia to the Stadio Mussolini accompanied a policy of civil society takeover of sport in general and of a club founded by members of Turin’s liberal bourgeoisie that was in some sense fascised (Dietschy 1997; Agosti and De Luna 2019). However, the stadium, the masterpiece of fascist sports policy in Turin, also revealed its limitations. The money spent was at the expense of the construction of playing fields for amateur teams. And even though it was primarily intended for major fascist competitions such as the Littoriali, it actually favoured professional football, the only sporting spectacle capable of regularly attracting at least 20,000 spectators. As the fascist regime took a totalitarian turn around 1938, this contradiction tended to become more pronounced, especially at the beginning of the Second World War. On 30 May 1945, a resolution of the new municipality of Turin decided to entrust two restoration companies with ‘the removal of the inscriptions and beams of the Marathon Tower’ in the former Mussolini stadium, now called stadio civico or comunale.35 Yet, one of the main legacies of fascism that could be assumed in Turin was obviously this stadium. From the fifties onwards both Juventus and Torino played in the Stadio Comunale which withstood the construction of the ill-conceived Stadio delle Alpi for the 1990 World Cup, before being given a new lease of life by becoming an Olympic venue in 2006.

Bibliography Agosti, Aldo and Giovanni De Luna. 2019. Juventus. Storia di una passione italiana dalle origini ai nostril giorni, Milan, UTET. Bolz, Daphné.2008. Les Arènes totalitaires. Hitler, Mussolini et les jeux du stade, Paris, CNRS éditions. De Finetti, Giuseppe. 1934. Stadi. Esempi, Tendenze, Progetti, Milan, Hoepli.

 ASCT, Atti del municipio di Torino, decision of 30 May1945, verbale 20, § 85, Eliminazione di scritte e fasci della Torre di Maratona per mezzo delle ditte di ordinario mantenimento Gabino Raffaello e Sommo Fratelli. 35

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Dietschy, Paul. 1993. ‘Les matchs du Stadio Mussolini: sport, football et politique à Turin sous le fascisme’, Cahiers d’histoire, tome XXVIII, n. 2, p. 153-174. Dietschy, Paul. 1996. ‘Pugni, bastoni e rivoltelle. Violence et football dans l’Italie des années vingt et trente’, Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée, Tome 108. n° 1, p. 203-240. Dietschy, Paul. 1997. Football et société à Turin 1920-1960, PhD thesis, Lyon, université Lumière-Lyon II. Dietschy, Paul. 2001. ‘Une passion urbaine: football et identités dans la première moitié du vingtième siècle. L’exemple de Turin et de l’Italie ’, Histoire Urbaine, n°3, p. 133-148. Dietschy, Paul. 2014. ‘The 1938 World Cup: Sporting Neutrality and Geopolitics, or All-Conquering Fascism?’, in Rinke and K. Schiller (ed.), The FIFA World Cup 1930-2010. Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2014, p. 85-101. Fonzo, Erminio. 2020. Il nuovo goliardo. I Littoriali dello sport e l’atletismo universitario nella costruzione del totalitarismo fascista, Canterano, Aracne editrice. Gentile, Emilio. 1993. Il culto del littorio, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1993. Haveman, Nils. 2005. Fussball unterm Hakenkreuz: Der DFB zwischen Sport, Politik und Kommerz, Francfort, Campus Verlag. Martin, Simon. 2004. Football and Fascism. The national game under Mussolini, Oxford, Berg. Passerini, Luisa. 1984. Torino operaia e fascismo, Rome-Bari, Laterza. Re, Luciano. 1993. ‘Il razionalismo e il nuovo assetto in via Roma’, in Valerio Castronovo (ed.), Storia illustrata di Torino. Volume Settimo. Torino dal fascismo alla repubblica, Milan, Elio Sellino Editore, p. 1901-1920. Varrasi, Francesco Maria. 1997. Economia, Politica e Sport in Italia (1925-1935), Florence, FIGC/Fondazione Artemio Franchi

4 What’s in a Name? The City of Stuttgart and the Toponymical Journey of Its Football Stadium Albrecht Sonntag

Introduction On 8 July 1945, two months after the end of World War II, the US Army took over the city of Stuttgart from the French, who had previously occupied the large industrial town in the South-West of Germany (Vietzen 1972). When the soldiers searched for a suitable field for practicing their favourite sport, baseball, they found it a few miles up the river Neckar, in the Bad Cannstatt suburb: the municipal stadium built at the beginning of the 1930s. They called it spontaneously the ‘Century Stadium’. How exactly this name was chosen is no longer known. In retrospect, however, it appears the G.I.s could not have found a more symbolic one. In an almost uncanny manner, the multiple toponymical revisions of this football stadium have illustrated the ideological changes undergone by German society over almost a century.

A. Sonntag (*) ESSCA School of Management, Angers Cedex, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_4

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The following chapter retraces this toponymical journey over time, starting in the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic already undermined by nationalist undertones, of which sport was both an expression and an amplifier. The totalitarian grip on society rapidly taken by the Third Reich was reflected in the renaming of a multitude of place names, which of course also included sport infrastructure. Following the four-­ year post-war interlude of a destroyed country divided into four occupation zones and governed by the Allied Forces, the newly founded Federal Republic, understandably, took great pains to wipe out the omnipresence of Nazi symbolism in the urban landscape. Finally, the reunification of Germany in 1990 occurred at a moment when the implementation of neoliberal policies led to an increasing commodification of public space, which in turn was not without incidence on place names. The multiple changes undergone by this football stadium, both in architecture and name, thus draw a revealing picture of the impact of power shifts and political ideologies on everyday urban environment.

 political: Bringing the Sport Movement A to the City (1929–1933) In 1928 the city of Stuttgart submitted a bid to host the ‘15th German Turnfest’ scheduled for 1933. The Turnfest—literally the ‘Gymnastics Festival’—brought together, every five years, the large national movement of the Turner, which had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century as a movement of resistance (to Napoleonic oppression) and rejuvenation of the (non-existing, but strongly imagined) German nation (Pfister 2001). In vast ceremonies structured by a liturgy of mass rituals and symbols borrowed from religion (Krüger 2009), the Turnfeste not only showcased modern gymnastics, but also included elements of athletics, team games and, increasingly, para-military preparation, in a successful attempt of turning the ‘national body’ in a real, tangible experience (ibid.). Organised at first as spontaneous, regional happenings, the increasingly popular Turnfeste took a distinctly national dimension with the

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emergence of the railway. As of 1860, their size and scope required significant organisational skills and infrastructure, and the Deutsche Turnerschaft (the national federation of gymnasts) introduced a bidding process for their national top event. As an explicitly non-competitive, non-elitist festival, the Turnfest drew an impressive number of people: with a total of 650,000 visitors, among whom 120,000 active participants, the six-day Turnfest of 1933 must well be qualified as a mega-­ event (Ritter 1933). Given such numbers, the host cities not only needed a large stadium for the main events, but also vast, ideally adjacent, areas for the impressive mass choreographies which produced scenes that already prefigured the pictures of Reichsparteitag ceremonies by Leni Riefenstahl. These areas were generally referred to as Festplatzanlagen, best translated by celebration grounds, or simply ‘fairgrounds’. The creation of suitable Festplatzanlagen was thus the main commitment of the city of Stuttgart when it was awarded the event in 1929, bringing the Turnfest for the first time to the South-West of Germany. An architecture competition was launched, which was won by the reputed local professor Paul Bonatz. At the end of 1932, the stadium—still simply referred to as Festplatzanlage or Kampfbahn (the generic German word for stadium or arena)—was finished. It boasted a capacity of 40,000 spectators, of which 2500 found seats and shelter in the grandstand with its impressive self-supporting, pillarless roof of reinforced concrete (the only architectural element that could compete with similar new stadiums in Italy). All the others stood on the rather simple terraces placed on heaped up earth mounds (Hörner 2006). In direct vicinity of the stadium, a Festwiese (‘festival lawn’) of 410 x 290 m was prepared for the mass ceremonies. With a population of then 450,000 inhabitants, Stuttgart was the last major German city without a large multisport arena. The construction of a big stadium was simply a response to a need that was expressed with increasing pressure by local associations. Built during the last years of the Weimar Republic, which were badly hit by the Great Depression of 1929, the Stuttgart stadium was designed as an apolitical public space. But this changed instantly with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933 and the events that followed: the Reichstag fire on 27 February, the

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federal elections of 5 March and the infamous ‘Enabling Act’ of 23 March, which effectively gave Hitler plenary powers. Within two months, everything had changed: in the new regime, implemented in accordance with the genuinely totalitarian ideology that underpinned it, there was no such thing anymore as apolitical public space. It was only coherent that the new arena, still without a name at its official inauguration match between two ad-hoc selections of different clubs from Stuttgart and Nuremberg respectively, was quickly baptised by the new mayor, Kurt Strölin, who had been appointed in May, to make sure the grandiose Turnfest could take place in what was now the ‘Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn’.

 otalitarian: Embodying the New Ideology T (1933–1945) The Turnfest 1933 was a very fortunate timing for the new national-­ socialist government. Without having to contribute on any financial or organisational level, it could reap the symbolic benefits provided by an event that brought together all aesthetic elements of the cultural ‘nationalisation of the masses’ (Mosse 1976): a tangible, euphoric embodiment of the nation, the cult of youth and physical strength (and, implicitly, racial supremacy) and a first illustration of the militarisation of the civilian sphere (Faure 1995, Kaschuba 1995). It is little surprising that the event was successfully infiltrated by the Nazis, from the massive display of the swastika—which at the time was only a party emblem, not at all a national symbol!—to the visible incorporation of SA and SS troops in the gymnasts’ parade. The reverence for the new government party culminated in the presence and speeches of Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in front of a crowd of 500,000 on the last two days of the festival (29 and 30 July respectively). Not that the Nazis had to put any pressure on the organisers. The entire preparation period during spring 1933 had been marked by a remarkable willingness of all actors—city government, sport bodies, media—to submit themselves voluntarily and immediately to the new

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regime and its ideology, represented by a party, the NSDAP, that had only won 43.91% of the nation-wide popular vote in the March elections. The key word in this context is ‘anticipatory obedience’, an attitude of subservience motivated by a desire to please and flatter a regime which was perceived as both irresistible and, at the end of the day, compatible with the nationalistic fervour that already deeply penetrated society in general and the Turner movement in particular. As the contributors in Markwart Herzog’s recent edited volume (2016) on the Gleichschaltung1 of German football in the Third Reich have demonstrated in a series of excellent case studies, anticipatory obedience was the rule, not the exception, in clubs and federations (see also Havemann 2013, and Herzog 2021). In Stuttgart, the sycophants in the local government even topped the sport organisations in what must well be termed ‘bootlicking’. In a city where the NSDAP had obtained only 33.67% of the vote at the federal elections of 5 March (less than communists and socialists combined), 26 of 54 seats in the regional parliament (15 April) and 20 of 44 mandates in the new municipal council (27 April), everything happened as if the Nazis had won landslide majorities. Within four months, between March and the beginning of the Turnfest in July, a series of symbolic changes were implemented in record time (Leiper 1982): one of the city centre’s major thoroughfares was renamed ‘Adolf-Hitler-Straße’; the ‘Neckar-­ Mittelschule’, a secondary school named after the city’s major river, became the ‘Adolf-Hitler-Schule’; the swastika was flagged at the city hall and the regional parliament; the Nazi salute became mandatory for all civil servants; Hitler was offered a honoris causa doctorate by the Technical University (which he refused), as well as honorary citizenship of the City of Stuttgart (which he accepted). Stuttgart was, of course, not alone in excelling in ‘anticipatory obedience’. Hitler was awarded honorary citizenship by over 130 German towns, and at least six other cities renamed their main sports arena in his honour (Büdesheim, Gera, Lübeck, Rheine, Worms as well as Zabrze in today’s Poland, which at the time was called Hindenburg). But Stuttgart had the Turnfest, which provided an unequalled opportunity to  Gleichschaltung is the German term generally used to describe the enforcement of rigid standardisation or uniformisation of the political, social and cultural sphere in totalitarian regimes. 1

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‘remember that behind the contests of peaceful competition there is a deep national meaning’, as mayor Strölin put it in his inauguration speech (Deutscher Sportverlag 1933b and 1933c), expressing his wish that the name ‘Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn’ be ‘a permanent admonition and impetus for all present and future generations’ in serving ‘exclusively the regeneration and strengthening of our people, and its mental and moral reconstruction’. During the Turnfest, a daily illustrated broadsheet paper of 16 pages was published between 22 and 30 July (Deutscher Sportverlag 1933a). It provides revealing insight into the speed with which the Gleichschaltung process was engaged and the extent to which nationalist vocabulary and semantics had already taken hold of the gymnasts’ movement. The newly appointed Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten, to quote but one example, made it very clear that the final vocation of the ‘fabulous, finest human material that we have in the German Turnerschaft’ was not ‘top performance in the system of sport records, but engagement in combat’ (Deutscher Sportverlag 1933d). Overall, the Turnfest in and around the brand-new Adolf-Hitler-­ Kampfbahn was an overwhelming success. Critical voices, as could be expected from the Left, were drowned in the overall enthusiasm about the perfect organisation of this mega-event, which was also praised by foreign visitors (Streit 1933). According to a regional party bulletin called NS-Kurier, the impact of the Turnfest, especially the impressive mass choreographies, on the Nazi leaders was such that the decision was immediately taken to transform and extend the Luitpoldhain area in Nuremberg into what was to become a gigantic rally ground for the yearly party congress (Murr 1933). According to a well-documented recent study by Ansbert Baumann (2022), it is Hitler’s personal experience in attending the Turnfest that led him, in October 1933, to changing the initial plans for the 1936 Olympics and order the design of an entirely new stadium in Berlin. Within a few weeks, what had been built under a generic name and for a seemingly apolitical purpose all of a sudden became a highly politicised public space, identified with the beginning of a new era. Twelve years later, as everywhere in Germany’s bombed cities, one of the first items on the ‘denazification’ programme carried out by the occupying forces was

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to purge urban space of the omnipresent symbols of the regime, laying great emphasis to rename all the streets, squares and buildings that had honoured Nazi dignitaries. The Stuttgart stadium quickly and discreetly became the generic ‘Kampfbahn’ again, before the American soldiers eventually reclaimed it for their baseball practice, very fittingly as we know now, as the ‘Century Stadium’.2

Innocuous: Shrouding the Past (1949–1993) Denazification is generally referred to as a process conducted throughout the immediate post-war years, but it was in fact pursued by the Federal Republic of Germany after its creation in 1949, way into the twenty-first century. Both the authorities and, increasingly, citizen initiatives, have never ceased to request the renaming of certain streets or buildings after embarrassing revelations on the individual thus honoured. This was part of what has been known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the (very German) word for ‘coming to terms with the nation’s past’. One of the main objectives of the young West German state was to ‘brand’ Germany as a reliable partner in the Cold War configuration for the defence of liberal democracy, but at the same time as an inoffensive, harmless, bland nation that had eagerly learnt the lessons from his recent history and foresworn all hegemonic instincts. As a result, Germans became very reluctant to display or refer to national symbols. As a matter of fact, even the use of the adjective ‘national’ was reduced to its strict minimum (Sonntag 1997). In this context, sport—and above all, football—became even more important for German society, not only as a tolerated outlet for complicated feelings of belonging, but also as an avenue for symbolic recognition of the ‘new’ Germany by the international community. Being awarded the organisation of global mega-sport events, like the Munich Olympics of 1972 (Schiller and Young 2010) or the 1974 World Cup

 By this time, the stadium’s original architect, Paul Bonatz, had returned from his exile in Turkey, where he had emigrated in 1940, and participated in the reconstruction of his native city. 2

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(Schiller 2014), was perceived as an important milestone in the country’s ‘normalisation’ process. What sport was to avoid by all means, however, was to refer in any way to its instrumentalisation under the Nazi regime and to its massive nationalisation prior to the Third Reich. This included of course also place names of major venues. The most consensual and innocuous-­ sounding names possible were those linked to the topography (rivers, landscapes, regions), which was also the option taken by the city of Stuttgart in renaming its stadium ‘Neckarstadion’, a name that was adopted as early as March 1946 (Baumann 2022), less than a year after the spontaneous, temporary renaming by the American liberators mentioned in the opening paragraph of this chapter. Other typical and well-­ known examples are the ‘Weserstadion’ in Bremen and the ‘Rheinstadion’ in Düsseldorf (both also named after the local river), the ‘Westfalenstadion’ in Dortmund (built only in 1974 and whose name stood for the entire region) or the ‘Betzenberg’ and ‘Bökelberg’ hills in Kaiserslautern and Mönchengladbach respectively. The Stuttgart arena kept its new name over more than four decades, during which it remained the home turf to the local club, VfB Stuttgart, but also hosted a variety of major international events (two European Cup finals in 1959 and 1988 respectively, a hand-full of matches of the 1974 World Cup, two fixtures of Euro 1988, as well as a series of international track-and-field events, like the 1986 European Athletics Championships). For each of these milestones, the stadium underwent significant renovation works, the most important of which were carried out prior to the 1974 World Cup. The capacity was brought to 70,000—with slight variations depending on different configurations. It deserves to be highlighted that each of the renovation and modernisation waves were financed by public funds and respectful of the initial function of a multisport stadium with a vocation to welcome athletics competitions. When Stuttgart was awarded the fourth IAAF World Championships in Athletics 1993, another major refurbishment was required. In preparation of this mega-event the Neckarstadion was given an elegant, technically pioneering white membrane roof, which has become its landmark feature. And a new name.

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 iscreet: Corporate Renaming in All But … D Name (1993–2008) The 1993 World Championships took place in a stadium that had just been renamed ‘Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion’, in honour of one of the two inventors of the automobile, who had built his first vehicle in the same Bad Cannstatt suburb where the stadium is located. The renaming obviously reflects the influence of the huge multinational company Daimler-­ Benz,3 whose headquarters are found in the direct vicinity of the stadium itself. Unsurprisingly, the street that leads to the factory gates and provides the stadium’s (and the club’s) postal address is actually Mercedes-Straße. In the early 1990s, when the Stuttgart stadium was modernised for the World Championships, neoliberal economic politics as promoted and implemented by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations had also become mainstream in Germany under the right-wing Kohl government. Private funding for the refurbishment of public infrastructure was sought for, and it was found next door. At the same time, selling the naming rights altogether was still a taboo: corporate brand names for football arenas, already very frequent in the United States (Crompton and Howard 2003), were inexistent in Germany at that time. Even the stadium in Leverkusen, initially built and owned by Bayer, the well-known chemicals and pharmaceuticals company, was called ‘Ulrich-Haberland-­ Stadion’ after a former chairman of the group. It was only in the 2000s that it became the BayArena. The name of Gottlieb Daimler thus can be seen as a compromise: paying tribute to the figure of the historical local entrepreneur could be perceived as an act of honouring the city’s heritage, while unmistakeably referring to a large contemporary corporate player (and its financial contribution). To what extent both the authorities and the company feared this transaction would meet with public disapproval became visible in the more than awkward communication strategy. It was made public that  Daimler-Benz was the traditional name of the corporation founded in 1926, before it became Daimler-Chrysler until 2007 and simply Daimler as of 2007. In 2022 the company was renamed Mercedes-Benz Group, which almost ironically finally aligns the company’s name on the name of the stadium, rather than the other way round. 3

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Daimler-Benz had co-financed the modernisation works with (a quite meagre) 11 million D-Mark (roughly five million Euros), but on an unconditional basis, without going so far as to requiring a renaming of the stadium. As later revealed by the local press, however, the city had concluded a secret contract with Daimler-Benz, which conceded the name ‘Gottlieb-­ Daimler-­Stadion’ for an unlimited duration and granted the company the right to approve or refuse any further renaming in the future. In retrospect, this was considered an exceptional, if not scandalously lopsided, bargain, made possible by the lack of experience (and dilettantism) in the city administration. As Gerd Hoffmann, in charge of sport sponsoring at Daimler-Benz (then temporarily named Daimler-Chrysler), pointed out in 2002, ‘it would no longer be possible nowadays to buy the naming rights in one go and have them forever and a day: today, this would be limited in time and the price would be tenfold’ (Interview with the author). Likewise, the former public relations director of Daimler-Benz, Matthias Kleinert, declared himself, in an interview in 2006, ‘still very satisfied to have been the very first to settle such an impactful deal’ (Hörner 2006, p.33). In 2006, when a total of six World Cup matches were played at Stuttgart, the stadium was allowed to keep its name—officially referring to a historical person, not a corporate partner—during the competition despite FIFA’s draconian rules against ‘ambush marketing’ and the protests of its exclusive partner Hyundai. The Korean car manufacturer thus saw the exhibition of its latest models squeezed into a small patch of cement cornered by the towering Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion, the train station of the same name, and the impressive entrance to the Daimler-­ Benz headquarters.

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 ommodified: The Brand Takes Over C (Since 2008) For a few years, Daimler’s clever deal was an exception in Germany, but by the time of the 2006 World Cup, corporate stadium naming had become the rule. The vast majority of all major Bundesliga arenas had their name sold, for a more or less limited time span, to a corporate partner. There was little public debate over the fact that most of these buildings were actually owned by the municipalities, while the revenues from the naming rights went straight into the pocket of the local clubs. In some cases, the corporate partners had already been long-standing sponsors with strong local roots, such as the Signal-Iduna insurance company in Dortmund, the Commerzbank in Frankfurt or the Rhein-Energie group in Cologne. The most coherent long-term deal was done between the Allianz insurance group in Munich, for a stadium entirely built and owned by the club. In addition to buying the naming rights for 6 million Euros per year, Allianz also holds 8.33% of the FC Bayern Munich (which it purchased for 110 million Euros). Since 1926, when the famous chewing gum industrialist William Wrigley Jr. baptised the ground of the Chicago Cubs (which he owned) the ‘Wrigley Field’ (Hollis 2008), the history of facility naming rights in the United States or the United Kingdom has clearly shown that public reaction to corporate renaming of well-established venues has often been problematic. Football supporters are a very conservative crowd (Ranc 2012) and their strong emotional attachment to the places linked to their club’s history has often been referred to as ‘topophilia’ (most notably by Bale 1994). Corporate names are best accepted (and thus most valuable to the sponsor) when a club moves to a newly built venue, ideally in close geographical proximity with the old stadium. Arsenal’s careful move from Highbury to what is now fully established as ‘the Emirates’ is often considered a particularly successful model case study (Hollis 2008), despite the absence of a local connection between the city and its corporate partner. In Stuttgart, the major refurbishing in 1993 had served as pretext for renaming the stadium, and only fifteen years later, another occasion arose

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with the (highly contested) decision by the city council, following the persistent lobbying of the home club, to transform the venue into a contemporary, ‘atmospheric’, football arena. The aim was to enhance the place’s commercialisation potential for the club and thus increase match-­ day revenues. But the price to pay was to put an (irreversible) end to the stadium’s long tradition as major international athletics venue  (Kaiser 2006), removing the running tracks and lowering the pitch. This major architectural challenge required, of course, commensurate financial means, and the city turned again to Daimler-Benz for a significant contribution. The company seized the opportunity in renewing the naming rights deal for 30 years, but this time giving preference to its flagship brand—Mercedes-Benz—rather than the historical figure of its founder. As it turned out, they made yet another bargain: the creation of the new ‘Mercedes-Benz-Arena’ cost them only 20 million Euros (while the city’s contribution to the rebuilding works amounted to 27 million).4 At the official inauguration on 5 August 2011, the company sponsored an 8-page supplement in both local newspapers, proudly introducing Mercedes-Benz as ‘official supporter of unforgettable moments’. One of these truly ‘unforgettable moments’ turned out to be, only five years later, an unforeseen relegation of VfB Stuttgart into the second division of the Bundesliga. But despite this ironical twist of fate, public buy­in of the new name was rather unproblematic (which is not surprising in an urban area where Daimler-Benz provides work to tens of thousands of people and where the famous three-pronged star trademark proudly hails from the main tower of the city’s train station). As might be expected, though, a significant group of die-hard supporters were unhappy with the corporate renaming: in an ad-hoc online survey among several hundreds of fan club members in 2009, 38% declared themselves ‘opposed’ to the appellation ‘Mercedes-Benz-Arena’. At the same time, almost as many (37%) agreed with the statement ‘I accept the new name, because the corporate partner has its roots here, too’, while 16% even went so far as to ‘approve it’, since the club would ‘benefit from the association with  It is worth noting that Daimler-Benz has been more generous with the city of Atlanta, host to the company’s North American headquarters. The naming rights of the brand-new ‘Mercedes-Benz-­ Stadium’, inaugurated in 2017, reportedly amounted to US $324 million, a sum which, for a period of 27 years, corresponds to US $12 million per year. 4

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such a prestigious brand’. Interestingly, only 13% actually used the official name when ‘spontaneously referring’ to the stadium. 40% used either the previous name ‘Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion’ or the shortcut ‘Daimler-­ Stadion’, while 38.5% were still stubbornly clinging to the good old ‘Neckarstadion’ (all figures from a flash survey conducted by the author). While this online enquiry did not allow for an analysis of the results according to age group, it is a safe bet to assume that the perception of the successive place names is closely linked to the period of socialisation as supporter of the VfB Stuttgart. Over time, the reference to the ‘Mercedes-Benz-Arena’ is likely to increase, thus vindicating the corporate renaming strategy.

Conclusions Is it exaggerated to consider this final move from an appellation closely linked to local industrial heritage to a simple brand name, however prestigious it may be, as the ultimate phase of commodification of what remains a public infrastructure owned by a city and managed by a club? Probably not. It is perfectly justified to consider the toponymical history of this football stadium an emblematic tale of how the neoliberal, market-oriented redefinition and discourse of urban management and the ‘public good’ has been interiorised by all actors (Kowalska 2017). Since the 1990s, all successive decisions on the use, architecture and name of the football stadium—in other words: the very identity of a well-­ established, clearly identified public space—have been subject to purely business-oriented motivations. On the surface, the story of the Stuttgart football stadium is an illustration of contemporary football, a case study of seemingly irresistible corporate hijacking of a football heritage site of memory and the positive community emotions that are associated with it. On a deeper level, it is characteristic for the relations between the public and the private sector in the neoliberal environment of the twenty-first century: as the different deals between the city, the club and the corporate partner suggest, the economic costs of the successive changes have been, for the largest part, socialised, while the profits are entirely privatised to the benefit of a professional football club and a multinational company.

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Finally, within the framework of sports, it is a concrete demonstration of football’s tendency to squash all other sports under its financial weight, whatever the memories of the place thus monopolised. On the other hand, the story of this football stadium may also be regarded as a somewhat reassuring journey towards the sheer triviality of an era that is characterised by greedy commercialisation and corporate occupation of every available inch of public space. In 1933, a huge enthusiastic public full-heartedly approved the nationalistic instrumentalisation of sport by an authoritarian, militaristic government that was about to impose its totalitarian grip on society, incarnated in the naming of the stadium in honour of a political leader. In November 1950, when Switzerland accepted to play the first international ‘friendly’ with the new West Germany, an incredible 115,000 spectators forced their entry into the recently renamed ‘Neckarstadion’, ignoring all security concerns, dangerously overcrowding the stands and literally sitting along the touchlines. Such was the hunger for normality, the desire to see football put a symbolic end to isolation and embody a (humble) new beginning. These were moments, where the stadium was host to events with disproportionately high stakes of symbolic and political nature. Today, it hosts events that are staged by the entertainment business; and the banality of the profit-making is in sharp contrast to what was at stake when sport and football were not yet commodified. On the long journey from the Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn to Mercedes-­ Benz-­Arena, the old stadium has undergone a process of banalisation, which is well reflected in its successive names. All things considered, this may not be the worst of destinies.

Bibliography Bale, John (1994=. Landscapes of Modern Sport, Leicester, University of Leicester Press. Baumann, Ansbert (2022). ‘Stuttgart ist viel schöner als Berlin!’ Das Stuttgarter Neckarstadion  – ein Inszenierungsort im Wandel der Zeit, in: Hüser, D., Dietschy, P; & Didion, P. (eds) ‘Arènes du sport – Cultures du sport – Mondes

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du sport. Perspectives franco-allemandes et européennes dans le ‘long’ XXe siècle. Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag, p. 41-62. Crompton, J.L. and Howard, D.R. (2003). The American experience with facility naming rights: opportunities for English professional football teams, Managing Leisure, Vol. 8, p. 212-226. Deutscher Sportverlag. 1933a. Turnfest-Illustrierte, No. 1, 23 July 1933. Deutscher Sportverlag. 1933b. Turnfest-Illustrierte, No. 2, 25 July 1933. Deutscher Sportverlag. 1933c. Turnfest-Illustrierte, No. 6, 29 July 1933. Deutscher Sportverlag. 1933d. Turnfest-Illustrierte, No. 7, 30 July 1933. Faure, J.-M. 1995. Nationalstaaten und Sport, in: François, E., Siegrist, H., & Vogel, J. (eds.) Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 321-341. Havemann, N. 2013. Samstags um halb vier. Munich: Siedler, 2013. Herzog, M. (ed). 2016. Die ‘Gleichschaltung’ des Fußballsports im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Herzog, M. 2021. FC Bayern Munich as a ‘victim’ of National Socialism? Construction and critique of a ‘heroic myth’, Sport in History, 41(1), 131-152. Hörner, G. (2006). Auf Ballhöhe. Zukunft, Gegenwart, Vergangenheit. Gottlieb-­ Daimler-­Stadion Stuttgart. Filderstadt: Markstein. Hollis, S. 2008. Stadium naming rights – A guided tour, Journal of Sponsorship, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 388-94. Kaiser U. 2006. Als die Königlichen noch mitapplaudierten, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 13 January 2006. Kaschuba, W. 1995. Die Nation als Körper. Zur politischen Konstruktion ‘nationaler’ Alltagswelt, in: François, E., Siegrist, H., & Vogel, J. (eds.) Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, p. 291-299. Kowalska, Malgorzata. 2017. Urban Politics of a Sporting Mega-Event. Legitimacy and Legacy of Euro 2012  in Anthropological Perspective. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Krüger, M. 2009. Turnfeste als politische Massenrituale des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Krüger, M. (ed) Der Deutsche Sport auf dem Weg in die Moderne. Carl Diem und seine Zeit, Münster, 75-91. Leiper, K. (ed). 1982. Stadtchronik Stuttgart 1933–1945. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Mosse, George L. 1976. The nationalization of the masses. New  York: Howard Fertig. Murr, W. 1933. NS-Kurier, No. 176, 31 July 1933.

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Pfister, Gertrud. 2001. ‘Frisch, fromm, fröhlich, frei’, in: François, E. and Schulze H. (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte II, Munich: Beck, p. 202-219. Ranc, David. 2012. Foreign Players and Football Supporters: The Old Firm, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ritter, A. 1933. Von 1860 bis 1933, in: Deutscher Sportverlag, Turnfest-­ Illustrierte, No. 4, 27 July 1933. Schiller, Kay. 2014. WM 74: Als der Fußball modern wurde. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag. Schiller, Kay. and Young, C. 2010. The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sonntag, Albrecht. 1997. Le football, symbole des vertus allemandes, Le Monde diplomatique, novembre, p. 29. Streit, W. K. 1933. The German Turnfest at Stuttgart, The Journal of Health and Physical Education, Vol. 4 Issue 10, p. 11-57. Vietzen, H. 1972. Stadtchronik Stuttgart 1945-1948, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett-Verlag.

5 Political Emotions in the Post-War Stadium: A Franco-German Perspective on the 1950s and Early 1960s Philipp Didion

Introduction The instrumentalisation and channelling of emotions in football stadiums for the purpose of mental mobilisation and “nationalization of the masses” (Mosse 1975) have been and continue to be a subject of historiographical studies on sport. Several examples of this can be seen in the Franco-German international matches in the inter-war period (Barreaud and Colzy 1994, pp. 116–119; Da Rocha Carneiro 2022, pp. 153–163; Dietschy 2020, pp. 36–38; Eggers 2001, pp. 109–113; Grün and Terret 2011). In such contexts, stadiums and football grounds can be described as emotional spaces that are politically charged. They incite, amplify and channel emotions (Gebauer and Rücker 2014, p. 45). However, sports arenas can become not only symbolic battlefields for the enactment of

P. Didion (*) Chair of Contemporary European History, Saarland University / Centre Lucien Febvre, University of Franche-Comté, Saarbrücken / Besançon, Germany / France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_5

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conflicts (e.g. Hüser 2017), but also spaces where rapprochement between states is negotiated. In the following, this dimension will be analysed in more detail by looking at Franco-German football matches in the 1950s and early 1960s (see  Didion 2019, 2021, 2022). In some of these matches, politics attempted to use the emotions associated with the games for purposes of cautious rapprochement and reconciliation. The success of these attempts depended on various factors, which will be examined in more detail in this chapter: What role did emotions generally play in these matches? In what ways did political authorities try to influence the emotions of the crowds and the players? Why did such attempts to instrumentalise emotions fail or succeed? How can the impact of the West German-French post-war encounters in the two countries be assessed? The following examples are based on the hypothesis that the spread of certain emotions—under certain conditions—can promote political decisions.

“ Don’t Forget That the Franco-German Friendship Is Well Established”—The 1962 International Friendly in Stuttgart The fifth post-war encounter between the two national teams of France and West Germany on 24 October 1962  in Stuttgart’s Neckarstadion took place under different political conditions than the previous matches between 1952 and 1958. Since the mid-1950s, more highly charged issues had moved into the political spotlight—the enormous tension between East and West generated by the Cold War, in particular the significance of the Berlin Wall, and more directly the Cuban Missile Crisis in the second half of October 1962—and begun to increasingly eclipse the Franco-German rapprochement process.1 This was also visible in football: matches against teams from the Eastern bloc—such as against the Soviet Union in Moscow in 1955 (Grimm 2015)—now attained a similar degree of explosiveness as the Franco-German games of the early 1950s (see below).

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On a bilateral scale, after the failure of the so-called Fouchet Plans, that is, the draft treaties for the creation of a European Political Union with the six founding member states of the European Economic Community (EEC), Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle again considered stronger Franco-German cooperation on a political level in April 1962. The conclusion of a protocol of mutual support (the later Elysée Treaty) as a declaration of intent for stronger political cooperation in foreign, defence, education and youth policy was already on the agenda. To mentally prepare the populations on both sides of the border for the signing of this Franco-German protocol, a “phase of official symbolic politics”2 (Defrance and Pfeil 2011, p. 110) had already been launched by the first state visit of Federal President Heinrich Lübke in June 1961 (Morsey 1996, pp.  376–378). In the “Franco-German summer” (Baumann 2002, pp. 31–40; Schwarz 1983, pp. 254–261) of 1962, two further state visits followed: Konrad Adenauer went to France in July, where he and Charles de Gaulle took part in a peace mass in Reims Cathedral, in turn, the French president came to the Federal Republic at the beginning of September. During this trip, De Gaulle also visited Stuttgart, the upcoming venue for the football duel not far from the border. This symbolic policy also contributed to a gradual change in the public opinion within the two societies.3 Hans-Peter Schwarz sums up: Never before and never since in the history of the Federal Republic has the power of historical memory and images been used so confidently to convince the public of a fundamental orientation in foreign policy. […] Even sceptical observers noted that the Franco-German relationship in the summer of 1962 showed all the signs of a love affair. (Schwarz 1983, p. 259)

This “Franco-German summer” was extended in October 1962  in Stuttgart’s Neckarstadion. The international match was to be staged as a major symbolic act of Franco-German friendship comparable to the state visits. In other words: the positive emotions associated with a football match were to be transferred to the Franco-German relationship. This instrumentalisation of football was most clearly expressed in the presence of Heinrich Lübke in Stuttgart. This was only the second visit of a Federal

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president to a match of the West German national football team (previously Theodor Heuß had watched a match between the Federal Republic and Austria in 1953). The idea of inviting the Federal president to this encounter came from Willi Daume, president of the German Sports Confederation, who advised Lübke in mid-September 1962: “I believe that at the present time this would be a politically highly remarkable gesture […] which would have a very exceptional echo in Germany, but also and especially in France” (BArch, B 122/5246, 1962a). Simultaneously—and without consultation—Erich Brodbeck, an editor and “jack-of-all-trades” from Stuttgart, also promoted the participation of a high-ranking politician at the game (StAS, 19/1/3296, 1962a). Before the match, the sports newspapers on both sides of the border tried to get their readers in the mood for this “international match between friends” (N.N. 1962a, p. 5).4 On the one hand, they referred to the special importance of Stuttgart for Franco-German reconciliation and on the other hand to the previous mutual state visits: Stuttgart’s city fathers and those responsible at the Western German Football Association are expecting a packed stadium. On the one hand, because Germany and France have played very well recently (Zagreb and Sheffield) and, on the other hand, because the ties between Stuttgart and France have always been particularly cordial and intensive. Demonstrations of a close friendship between the Federal Republic and France are seen in the partnership between Stuttgart and Strasbourg, the meetings of the German and French city mayors chaired by Lord Mayor Dr Klett, the Franco-German week that has been organised in Stuttgart for years, and most recently De Gaulle’s visit to Stuttgart. (N.N. 1962a, p. 5) And since General de Gaulle’s visit, everything that comes from France has enjoyed considerable interest here [in the Federal Republic]. (Ferran 1962a, p. 6)

After the Franco-German Week in May, the announcement of the partnership between Stuttgart and Strasbourg (see Riederer 2022) and de Gaulle’s state visit in September, Stuttgart’s Lord Mayor Arnulf Klett described the international match as “the sporting highlight of 1962 and

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at the same time [as] the conclusion of the events in our state capital to strengthen the friendly ties with France” (StAS, 167/2/12, 1962). The French team and its official delegation arrived in Stuttgart two days before the match by flight and stayed in Rotenberg (a district of Stuttgart) at the Hotel Böhringer, which was owned by the Francophile rally driver Eugen Böhringer and his family. Immediately before the match, the officials were received by Stuttgart’s Lord Mayor Arnulf Klett. The latter called for a match that would be “fair and cordial and that it should give the popular sport football recognition and further prestige” (StAS, 167/2/12, 1962). Presumably, both the French and German teams had also been made aware of the importance of the match by the officials. Such pre-match speeches—accompanied by appeals to fair play—were commonplace at Franco-German football matches in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially at matches with large numbers of spectators. In this way, political actors, but also officials, wanted to exert a preventive influence on the players and avoid the emergence of so-called shifting moments. This is because certain incidents on the pitch (foul plays, disputed referee decisions, etc.) could and still can shift spectators’ and players’ mood during matches, culminating in “heat-of-the-moment violence” (Vamplew 1980, p. 11)—here, in contrast to Wray Vamplew, violence is understood primarily as verbal violence (booing, verbal sparring, etc.). The actual international match day followed a strict protocol marked by Franco-German friendship (BArch, B 122/5246, 1962b). Present at the Neckarstadion were the French Ambassador in Bonn Roland de Margerie, the Ministerialdirigent responsible for sport in the Federal Ministry of the Interior Cornelius von Hovora, the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg and later Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, his deputy Minister of Justice Wolfgang Haußmann, the Lord Mayor of Stuttgart Arnulf Klett and the French General Consul in Stuttgart Robert Faure. Apart from the match itself, which ended 2-2, other highlights of the event were the welcoming of the two teams by Heinrich Lübke and the festive banquet in Stuttgart’s Liederhalle in the evening. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung gave a positive summary: “The international match between Germany and France, which was also attended by Federal President Dr Lübke, has become an honourable demonstration of Franco-German friendship” (N.N. 1962b, p. 9). At the

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same time other media echoed this coverage. The Sport-Magazin even noted that “the Marseillaise has rarely been played with such sincere Franco-German feelings of friendship” (Dirschner 1962, p.  11). Der Spiegel linked the match to the Cuban Missile Crisis and asserted: “Of all the major West German cities, Stuttgart was the least affected by war worries: the international football match between Germany and France […] overshadowed the fear caused by the Cuban Crisis” (N.N. 1962d, p.  26). And in the Sport-Magazin, Heinz Häupler also referred to the global political context, in which he placed the Franco-German friendship: Despite the highly explosive world political situation, Federal President Heinrich Lübke had come to the Neckar Stadium. A presidential opinion on the game is clearly of great interest. But the hundreds(!) of blue-­ uniformed policemen […] did not let the journalist approach the West German head of state, who by the way had greeted and seen off the visiting players and officials in French, for a short conversation. A pushing wave of the wedged crowd nevertheless carried me towards the president, who said that it had been an interesting and exciting game and that the ‘2:2 split’ was in accordance with the harmony that currently exists between France and Germany. Shared joy, shared sorrow. (Häupler 1962, p. 12)

The presence of the Federal president was similarly received in France: L’Équipe emphasised that this was an indication of the political importance that the Federal Republic attached to this football match (Ferran 1962b, p. 6). According to France Football, Lübke had said to the players before the match: “Today politics do not matter. Don’t forget that the Franco-German friendship is well established” (N.N. 1962c, p. 3). From these descriptions coming from both countries, the political instrumentalisation can be clearly identified. The international match was obviously put in the service of Franco-German “harmony”. At the same time, however, policymakers tried to dismiss any suspicion of deliberate political interference that would have violated the principle of an autonomous sport. In line with the repeatedly emphasised lessons allegedly learned from the massive political instrumentalisation of sport by the Nazi regime, the apolitical character of sport was thus to be underlined. This is particularly evident in Heinrich Lübke’s statements: on the one hand, the

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Federal president emphasised that politics did not play a role during this event (see above); on the other hand, he openly expressed his wish “that the game may contribute to the further solidarity between the two nations” (StAS, 19/1/3296, 1962b). Now what was the impact of this encounter in the two countries? All in all, the match became the “international match between friends” that was so much heralded in advance by the media and the politicians. At least the 75,000 spectators in the stadium—but also those who followed the encounter in front of a television or a radio5—seemed ready for such an event after the intensified rapprochement during the summer of 1962. However, this statement must be put into perspective somewhat given the small number of French spectators in the sports arena (about 4000 to 5000 civilians and military personnel). The French who did attend the match, whoever, felt extremely comfortable in Stuttgart. This is expressed, for example, in a travel report by Maryse Dufaux, one of the first female sports journalists in France (Dufaux 1962, p. 27). To sum up, it can be stated that the political actors were able to integrate the international match as part of their symbolic policy in preparation of a protocol of mutual support without the people present in the stadium expressing any protest. Although the statements are almost exclusively based on experiences and impressions conveyed by the media, it can nevertheless be concluded that the international match had a mediating effect and that the match as an “intercultural interaction […] also [had] a long-term effect which helped to foster better mutual understanding” (Sonntag 1998, p. 247). On the one hand, this assessment is based on the fact that the atmosphere during the match did not “shift” at any time; the drawn result of the match may also have contributed to this. On the other hand, this outcome was not surprising given the previously mostly untroubled state visits of De Gaulle and Adenauer. Nils Havemann has pointed out that “sport is only able to foster the permanent identification of the masses with a community or with a state entity if the polity offers further reasons for identification with it beyond [a single] match” (Havemann 2007, p. 402). This attempt to instrumentalise the Stuttgart international match, which was supported by the media, was successful because it took place in the context of the state visits and other measures to foster mutual understanding during a phase of intensified

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Franco-German rapprochement. The spectators were thus already mentally prepared for such symbolic acts and their emotions could be channelled into the desired direction—this was also helped by the favourable outcome of the encounter.

“ How Many of Those Misadventures Have Already Damaged Our Prestige?”—Incidents at Club Matches in the Early 1950s In the early 1950s, the atmosphere was quite different. The everyday life was often marked by painful memories of war and occupation. It was therefore much more difficult for politicians and governing bodies involved to channel emotions and organise “matches between friends”, especially at the club level. In the run-up to the first match between two teams from the top-tier of the two countries, which took place on 30 October 1949 between 1. FC Kaiserslautern and AS Saint-Étienne at the Betzenberg stadium in the Palatinate (see Didion 2022, pp. 140–143), the French authorities in the Federal Republic were concerned about how to organise the resumption of matches between high-level teams. The principles formulated at this time were to keep their relevance for future encounters: […] it is important that the French team playing in Germany is excellent and, if possible, slightly better than the German team […]. A crushing defeat [of the French team] would have devastating consequences. […] In order to prevent these sporting encounters, which must be seen from the perspective of French politics and Franco-German relations, from assuming a commercial character, […] it is absolutely necessary that the financial issues of these matches are not settled between the clubs, but by an authority such as the Youth and Sports Bureau or the French Football Federation. (AD, ZFO, 1 AC/421/2, 1949)

In the period that followed, two types of matches became real challenges for the Franco-German football relations: on the one hand, matches that “shifted” due to diverse incidents and in which emotions

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ran high; on the other hand, matches in which the French teams were defeated heavily, which a lot of people in France perceived as an insult to their national pride. In the following, one example for each type will be used to show that attempts to instrumentalise emotions in the stadium in the sense of a Franco-German rapprochement policy could also desperately fail. Already during the third big match, when Toulouse FC played against Phoenix Ludwigshafen on the secondary pitch of the Südweststadion in Ludwigshafen, not everything went as expected. The encounter developed into a hard-fought, at times unfairly played match, which was attended by only about 7000 spectators. During the match, there were several incidents of unsportsmanlike acts, especially by Toulouse players: for example, the Toulouse half-forward got physical with his opponent and with the referee (AD, ZFO, 1 AC/421/4, 1950). After a long period of dominance by the French team during the final phase of the game, with the score at 3-3 in the last minute, the Ludwigshafen team took a corner kick, and the Toulouse goalkeeper Abderrahman Ibrir was hapless to send the ball into his own goal. The final score of 4-3 for Ludwigshafen caused the guests great frustration. After the end of the game, the situation escalated: reports in the local press and eyewitness accounts obtained later by the occupation administration agreed that the French players had refused to give the Sportgruß6 and had thrown sand and dirt at the referee. Finally, the guests had insulted the Palatinate players in the dressing room with expressions such as “dirty boches” (a defamatory designation for Germans) and “Nazis” (AD, ZFO, 1 AC/421/4. n.d.; N.N. 1950a). Soon after, the negative effects of the match and the media coverage also brought the French occupation administration on the map. They tried to prevent negative consequences of this heated match: on the one hand by exerting pressure on the press and on the other hand by insisting that French teams should be better controlled in future at their matches in the Federal Republic by imposing stricter guidelines. The staff of the cultural department of the French High Commission also complained to the French Football Federation. The protest was discussed by the Executive Board of the Federation on 27 February (FFFM 1950a). After a detailed examination, the Board ultimately decided that the allegations against Toulouse had been disproportionately inflated (FFFM 1950b),

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which was in turn clearly at odds with the actions of the French authorities in Germany. However, as they did not investigate further, the “Ludwigshafen-Toulouse case” was closed and had no consequences—at least for the French club. So, while the French High Commission focused on intervention to minimise damage and on prevention regarding future matches, the French federation was unimpressed and came to the defence of Toulouse FC. Overall, it can be concluded that the match at least did not contribute to further rapprochement between France and the Federal Republic. Both the intervention of the authorities and the low and only regional media coverage probably led to the fact that the encounter did not have any lasting negative consequences. For the French representatives, however, the escalation of the game after the end of the match had caused great concern. Their initiatives of official control of emotions before and after the event demonstrate that Franco-German football encounters after the war were still far from being an everyday sporting practice. The attempt to appeal to the fairness of the players and to prepare the spectators to keep their emotions under control was a complete failure. It seems that positive emotions cannot be produced on command and instrumentalised, or only under certain conditions. The second type of matches which became real challenges for the Franco-German football relations can be exemplified by an encounter that also took place in Stuttgart. At the beginning of June 1950, local politicians tried to use sport to underpin the efforts to reconcile the two countries at the negotiating table. From 30 May to 4 June, the third Conference of French and German Mayors took place in Stuttgart and thus for the first time on German ground. This initiative, which was subsequently renamed International Union of Mayors for Franco-German Understanding, was the idea of the Swiss writer Eugen Wyler and the president of the Bernese Writers’ Association Hans Zbinden. In the sense of a “bottom up” process of rapprochement of civil societies, the cities were to take on a mediating function at the municipal level through regular exchanges and thus contribute to Franco-German rapprochement (for more details see Bautz 2002, pp. 47–69; Engelhardt 1981, pp. 33–43; Schäfer 2013). This conference was accompanied by the first

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Franco-German Week in Stuttgart, which offered a rich cultural programme, including sporting events. In addition to four tennis matches between French ranked players of the Racing Club de Paris and players of the Württemberg top class, a match of a team from Stuttgart against the Racing Club de Paris football team in the Neckarstadion was also planned as a sporting highlight. As VfB Stuttgart was prevented from playing that day due to a test match in preparation for the final of the German championship, the last-placed team in the Oberliga Süd, Stuttgarter Kickers, stepped in. Lord Mayor Arnulf Klett, as host of the conference, was also the main initiator of the football match and organised the encounter in consultation with the Municipal Sports Office (StAS, 167/2/1, 1950a). The net surplus from these sporting events—after deduction of the clubs’ remuneration—was to be donated to the mayors’ conference. To achieve the highest possible profit for the Franco-German cause—consequently to attract as many spectators as possible—the city administration asked the Kickers to improve the squad with particularly good players; the officials fulfilled this request by temporarily engaging former players. In addition, the match was to be widely publicised by the police (StAS, 167/2/1, 1950b). The Racing Club de Paris, a club full of tradition and packed with international players, came to Germany for a tour of several days with matches in Stuttgart, Augsburg and Munich and was supposed to repeat the success of the Girondins de Bordeaux, who had won the anniversary football tournament of SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin at Pentecost. However, this did not happen: the Parisians, who were completely exhausted because the regular season had just come to an end, came to grief in Stuttgart against the last-placed team in the Oberliga Süd: in front of only 5000 spectators, including the French High Commissioner André François-Poncet, who had also welcomed the players on the field before the game, as well as several French and German mayors, the Racing Club conceded a crushing 7-1 defeat. This encounter was perceived differently in the two countries: In the Federal Republic, the idea of reconciliation was in the spotlight and the political was linked to the sporting event. In the Sport-Magazin, one could read after the match:

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Something was at stake here, a great matter in fact: Franco-German understanding among athletes. Let’s be frank and honest, it was long overdue. The Franco-German mayors’ meeting in Stuttgart finally provided the initiative, and it was a brilliant idea to include a sporting event in this programme […]. (Becker 1950, p. 15)

The reports here were less concerned with the poor performance of the French team, but rather focused on the exceptional play of the Stuttgarter Kickers, who were reinforced with former internationals Reinhard Schaletzki and Albert Sing, among others (ibid.). In France, on the other hand, no one could really be satisfied with this result. A slow return of the Federal Republic into the international political and sporting arena, combined with such a disastrous defeat of the club from the capital, was perceived with great concern on the other side of the border. High defeats by French teams repeatedly led to great discontent within the federation, but also among politicians and other officials.7 This is also illustrated in the L’Équipe journalist Marcel Oger’s review of the match between the Stuttgarter Kickers and the Racing Club de Paris, where he asked the provocative question “How many of those misadventures have already damaged our prestige?” (Oger 1950, p. 5). Previously, the director of the Centre d’études françaises de Stuttgart (the later Institut français Stuttgart), Pierre Wurms, had written an enraged letter to the editors of France Football and L’Équipe, complaining in strong terms about the Racing Club’s performance in the Federal Republic. L’Équipe decided not to print the letter but supported the cultural representatives “who are responsible for maintaining France’s good reputation abroad in all its facets” (ibid.). Thus, at least in the early 1950s, matches between French and German teams were always very special encounters that were followed with great attention and special emotions. The fact that Franco-German relations were by no means as solid as they were twelve years later at the international match in Stuttgart is illustrated by the conclusion that Le Monde drew for the entire third Conference of French and German Mayors in Stuttgart:

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Neither the sun nor the flowers nor the Franco-German rapprochement can make us forget the problems that remain unsolved: that of German unity, that of the two million unemployed, that of the eight million refugees, that of the forty-seven million people living in a territory too small to feed them and, above all, that of the immense German power that is being felt everywhere again and of which we do not currently know where it will move tomorrow. (N.N. 1950b)

The experiences gained from the club matches of the early 1950s most likely led the political actors on both sides of the border to take numerous preventive measures for the first post-war international match between the Federal Republic and France, which took place in October 1952 at the Stade de Colombes near Paris (Didion 2019, pp.  64–71; Didion 2021). This was intended to contain any possible negative impact of the encounter right from the start. It remains questionable for the international match in 1952—but also for other matches in the 1950s—whether there would have been a real danger for the Franco-German rapprochement without the preventive measures taken by the authorities and federations.

Conclusions Encounters between French and German teams in the 1950s and the early 1960s were always special matches. They were associated with special emotions and memories that went far beyond football. Since French diplomats had drawn conclusions from the period after the First World War, they developed a “double Germany policy” “between factual constraints and learning processes” (Hüser 2003), which allowed football matches to be resumed much earlier than after 1918. At the beginning of the 1950s, both the French authorities and the German politicians and football officials, who were naturally looking for the soonest possible return to the international political and sporting arena, were therefore concerned with channelling emotions and instrumentalising them for the purposes of cautious rapprochement and reconciliation. In the beginning, preventive measures were particularly part of the political actors’

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range of actions (e.g. appeals to the fairness of the players and the spectators). Only over time, when a clear shift in the public opinion of both countries became apparent, did it become clear that Franco-German football matches could also be actively used as a symbol for the reconciliation of the two countries—as shown by the international match in Stuttgart in 1962. All in all, a comparison between the early 1950s and the early 1960s reveals a change in political intervention strategies from an active prevention policy to the intentional instrumentalisation of the encounters. At some matches, this channelling of emotions failed fundamentally (e.g. at the match in Ludwigshafen in February 1950) or the intentional use of emotions for purposes of rapprochement was unsuccessful (e.g. at the match in Stuttgart in June 1950). This raises the question of why such attempts to control emotions failed. Indeed, certain conditions had to be fulfilled: Firstly, the context played a crucial role. A match at the beginning of the early 1950s was of course a more delicate matter than in the context of the preparation of the Elysée Treaty in the early 1960s. Secondly, spectator interest was also important. With higher public interest and matches played in larger stadiums with more attention, incidents were less likely to happen. Therefore, matches at club level had a greater explosive power for Franco-German football relations than international encounters between the two national teams. Thirdly, matches that were as balanced as possible ensured greater satisfaction on both sides of the border. High defeats, especially for French teams, usually caused greatest discomfort. Fourthly and finally, so-called shifting moments—that is, incidents on the field that “shifted” the atmosphere in a match—were an important reason for excessive emotions, often degenerating into verbal violence, and thus for unsuccessful channelling of emotions. However, emotions as well as mediating effects in and through such football matches can in most cases only be “measured” indirectly— through media coverage or through reports of other eyewitnesses (especially of a diplomatic nature). These limits of the “measurement” of emotions and mediating effects must always be considered regarding the statements made in this chapter. The descriptions in the media and diplomatic documents should not be overrated. Nevertheless, international football matches are intercultural encounters. At the matches analysed

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here, several thousand people from both countries came together in most cases—and even more followed the major games on the radio or on TV. In the case of games that were played without any incident, it can be assumed that they made a contribution to the normalisation of the image of France in the Federal Republic and the image of Germany in France. They thus formed a mosaic piece in the process of rapprochement and reconciliation between France and the Federal Republic. To confirm or, if necessary, modify these statements, other games (also in other time periods) should be examined more closely in the future. In addition, it would be interesting to look in more detail at matches between German and French hobby teams as well as matches between lower-class clubs.

Notes 1. Domestically, France and the Federal Republic also had to deal with important issues: the consequences of the recognition of Algerian independence (3 July 1962) and the presidential election referendum (28 October 1962) in France; the Spiegel affair in the Federal Republic (starting in October 1962). 2. For better clarity, quotations in this chapter are always translated into English. All translations were made by the author of this chapter. 3. Whereas in 1955 only 10% of French people surveyed had a positive opinion of the Federal Republic, this figure had risen to 30% by 1961 and 54% by 1964. In the Federal Republic, 40% of those questioned in May 1955 believed that a durable reconciliation with their neighbour was possible. In July 1962 the percentage was 52%, and in September 1962 59% (for these figures see Ziebura 1997, pp. 119–120). 4. The significance of the match can also be seen in the fact that never before had such a large number of journalists accompanied the French national team to a match abroad (Weilenmann 1962, p. 12). 5. In the Federal Republic, the second half of the match was broadcast live on the radio via numerous stations and time-delayed on TV; in France, the whole match was broadcast live on radio as well as on TV. 6. The Sportgruß is a German tradition in which the players and the referee come together in the centre of the pitch at the end of the game. Usually,

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the referee then announces the result, and the home team gives a salute, or the two teams simply shake hands. 7. For example, the French Football Federation invited the president of Stade Français Football Club–Red Star to a meeting before his club’s tour to make it clear to him that the club had to travel to Germany with its best squad (FFFM 1950c).

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Part III Contemporary Case Studies

6 Politics, Identity, Global Branding, and the Stadium: FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou Hunter Shobe

Introduction This chapter considers the role of FC Barcelona’s stadium, the Camp Nou, as a venue for the reproduction of cultural and political identities, both during the dictatorship (1939–1975) and subsequent to the regime’s end and the emergence of democracy in Spain. I consider FC Barcelona’s stadium, the Camp Nou, as a site of resistance and as a place where narratives about Catalan cultural and political identities are reproduced and collectively experienced. Subsequently, I discuss the Camp Nou as a site of global consumerism and a place where the club promotes itself as a global brand. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the stadium as a place where narratives at many spatial scales are negotiated. Many scholars argue that football can play a powerful role in how cultural and political identities are reproduced. The stadium is the venue where political and cultural meanings attached to the club are

H. Shobe (*) Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_6

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experienced. The stadium connects a club, a place, a group of supporters, and narratives about associated identities. Geographers argue that football teams and the stadiums in which they compete have powerful roles in facilitating collective identification with place (Shobe 2008a; Gaffney and Bale 2004; Bale 2001; Hague and Mercer 1998). The Camp Nou played an important role in providing a venue for the expression of Catalan identity during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (Kuper 2021; Shobe 2008a; Ball 2001; Burns 1999; Espadaler 1998; Macclancy 1996; Kuper 1994; Shaw 1987; Shaw 1985). Even during the years it was administered by Franco’s appointees, the Camp Nou was a place for the collective expression of the cultural/political idea that Catalonia is distinct from Spain. In a society where freedoms of assembly and speech were drastically curtailed, the stadium served as a site of resistance. In post-dictatorship Spain, the Camp Nou continues to function as an important place for the expression of Catalan identity (Shobe 2008b). Although the Camp Nou is FC Barcelona’s stadium, it also serves as the unofficial home of the unofficial Catalan National Team. This provides the stadium with an additional role for reproducing narratives of Catalonia as a nation. Increasingly, the stadium is also a site of global consumerism and a place to promote the club as a global brand as a well as a place to promote the brands of large transnational corporations. Thus, the stadium is not only a place where local identities are reproduced it is a site where global consumerist culture is reproduced. Like stadiums in many other cities, the Camp Nou is a place where the local, the global, and the myriad scales in between are negotiated.

Literature Review/Context In this section, I examine the academic literature that concerns sport, the stadium, and identity by focusing on two main threads of that research— collective identification and place representation. I then consider important concepts distilled from the literature on globalization and sport. Stadiums, like all places, must be understood in larger spatial contexts.

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Sport, Stadium, and Identity Collective Identification The stadium has a prominent role in facilitating collective identification through shared experience, something noted in geographic literature (Shobe and Gibson 2017a, 2017b; Gaffney and Bale 2004; Bale 2001 [1993]; 2003; Hague and Mercer 1998). Hague and Mercer highlight the importance of a local stadium, Stark’s Park, in facilitating senses of home and connectedness to Kirkcaldy, an evocation of Tuan’s humanistic notion of rootedness and attachment to place (Tuan 1977, p. 156). They highlight how, “the stadium and team are collectively recognized … becoming part of Kirkcaldy’s geographic memory” (Hague and Mercer 1998, p. 105). This phenomenon occurs in places across the globe. Bale suggests that, “football in its modern form, provides what is arguably the major focus for collective identification in modern Britain and in much of the rest of the world” (Bale 2003, p. 55). It is in the stadium where the visceral lived experience of support for a club, and the place it represents, is most acute. From a humanistic perspective, the stadium engages our senses in distinct ways—the sounds of thousands of supporters chanting, the sight of the deep green pitch, the smell of smoke from flares set off in celebration, the taste of cold beer, the feeling of people all around often bumping into one another or of the stands vibrating under the weight of entire sections of supporters jumping up and down. Perception is not limited to these traditional senses as the stadium can also evoke senses of history and/or senses of belonging (Gaffney and Bale 2004, p. 34). Tuan suggests that it is the experiencing of all these senses in unison, as a suite, that aids in giving places discrete meaning (Tuan 1974). For supporters, the stadium is often a sacred or hallowed place. The home ground takes on “quasi-religious or spiritual” attributes (Bale 1994, p. 120). As Tuan notes in Topophilia (Tuan 1974, p. 4) there is “an intense affective bond between people and place”. Bale suggests that, “The fact that people seem to treat sports places like religious places helps explain their sense of topophilia” (1994, p. 134). Edensor and Millington proffer

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that, “Football has become a particularly salient way in which to express identity contemporaneously through an affective and cognitive sense of belonging to a place” (Edensor and Millington 2008, p. 186). The interior of stadiums has their own social geographies as well. Sitting in the same part of the stadium helps supporters feel connected and grounded in place, “Often supporters occupy the same section of the home stadium every game giving that local small-scale identity within the stadium a territory, a small piece of the grounds they make their own” (Wagner and Shobe 2017, p. 1151). During times of political repression, the role sport has in facilitating collective identification can become amplified. For societies under dictatorship, the stadium can function as one of few places of resistance. For example, Kuper relates that Austrians living under the Third Reich began “turning against Germans as the war grew grimmer, and the only place where they could express these feeling safely was the football stadium” (Kuper 2003, p. 161). As will be discussed in the Catalan case, the stadium provided a space for acts of popular resistance during periods of authoritarianism in Spain (Ball 2001; Burns 1999; Duke and Crolley 1996; Shaw 1987). Sport happens on a timetable, on a schedule, it is routine. The stadium is the focal place of that routine. Engagement with the stadium becomes ritualized (Bale 2001, p. 3). Ritual behavior in the stadium, chants and songs voiced in unison, for example, reinforce place-based collective identities (Wagner and Shobe 2017; Clark 2006). The Camp Nou provides a “serialized” and “constant” venue for collective identification (Bale 2003, p. 56), which may be important for sustaining a sense of Catalan identity. The stadium also provides a constant link to the past when supporting the club was an act of political defiance.

Place Representation Football clubs are sometimes understood to be representatives of discrete places and stadiums figure prominently in the accompanying narratives. Nielsen submits, “Stadium life constitutes a form of cultural maintenance of the city’s representation, which, as opposed to other versions of

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cultural enactment, is emphatically tied to a particular place” (Nielsen 1995, p. 29). The stadium takes on a “territorial symbolism” as it functions as a venue for political and national conflict (Cronin 2000, p. 72). This is also clearly the case with national football teams from independent states. However, for nations without a state or in a contested territorial situation, as Cronin points out in the case of Northern Ireland, a football team can become an “embodiment of a contested identity” (Cronin 2000, p. 72). These ideas are helpful for framing the connections between Camp Nou, FC Barcelona, and Catalonia. Some national teams represent places that are not independent states recognized by the UN but recognized as independent places by FIFA. There are over 20 territories that have independent football associations and representation in FIFA (International Federation of Football Associations) but are not recognized as independent states by the United Nations. These include Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Puerto Rico, and Palestine. Most teams that represent places that are seeking independence are unrecognized by FIFA and thus exist on the margins of the football world. The Catalan national football team is one of these. It generally plays one “friendly” match a year, usually against FIFA recognized teams including Brazil. Significantly, the Catalan national team plays its home matches in the Camp Nou. The matches serve to further concretize the idea of a Catalan nation (Shobe 2008a, p. 332). This connection may be particularly strong for those who attend matches in the Camp Nou. The stadium can also be considered through the concept of landscape. Urban landscapes, read as text, provide information about some of the identities and meanings associated with particular places and reveal something about how power relations are structured from place to place (Duncan 1990). The urban landscape provides a platform for the projection of certain images and symbols associated with certain ideologies and/or dominant powers. Governments and private enterprise seek to inscribe power on the urban landscape through the competition for the highest skyscrapers and most distinctive skylines. Similarly, the stadium has been an important element of the urban landscape (Bale 2001, p. 3), one in which a great deal of both meaning and money are invested. Raitz proffers the view that the stadium is “a source of civic pride and a symbol

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of victory and accomplishment. Therefore, it represents success” (1995, p. 5). Stadiums in Europe, like the Camp Nou, developed in conjunction with urbanization and industrial capitalism and need to be considered in that context. Bale argues that, “the confined spaces of football are the manifestations of modernizing and rationalistic trends which have aimed to improve and make more efficient the comfort, control and discipline of crowds” (2001, p. 9). Bale evokes Foucault and panopticism (2003, p. 27) in articulating his concern with confinement and surveillance in the modern stadium (2003, p. 11). This speaks to larger issues government surveillance and rights to privacy.

Globalization and the Stadium In order to understand the social role of the stadium, one must also consider how that stadium is connected to and relates to other places at multiple scales—locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. Place-based dimensions of identity narratives need to be understood in the context of other places at these various scales. Humanistic approaches should be considered alongside more critical perspectives. Global and local are understood here as general terms that inform one another dialectically rather than as a binary opposition. Work in sport and globalization literature highlights the importance of transcending a dualistic understanding of the global and the local in the context of sport and advocates that researchers acknowledge it explicitly (Andrews and Ritzer 2007). One example of this involves how local branding campaigns for football clubs are often drawn from “embedded myths around the local and the global” (Edensor and Millington 2008, p. 186). Another thread that runs through globalization literature suggests that the current intensity of globalization disrupts the ways in which local identity is structured in place (Appadurai 1996; Philo and Kearns 1993; Zukin 1991; Castells 1989; Emberley 1989). Similarly, scholars of sport have suggested that the intensification of globalization challenges the relationship between football clubs, local communities, and places (Brookes 2002; Bairner 2001; Maguire 1999; Duke and Crolley 1996).

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The argument suggests that time-space compression, driven in this case by the Internet and satellite television, often seems to displace sport from the neighborhoods and cities in which they are located. Attracting global customers creates tension with traditional emphases on local supporters. The need to complete globally is said to explain the need for clubs to make themselves increasingly popular and successful beyond their areas of traditional support. In elite football, developing a global brand is valued above almost anything else. This approach suggests the stadium experience is best understood through the lens of consumption, eschewing the more local place-based identity frameworks discussed above. Sport is viewed less as a communal and popular experience and more as thing or a commodity. For example, in writing about hockey in Canada, Whitson suggests that “globalized sports become more like products” (Whitson 2001, p. 219). He goes on to argue that, the effect has been to make sports brand names—and team logos and colours—into popular texts of identity, especially among the young … In the new millennium, sport marketing will appeal to national identity when strategically useful. However, discourses that spoke to (and traded on) identities rooted in place are gradually being supplanted by marketing in which consumers around the affluent world are invited to identify with teams—and sports—on the basis of colours, and logos, style and ‘attitude’, and sheer ubiquitous presence in the media. (Whitson 2001, pp. 228–230)

Andrews and Ritzer argue that our experiences of sport are highly mediated by capitalistic imperatives. They suggest that, “Today, virtually all aspects of the global sport institutions (governing bodies, leagues, teams, events, and individual athletes) are now un-selfconsciously driven and defined by the inter-related processes of: corporatization (the management and marketing of sporting entities according to profit motives); spectacularization (the primacy of producing of entertainment-driven [mediated] experiences); and, commodification (the generation of multiple sport-related revenue streams)” (Andrews and Ritzer 2007, p. 140). Stadiums are the places where corporatization, spectacularization, and

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commodification meet, they are at the confluence of these three processes. These concepts will be revisited later in the chapter. The following case study of the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona gives attention to both the humanistic and critical concepts introduced above and draws upon them in framing the stadium as a place, something Massey alternatively calls a progressive or global sense of place (1994). She suggests that places must be understood as part of an intricate network of social, economic, cultural, and political flows. She encourages a reading of place that is open, fluid, and dynamic rather than bounded, rigid, and static. Such a conceptualization of place allows a more nuanced and sophisticated look at how identities are socially constructed. Evoking Massey, Conner argues that when examining the social role of football, ‘routes’ need to be considered alongside ‘roots’ (2014). In other words, it is important to examine and trace the routes along which “identities are being performed, maintained and (re)negotiated on an everyday basis” (Conner 2014, p. 526). Following a brief history of FC Barcelona and Catalan politics, I examine some of the roots and routes associated with the Camp Nou.

F C Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain: A Brief History To better understand the role of the Camp Nou as a venue for Catalan political expression, this section provides a brief history of FC Barcelona and how it has related to Spanish politics and Catalan political expression (for a lengthier examination see Lowe 2014; Shobe 2008a; Ball 2001; Burns 1999; Espadaler 1998; Macclancy 1996; Kuper 2021; Kuper 1994; Shaw 1987; Shaw 1985). FC Barcelona was founded in 1899 at a time when modern Catalan political consciousness was beginning to develop and Catalanista political parties began to form. Barcelona was the first city in Spain to industrialize and as the economy developed, the city attracted migrants from other parts of Spain and Europe. A Swiss businessman named Hans Gamper

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placed an ad in the newspaper looking for a group of men to form a football team. The group that Gamper assembled became FC Barcelona. It elected Englishman Walter Wild as the first president of the club. Founded and led by people from outside of Spain, the club had more European and Catalan associations than Spanish ones. From its beginning, FC Barcelona was known as a Catalan team associated with Catalan politics (Burns 1999, p. 85). In 1923, General Miguel Primo de Rivera led a successful coup of the Spanish state and installed himself as dictator from 1923 to 1930. Primo De Rivera’s slogan was “country, religion, monarchy” and his reign brought political and cultural oppression to Catalonia. This “inevitably politicised life inside and outside the stadium” (Burns 1999, p. 88) and amplified the role of FC Barcelona in relation to Catalan political expression. Initially, FC Barcelona’s primary adversary was crosstown rival Español, a club founded by migrants from southern Spain. The rivalry with Real Madrid became more pronounced during the Primo de Rivera regime. A short period of democracy in the early 1930s ended in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), won by troops loyal to General Francisco Franco, who became dictator of the authoritarian state. With the regime came another era of brutal repression and the suspension of civil liberties in Catalonia—the Catalan language, flag, and symbols were all banned. Repression reached into the world of football. For example, FC Barcelona’s democratically elected president was replaced with official from the Franco regime and the club had to change its name from the Catalan “Futbol Club Barcelona” to the Castilian “Barcelona Club de Football”. This resulted in a further amplification of FC Barcelona’s role in the expression Catalan identity. It was in this political atmosphere that the Camp Nou was constructed. As will be discussed in the next section, the Camp Nou was one of the few places that Catalan identity could be demonstrated and performed. The dictatorship and authoritarianism came to end in 1975 with Franco’s death. In 1978, a new Spanish constitution guaranteed rights to Catalonia and the Basque Country and those regions began to recover their

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political, economic, cultural, and social institutions. This period also marks the beginning of a new era of globalization—one of transnational production and greatly increased speeds of communication and transportation.

 he Camp Nou as Site of Resistance T and Political and Cultural Identity Reproduction Until the early 1920s, FC Barcelona did not have a home stadium and played at several different fields throughout the city. The club’s first home grounds, Les Corts, opened in 1922 with a seating capacity of 20,000 (FC Barcelona 2015a). The club quickly grew in popularity and accordingly the stadium was expanded numerous times to accommodate the larger soci base. However, when it closed in the mid-1950s, Les Corts seated a modest 30,000 spectators (Ainaud De Lasarte et al. 1999, p. 13). In 1947, Real Madrid built the Nuevo Estadio Chamartín, which in 1955 was renamed the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, in honor of the club’s president. Bernabéu fought for Franco’s troops and served on the Catalan front (Burns 1999, p. 155). The stadium’s name was understood as an affront to Catalonia. Upon its construction, the Bernabéu had a seating capacity of 77,000, which made it the largest stadium in Europe at the time. It was built in part to reify Madrid’s position as the core of power in Spain (Burns 1999, p. 156). Franco also looked to build support for his isolated regime through success in football—particularly through Read Madrid and the Spanish national team. Partially in response to the construction of the Bernabéu, FC Barcelona built the Camp Nou. On September 24, 1957, the Camp Nou (“New Field”, in Catalan) opened with an initial seating capacity of 93,053 1 (Tomás 2004b) becoming the largest football stadium in Europe, a ­designation that it still holds. In claiming that distinction at the expense  Camp Nou seating capacity grew to 120,000 for the 1982 FIFA World Cup. The After high profile stadium disasters in Brussels and Sheffield in the 1980s, many standing terraces throughout Europe were eliminated and replaced with seated areas. Eliminating the standing terraces in the Camp Nou brought capacity back under 100,000. 1

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of the Bernabéu, the Camp Nou’s grandiosity amplified its role as a site of resistance throughout the dictatorship. The stadium was very costly and put the club in heavy debt for many years (FC Barcelona 2015a). The original name chosen for the stadium was “Esatdi del FC Barcleona” (Stadium of FC Barcelona) but the nickname “camp nou” or “the new ground” soon developed in order to distinguish it from Les Corts, the old ground. The moniker stuck. In 2001, the socis (club members) chose to make Camp Nou the official name of the stadium. The opening game in 1957 was an exhibition match against the Polish club Warsaw. At halftime of this match, 1500 members of a folklore and culture association performed the national dance of Catalonia, the Sardana (FC Barcelona 2015b). The Sardana had been banned and so its performance was an act of resistance. Stadiums also acted as sites of control for Franco’s regime. Hargreaves emphasizes the role of the stadium in the regime’s promotion of Spanish nationalism, “the Spanish league clubs were taken over and administered by Franco’s placemen with the intention of transforming the football stadium into a kind of nationalist church where the nation and its values could be celebrated though nationalist propaganda, ritual, and symbol” (Hargreaves 2000, p. 9). Franco allowed the football league to continue in part because he thought it would distract people from politics and reduce the likelihood of a revolution (Shaw 1985, p. 40). The stadium is the site of football’s rituals. Those rituals were harnessed by the regime to promote Spanish state nationalism. In the Camp Nou, as in stadiums across the country, players were required to perform the fascist salute before every match (Gonzalez Aja 1998, p. 107) as part of the effort to widely instill Spanish nationalism and identity. The Camp Nou was an important lived site of resistance for some Catalans and an important symbolic site for many more. The stadium was a place where Catalan language and songs could be voiced unlike most other places in society (Brown and Walsh 2000, p.  94). Kuper argues that, “Only at the Nou Camp did Catalonia still exist and the only Catalan symbol Franco never dared touch was Barça” (1994, p.  87). Jaume Sobrequés explains the great political importance of FC Barcelona and the Camp Nou to “[a] country that had lost its organizations, the democratic institutions of government and had no political parties … It

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has to shape its difference according to what is permitted” (Sobrequés 2004). The ritualized traditions associated with football and Catalan identity were incubated in the stadium and this was particularly true if the opponent was Real Madrid. One incident in particular highlights how what occurs in the stadium is connected to larger place-identity related contexts. On June 6, 1970, FC Barcelona hosted Real Madrid in a Spanish Cup match. At the time the Spanish Cup was called the Copa del Generalísimo, a direct reference to the dictator himself. The official, Emilio Guruceta, famously awarded a penalty against FC Barcelona for a foul that was, by several accounts, several feet outside of the penalty area. Angry FC Barcelona supporters began to throw seat cushions onto the field in protest. After FC Barcelona lost the match and was eliminated from the cup, the supporters rushed the pitch. The brutal police response (Burns 1999, p. 169) served as a stinging reminder that power resided with the government in Madrid. The “Guruceta Case” quickly became code for the continued oppression experienced by the club and, by extension, Catalonia. This incident also marks the rebirth of FC Barcelona as a dynamic force in Catalanism. Certainly many factors contributed to this incident. Among them is an explanation that highlights the unambiguous Catalanism associated with the club leadership at the time, several who “strongly identified with the growing calls for democratic rule and political autonomy for Catalonia” (Burns 1999, p. 169). The club’s board of directors in the early 1970s, led by Armand Caraben and including Joan Granados and Jaume Rosell who were both members of the nationalist political party Convergencia Democratica de Catalunya, repoliticized the club along Catalan nationalist lines (Espadaler 2004; Tomás 2004a; Burns 1999, p. 220). The board’s Catalanista character was central to creating an atmosphere that was conducive to such an act of resistance. Espadaler (2004) submits that “in some respects Barça was a battering ram that clashed with the remnants of franquismo”. As Franco became ill and weak in the early 1970s, these directors became increasingly bold. In 1971–1972, the club officially advocated for the use of Catalan in schools (Tomás 2004a). The stadium was the key place where many acts of defiance on the part of the club were staged. During the 1972–1973 season, the club began making announcements

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over the Camp Nou public address system in Catalan and displayed a Catalan flag in the stadium (Tomás 2004a). During the 1973–1974 season the club changed its government imposed Castilian name, Barcelona Club de Fútbol, back to the original Catalan, Futbol Club Barcelona. A few months before Franco died in 1975, the club officially reinstituted use of the Catalan language. These examples all demonstrate how sport and the stadium were used to push back against a regime that had grown increasingly weak (Shobe 2008a, p. 341).

 he Camp Nou as Site of Global Branding T and Consumption In this section I examine the national and place-based dimensions of the Camp Nou and FC Barcelona in the democratic era post-1975 alongside the increasing commercialization of the club. I argue that since the commencement of democracy in Spain, the stadium and club continue to play a role in the social construction of place-based identities in Barcelona and Catalonia (Shobe 2008b) while the stadium and club is simultaneously promoted as a global brand (Shobe 2006). The social role of the stadium is anchored by the regularly scheduled ritual, year after year, and punctuated by important moments that occurred there in the past. Yet, the stadium is also mobilized as a site for the promotion of the club’s global commercial interests. In his history of the club, Burns argues that in the 1980s and 1990s, “Football became a vehicle for political influence and distractions as great as, if not greater than, it had been in the Franco years, its power strengthened by the expanding role of television” (1999, p. 352). Internet media and social networking likewise have become influential in promoting narratives associated with national and place-based identity. However, increasingly the stadium is experienced as a televised space mediated by corporate and commercial interests. Thus, the stadium not only functions as a venue for the expression of local, national, and place-based narratives but is mobilized in marketing the club as a global brand. In this

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way, corporatization, spectacularization, and commodification (Andrews and Ritzer 2007) combine in the space of the stadium. The Camp Nou is also linked to the meteoric rise and commercial success of women’s professional football in Europe as the site of selected games of the club’s women’s team. Formed in 1970 and professionalized in 2015, Barça Femení has emerged as a dominant force in Europe. In April 2022, the Camp Nou hosted a Champions League match between Barça Femení and VfL Wolfsburg in front of over 91,600 spectators (Burhan 2022). This broke the stadium’s own record for largest attendance at a women’s football game as recognized by FIFA. 2 FC Barcelona along with a small number of clubs in Spain (including Real Madrid) are not publicly traded or privately held entities but rather organizations of paying members called socis, who democratically elect the president of the club. During the dictatorship this system was suspended, and the Franco regime appointed the presidents of clubs. After the regime’s fall, FC Barcelona reinstituted the model of socis electing the president. In 1978, Josep Lluís Núñez was elected president of FC Barcelona. Núñez was neither Catalan nor connected to Catalan politics, which oddly made him a safe compromise candidate for socis who did not want to see the club fall under the influence of any particular Catalan political party. Núñez was a real estate developer and in the late 1990s announced a scheme, called Project Barça 2000, to renovate the stadium and develop the area around it into a much larger complex that included athletic and leisure parks. The proposal would have required a massive transformation of the immediate neighborhood. For Núñez, this plan may have represented the culmination of his two careers—club president and urban development mogul. He announced the plan as a forgone conclusion neither having sought any input from outside parties in its design, nor bothering to publicly explain the project in any detail. The project’s chilly reception was in part due to disagreements with the plan itself and in part due to his poor handling of presenting the plan (Batlle 2004; Canut 2004; Espadaler 2004; Pérez De Rozas 2004; Sobrequés 2004).  FIFA does not recognize the record of an estimated 110,000 spectators at the Estadio Azteca during the final of the 1971 Women’s World Cup in Mexico (Burhan 2022). 2

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The nebulous promises of a leisure park surrounding an expanded sporting complex troubled many people in Les Corts, the neighborhood where the Camp Nou is located. Neighborhood groups were angered by Núñez for his hubris (Batlle 2004; Sobrequés 2004). Many feared extensive commercial development with restaurants, cinemas, stores, and the like (Artells 2004; Espadaler 2004). Local social justice organizations rallied against the project, demanding to know what the benefits to the immediate neighborhood and city at-large would be (Pérez De Rozas 2004). The governments of Catalonia and Barcelona also opposed Projecte Barça 2000. The city raised the issues of both the financing on the project and the process by which Núñez was advancing his vision (Batlle 2004). The Generalitat opposed the project on similar grounds (Batlle 2004; Canut 2004). Núñez’s plan received criticism from within the club as well. A group of socis known as L’Elefant Blau called for a censure vote against Núñez which helped derail the plans. Núñez became estranged from the neighborhood, the city, and Catalonia itself, precisely because he proposed turning the stadium in to a strictly commercial enterprise stripped of its Catalan associations. Espadaler explained that Núñez, “wanted to take the Catalan flag out of the stadium, he wanted to convert the club into some kind of business” (Espadaler 2004). One of the leaders of L’Elefant Blau, Joan Laporta, campaigned for president during the 2003 election and was elected. The arrival of Laporta and his administration, predominantly young men, many of whom were businessmen rather than sports industry people, transformed the club in two important ways. First, it repoliticized the club along Catalan nationalist lines, which strengthened the role of the Camp Nou as a venue for political expression. Second, Laporta, his administration, and those that followed, transformed FC Barcelona from a well-known but rather parochial club into one of the leading brands in the sports world—and the Camp Nou was also mobilized to promote the club as global brand. Since Laporta’s first administration of the club in 2003 (which ended in 2010), FC Barcelona has employed a narrative which does not choose between casting the club in either global or national/local tropes but rather embraces them both. The discourse of Catalanism that the club

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mobilizes is a cosmopolitan and outward-looking one, which meshes easily with the narrative of FC Barcelona as a global club (Shobe 2006, p. 262). The FC Barcelona brand, although rooted in notions of Catalanism, embraces the cosmopolitanism with which the city of Barcelona is often associated. It is from this platform that the global brand is constructed. An excellent example comes from a 2013 video advertisement for Qatar Airways. In 2013, Qatar Airways sponsored the front of the FC Barcelona jersey. The commercial depicts FC Barcelona as a country or nation unto itself. A plane descending for a landing and heads for an urbanized island or continent that resembles FC Barcelona’s badge/logo. A passport officer, played by defender Gerard Pique, stamps the passport of a deplaning passenger—Brazilian superstar Neymar—with the FC Barcelona logo. The ad goes on to show vignettes with several star players and then fans lining up to and subsequently sitting in the stadium. The stadium appears to be the Camp Nou itself. As the camera pulls away from the stadium, a plane flies away from the fully illuminated landmass in the shape of the FC Barcelona logo. As the spot concludes, the following appears across the screen—“Qatar Airways and FC Barcelona. A team that unites the world”. This ad reveals the global image that the club developed and refined since the first election of Joan Laporta to the club presidency in 2003. In this fantasy world, the FC Barcelona brand is present in practically every frame and the only place from the real world that also exists in this fantasy world is the Camp Nou. The stadium is the link from the lived world to the fantasy. In this narrative, the club supersedes Catalonia as an independent country. This corporate utopia seems at odds in many ways with the nationalistic associations of the club. However, Laporta was among the most vocal critics of the club’s association with Qatar Airways (and before that the Qatar Foundation). He suggested that the association did not fit with the democratic spirit of the club. In running for president of the club again in 2015, he made breaking with Qatar Airways a campaign promise. The political dimensions of the Camp Nou are not relegated to the past, rather they continue to develop and unfold. However, the degree to which the leadership of FC Barcelona has promoted Catalan identity and

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independence subsequent to Laporta’s first presidency has been debated. The ambiguous character of the club’s leadership with regard to Catalan nationalism came to a dramatic head on October 1, 2017, when the Catalan regional government held a referendum on independence from Spain (for a thorough consideration of October 1, 2017, and FC Barcelona see Pulleiro Méndez 2022 and Kassing 2019). In the days leading to the referendum, the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled that the referendum was unconstitutional, and the Spanish government moved thousands of police forces from around the country to prevent the vote from taking place. On October 1, national riot police clashed with crowds attempting to vote. Dressed in black with tinted visors, the national police beat crowds with batons, fired rubber bullets, and brutally removed voters from polling stations. Police injured hundreds of people. On that same day, FC Barcelona was slated to play a match against Las Palmas in the afternoon. The club initially declared it wanted to postpone the match, but Spanish league authorities threatened a six-point deduction if the game was not held. Thousands of supporters and fans were outside the stadium waiting to enter. Just 25 minutes before kickoff, the club decided to hold the match but not allow spectators bar journalists. The club condemned the state’s actions to violently block people from voting and declared that playing in an empty stadium was a protest. The club’s statement read in full: FC Barcelona condemns the events which have taken place in many parts of Catalonia today in order to prevent its citizens exercising their democratic right to free expression. Given the exceptional nature of events, the Board of Directors have decided that the FC Barcelona first team game against Las Palmas will be played behind closed doors following the Professional Football League’s refusal to postpone the game. (FC Barcelona 2017)

The decision to play the game at all could also been seen as an abdication of voicing a stance against the state—allowing a game to be played for commercial and sporting reasons while citizens were beaten in the streets.

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Las Palmas players wore jerseys that day with the Spanish flag embroidered on the front as a sign of a unified Spain, an action, sanctioned by the league, that could be interpreted as an incendiary anti-referendum and anti-independence statement. On this day, the role of the stadium as a venue for political expression came into stark view. For years many FC Barcelona administrators have talked about either building a new stadium or renovating the Camp Nou. In 2022, a year after Laporta was elected president for the second time, the club began renovation of the Camp Nou as part of the Espai Barça project, a redevelopment of the overall site in which the stadium is situated. The expansion will increase the seating capacity to 110,000 (Garrick 2022). During the 2023–2024 season, the team will play at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Comapnys; a time that corresponds with the most disruptive part of the renovation. The renovated stadium will feature a retractable roof equipped with solar panels and plays into the club’s narrative of environmental consciousness. One report cites the cost of the renovation at €1.5 billion (Bosher 2022). In March 2022, the club signed a €280 million sponsorship agreement with music streaming and digital media service Spotify which included altering the name of the stadium to Spotify Camp Nou as of July 2022 (FC Barcelona 2022; Shaw & Bloomberg. 2022). Spotify’s brand is to be featured on the main stand of the stadium and the seats of Gol Nord stand. The club emphasizes that the relationship with Spotify further projects the global image of the club. The emphasis on global brands can be framed as compromising the local and national associations of the club. O’Brien argues that global merchandising and sponsorship draw attention to, “the notion that the Bernabéu or Camp Nou are no longer tight local, regional or even national sites of contested identities, but have merged into focal points of global fandom and football tourism” (2013, p.  326). The stadium has increasingly become a canvas for global brands such as Spotify, Coca-­ Cola, and Nike, whose logos are not only visible by those at the grounds, but by the many millions more who are watching on television/Internet. The corporatization, spectacularization, and commodification of globalized sport discussed by Andrews and Ritzer (2007) converge on the stadium. The Camp Nou brings it all together—the constant corporate

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presence, the pageantry of televised spectacle, and the commodification of the sport and athletes themselves for consumption by a global viewing audience.

 onclusion: Negotiating the Local C and the Global in the Stadium The role of the Camp Nou in facilitating narratives of both Catalan nationalism and global consumption are not mutually exclusive. As FC Barcelona is mobilized to contest meanings and identities tied to Spain and Spanishness and promote Catalan political and cultural identities, the stadium continues to be the primary venue in which this phenomenon is grounded (Shobe 2008a, p. 329). More than being merely reflective of national or place-based identity, the Camp Nou itself continues to be drawn upon to construct ideas about place and nation. And yet the club continues to build a global brand associated with transnational corporations with few or no connections to Catalonia. As the naming rights agreement with Spotify illustrates, the stadium is central to this branding and marketing. Whether the global narratives tied to consumption disrupt or eclipse the role of the stadium as a venue for Catalan political expression is a matter of perspective. El Mundo Deportivo managing editor Josep Maria Artells suggests that the local, family-oriented aspects of the club are not negated by the need to compete with the richest and best-known clubs in the world. He also suggests that many socis and supporters are cognizant of how important the club’s global stature is, “the people understand that Barça needs to be global and needs to be in all the world and needs to be powerful, needs to have a very grand dimension. This I think is compatible with going to the Camp Nou on Sundays with friends or families” (Artells 2004).

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Bibliography Ainaud De Lasarte, J. et al. (1999) Barça Centenario de Emociones: Libro oficial del centenario del FC Barcelona. Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores. Andrews, D. L. & Ritzer, G. (2007) The grobal in the sporting glocal. Global Networks. 7 (2). p. 113–153. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Artells, J.  M. (2004) Managing Editor of El Mundo Deportivo, a Barcelona-­ based daily sport newspaper, at time of interview. Interview by author. Barcelona, March 10. Bairner, A. (2001) Sport, nationalism, and globalization: European and North American perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bale, J. (1994) Landscapes of Modern Sport. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Bale, J. (2003) Sports Geography, Second Edition. New York: Routledge. Bale, J. (2001) Sport, Space and the City, Reprint of First Edition (1993). Caldwell, NJ: The Blackburn Press. Ball, P. (2001) Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football. London: When Saturday Comes Books. Batlle, J.M. (2004) Managing Editor of Sport, a Barcelona-based daily sport Newspaper, at time of interview. Interviewed by author. Barcelona, March 2. Bosher, L. 2022 (April 28). Barcelona to play 2023–24 season in Olympic Stadium due to planned rebuild of Nou Camp. theathlectic.com. https:// theathletic.com/3500090/2022/04/28/barcelona-­to-­play-­2023-­24-­season-­ in-­olympic-­stadium-­due-­to-­planned-­rebuild-­of-­nou-­camp/ [Accessed: 29 August 2022]. Brookes, R. (2002) Representing Sport. London: Arnold. Brown, A. & Walsh, A. (2000) Football Supporters’ Relations with Their Clubs: A European Perspective. Soccer and Society. 1 (3). p. 88–101. Burhan, A. 2022 (April 22). Barcelona Femení Set another Women’s World Record Attendance at Camp Nou. Forbes.com. https://www.forbes.com/ sites/asifburhan/2022/04/22/barcelona-­femen-­set-­another-­womens-­world-­ record-­attendance-­at-­camp-­nou/?sh=16f847c54fc4 [Accessed: 29 August 2022]. Burns, J. (1999) Barça: a people’s passion. London: Bloomsbury. Canut, L. (2004) Television sport journalist for Barcelona-based TV3/TV Catalunya at time of interview. Interviewed by author. Barcelona, April 6. Castells, M. (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the urban-regional process. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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Shaw, D. (1985) The Politics of Futbol. History Today, 35(Aug). p. 38–42. Shaw, L., Gualtieri T. & Bloomberg. 2022 (March 16). Spotify Camp Nou? FC Barcelona will rename its stadium in reported $300 million deal as it tries to climb out of a financial hole. fortune.com. https://fortune.com/2022/03/16/ spotify-camp-nou-fcbarcelona-rename-stadium-300-million-deal-financialhole/ [Accessed: 29 August 2022]. Shobe, H. (2008a) Place, Identity and Football: Catalonia, Catalanisme and Football Club Barcelona, 1899–1975. National Identities. 10 (3). p. 329–343. Shobe, H. (2008b) Football and the Politics of Place: Football Club Barcelona and Catalonia, 1975–2005. Journal of Cultural Geography. 25 (1). p. 87–105. Shobe, H. (2006) Barça; Place, Sport and Globalization: Making Sense of la marca Barça. Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia. p. 259–276. Shobe, H. & Gibson, G. (2017a) Cascadia Rising: soccer, region, and identity. Soccer & Society, 18 (7), p. 953–971. Shobe, H. & Gibson, G. (2017b) Place, Nation, and the Mexico-US Soccer Rivalry: Dual Citizens, Home Stadiums, and Hosting the Gold Cup. In Kassng, J.W. and Meân, L. J. (Eds.) Perspectives on the Mexico Soccer Rivalry, Passion and Politics in Red, White, Blue, and Green. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Sobrequés, J. (2004) Director of the Museum of Catalan History at time of interview. Former Director of the FC Barcelona Board, 1993–2003. Interviewed by author, Barcelona, March 10. Tomás, M. (2004a) La Fundación del FC Barcelona. Unpublished archival document from the FC Barcelona Centre de Documentació. Tomás, M. (2004b) Camp Nou. Unpublished archival document from the FC Barcelona Centre de Documentació. Tuan, Y. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tuan Y. (1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Wagner, J. & Shobe, H. (2017) Identities, scale and soccer supporter groups: the case of the Timbers Army. Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics. 20 (9). p. 1150–1166. Whitson, D. (2001) Hockey and Canadian Identities: From Frozen Rivers to Revenue Streams. In Taras, D. and Rasporich, B. (eds.), A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century. Scarborough, Ontario: Nelson Thompson Learning. Zukin, S. (1991) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

7 Spatial Aspects of Identity Differentiation—Stadiums in Sarajevo Özgür Dirim Özkan

Introduction Slaven,1 29 years old at the time of the interview, who has been one of the leaders of ‘Maniaci’ (The Maniacs) fan group of FK Željezničar from Sarajevo, recognizes the Grbavica Stadium as such: For us Grbavica was like a child who was crashed between two cars. During the war, until the curfew at 10 pm every evening, we were coming together, buying some rakija [a kind of brandy popular in Balkans], and carrying Željo’s [Željezničar’s] flag. (Interview, December 10, 2007)

Grbavica Stadium, the home pitch of FK Željezničar, located in the eponymous Sarajevo quarter was occupied by the Bosnian Serb Army and, being on the frontline, heavily ruined during the war. Koševo Stadium, officially named as Stadion Asim Ferhatovic (Hase) located in the Koševo district, on the other hand, had a different destiny. Being far

Ö. D. Özkan (*) Vadar Consulting, Ankara, Türkiye, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_7

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away from aggressive snipers, training areas around the stadium were used as graveyard for those who died during the Siege of Sarajevo that lasted 1425 days. Both of the stadiums deserve to be recognized as symbolic icons of the war, which is still apparent in the perception of the football fans. In fact, football in general and stadiums as the symbolic icons of the game had always been one of the most important peculiarities of identity construction in the region. During the fall of Yugoslavia, the iconic symbolism of stadiums for the fans was even transformed into emblematic representations of soaring nationalism, where ‘the tribal activity of football following, particularly “hooligan” actions, was transferred from the ends to the trenches’ (Vrcan and Lalić 1999, p. 176).

Football as a Metaphor of War in Yugoslavia Eduardo Galeano argues that football is the dignified form of warfare (Galeano 1998, p. 26). In Yugoslavia, the very dignified football discourse of warfare was commonly exploited by the blossoming fan clubs by the 1980s, just one decade before the Yugoslav wars. Franklin Foer mentions how the symbolic expressions used in newspapers referring to the world of football were easily transferred to frontlines during the war (Foer 2004, p. 21). It might not be surprising that the stadiums were the first spatial contexts which flamed the ongoing warfare following the fall of Yugoslavia. Not only symbolically, but very literally, were fans carried to the trenches. Vrcan and Lalić recall that ‘these absurd soccer warriors turned almost overnight into soldiers in a cruel war. The symbolism of fan aggression was easily transformed, first into aggressive political symbolism, then into military symbolism’ (Vrcan and Lalić 1999, p. 176). During the Yugoslav wars, members of fan groups took an active role in the frontline. Jasminka Udovički mentions that the fall of Yugoslavia was brought about by brutal military force, but the energy needed to utterly dismantle the country was supplied by political ethno-kitsch, that could be found everywhere including the slogans chanted by fans of the favourite national football club Crvena Zvezda (Red Star) (Udovički 2000, p. 1). Tigrovi (Tigers), a paramilitary group organized by the gang

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leader Željko Raznatović (aka Arkan), was the most famous among them, and many members were recruited from members of Delije (a term deriving from the Turkish word for ‘brave’) fan group of Red Star. Tigrovi were recognized guilty of slaughter of thousands of civilian victims in BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina) as well as ethnic rape. Delije was not the only fan group where the fans were mobilized in paramilitary groups during the war. Similar examples were seen among football fans in Croatia and BiH as well. In fact, most often scholars argue that football had a primary role in igniting the bloody civil war in Yugoslav. Giulianotti, like many others, argues that the opening salvoes of the civil war occurred with a match played in Zagreb’s Maksimir Stadium on 13 May 1990 between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star, the former representing the Croatian and the latter the Serbian ‘pride’ (Giulianotti 2003, p. 13). BiH, which can be identified as a condensed model of Yugoslavia itself, was not only the arena of bloody warfare, but also witnessed how football can become a tool for the ethno-politics of nationalist politicians. In fact, the historical sequence of the game was itself shaped under the shadow of ethno-politics in BiH. A glance on to the historical dynamics of football in BiH may give hints about that fact.

 Brief History of Football A in Bosnia and Herzegovina In short, the history of football in BiH can be best analysed by dividing it into three historical sequences, in accordance with the different cultural traits dominating those eras: 1. Football in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Habsburg rule (1878–1918) 2. Football during Yugoslavia (1918–1992) 3. Football in independent Bosnia and Herzegovina (Since 1992)

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F ootball in Bosnia and Herzegovina Under Habsburg Rule Although the Habsburg rule did not last longer than 40 years, its social, economic and cultural legacies are still very much visible in Bosnia. Among many other traits, football was also brought to BiH by Austrian colonizers. Football had an earlier history in the Habsburg Empire, especially in Vienna after English expatriates in 1890s introduced the game to the cosmopolitan urban centres of Central Europe (Duke and Crolley 1999, p. 86). Soon, football in Vienna was able to create its own genre known as ‘The Danubian School’ (Donauschule), or as the  Viennese School, a football tradition emphasizing passing and high technical skills (Duke and Crolley 1999, p. 90). Unsurprisingly, football was brought to BiH by Austrian officers and Zrinjski, the first football team in BiH, was established in 1905 in Mostar as a Bosnian Croat team, followed by the foundation of FK Slavija in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs. As can be seen, football in BiH since the beginning was introduced in a fragmented form determined by ethnic boundaries.

Football in Yugoslavia After the First World War, the Habsburg Empire collapsed and a new state was established in the Western Balkans: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The name of the new state was transformed into ‘Kingdom of Yugoslavia’ (literally the Kingdom of Southern Slavs) following a coup d’état in 1929. Despite the disappearance of the Habsburg Empire and the emergence of the new state, the previous cultural traits continued to survive in BiH. So did football culture. Austrian football was typically dominated by football clubs which were formed by members of the working class (Horak 2001, p.  310). This typical tradition was followed by clubs in the whole Western Balkans, and BiH was no exception. The clubs that were established in BiH after the First World War—namely Radnički (Workers) Lukavac (1921), Rudar (Miner) Ugljevik (1925), Proleter Teslić (1926), Rudar Prijedor (1928) and Rudar Kakanj (1928)—show the signs of this tradition in

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their names, without ignoring the fact that even some clubs like Sloboda Tuzla (1919) or Velež Mostar (1921), which do not carry any explicit reference to their working-class character, were also established by workers. The Second World War inaugurated a new political era in Yugoslavia as was the case all over Central and Eastern Europe, under the newly emerging socialist states. Partisans, commanded by Josip Broz Tito, seized the power after chasing the Nazis from the country and the first thing they did was to deal with the issue of nationalism and nationalist organizations which had taken an active part in the devastation of the country, causing hundreds of thousands of citizens to be massacred just because of their ethnic background. Among many nationalist and fascist organizations were some football clubs who carried the banner of ethnic nationalism such as Zrinjski and Slavija, which were blamed for having collaborated rather with Ustašas (Croatian nationalists who established a puppet Nazi state on Yugoslav territory) or Četniks (Serbian ultra-nationalists), both responsible for massacres committed against people of different ethnic backgrounds. Despite banning those football clubs, Socialist Yugoslavia favoured the blossoming of new football clubs, as well as many social and cultural institutions in all over the country. BiH, having been the base of the Partisan anti-Nazi resistance, thanks to the strategic topography of the Dinaric Alps that provided a safe haven for Tito’s partisans’ guerrilla warfare during the war, enjoyed the establishment of new clubs in 1945 such as Drina Zvornik, Kozara Gradačac, Sutjeska Foča, honouring the legendary Partisan battlefields against the Nazis. New clubs, rather established by workers or by the newly emerging urban elites, mostly connected with the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, were following the tradition of the Danubian School. In addition to this, it also has to be mentioned that sports in general and football in particular were seen as a tool for integration of Yugoslavia by the Yugoslav state, that is by Josip Broz Tito. Sack and Suster mention that, for Tito one of the criteria for measuring the success regarding the Yugoslav project was the public support for the Yugoslav national football team (Sack and Suster 1999, p. 309). Paradoxically, the notion of football itself played an important role in the fall of Yugoslavia. Establishing the

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new national football teams and participating in international competitions were seen as strongly legitimizing symbols for the ex-Yugoslav countries once they had declared independence from Yugoslavia. It was not a surprise that the football match between Croatia and the USA on 17 October 1990 had a high symbolic impact on the international recognition of the Croat state, and was attributed a special importance by Franjo Tudjman, the leader of Croatia on the way to independence, former president of Partizan Belgrade, when he was a colonel in the JNS (People’s Army of Yugoslavia) (Sack and Suster 1999, pp. 313–314). The decade following Tito’s death on 4 May 1980 had been staged with a drastic increase in ethno-politics in Yugoslavia. Unsurprisingly, the 1980s are also known for the establishment of fan clubs all over ex-­ Yugoslavia, among which Dinamo Zagreb’s Bad Blue Boys, Red Star’s Delije (braves) and Partizan’s Grobari (grave diggers) were the most well-­ known. They were also the main actors of the Maksimir incident in Zagreb in 1990, when the match between Red Star of Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb was cancelled because of the fight between fans, football players and the Yugoslav Police’s involvement in the fights. As mentioned above, this incident is often symbolically attributed the role of ‘kick-off’ of the Yugoslav wars, and honoured by a monument dedicated to the fans of Dinamo Zagreb. In Bosnia, FK Sarajevo’s Horde Zla (horde of evils), Željezničar’s Maniaci (the maniacs), Sloboda Tuzla’s Fukare (the poor) and Čelik Zenica’s Robijaši (the prisoners) were established in the same period.

Football in Independent Bosnia and Herzegovina Bosnian football, outperformed during the Yugoslav era, experienced a total devastation after the war. The crises of football in Yugoslavia took the form of a tragedy in BiH, not independent from the tragedy of the Bosnian War in 1992–1995. The Dayton Peace Agreement signed in Paris on 14 December 1995 was meant to end the bloody war in BiH. In fact, it resulted in the construction of a dysfunctional state and a pseudo-­ peace. Instead of reconciliation between ethnic groups, the Dayton Agreement led to the fragmentation of society by social, political and

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economic means, to the legitimization and structuration of the society within ethnic boundaries by constructing official separations between them, making all future reconciliation impossible. Post-Dayton BiH is divided into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska, while the Federation is also divided into ten cantons: Five Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), three Bosnian Croat and two mixed cantons. Within this structure, any social and cultural practice cannot be realized without taking the ethnic boundaries into consideration. This is of course also the case for football. Until the year when Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat football teams got together in 2000, it was not possible to organize a common league. The Bosnian Serb teams were involved by 2002. In contrast to the successful stand of the Bosnian national squad, the Bosnian league is recognized as one of the weakest in Europe and despite a unified league has been in practice for two decades now, football is still subject to ethnic differentiation. Davide Sterchele, a sociologist who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in BiH between 2003 and 2007, argues that inter-ethnic trust was broken by creating separated (mono-ethnic) life-worlds, thus feeling tensions and feeding antagonisms through the propagandistic demonization of the ‘others’ (Sterchele 2014, p.  34). He concludes that religion and football serve for the deeds of nationalists in the country (Sterchele 2007, p. 212): Ethnic hatred, hostility and intolerance therefore have to be considered both as a tool used by the local political and criminal entrepreneurs to feed the war, and as a result of the war itself, rather than simply the cause of the conflict. (Sterchele 2014, p. 34)

Sterchele points out that, following the organization of a united football league in 2002, a certain progress has been made since the previous mono-ethnic teams began to include players from different ethnic backgrounds to their squads, and a progressive shift from ethnic rivalries to traditional local and sport rivalries can be noticed as well. He emphasizes that, just like before the war, the matches between Željezničar and FK Sarajevo draw more attention than the matches played by FK Sarajevo or

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Željezničar against the Bosnian Croat team Orašje or the Bosnian Serb team Leotar (Sterchele 2014, p. 37). Looking at contemporary Bosnian football, the rivalry between football clubs can be distinguished regarding three different social-spatial dimensions: (a) ethnic rivalries, (b) city rivalries and (c) traditional rivalries. Despite the fact that more than a quarter century have passed since the war, ethnic disunity in BiH is a significant determinant in the differentiation between football fans. As mentioned above, with the Dayton Agreement, the cultural differences between ethnic groups, which were exploited by the local politics, were transformed into spatial boundaries. As a result of this, the homeland of the football team would say a lot about the ethnic identity of the club. In this sense, for example Borac Banja Luka, as the team from the Republika Srpska can be definitely known as a team of Bosnian Serbs, where Orašje is a Bosnian Croat team, or Čelik Zenica is a Bosnian Muslim team. Apart from the territorial anchorage of the football club, the logos of teams can tell us whether if the team is a Bosnian Serb or a Bosnian Croat team. Croatian teams certainly place the red-white checkerboard pattern design somewhere on their emblems since it is the national symbol of Croatians. Emblems of Serbian teams are distinguished by the use of Cyrillic alphabet. Football teams of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) on the other hand are teams with emblems that have no red-white chequered patterns, where no Cyrillic alphabet is used and that do not include any national/ethnic signifier. In a sense, Bosnian Muslim teams whose emblems do not include national-religious symbols like hilâl (crescent) and so forth in fact do not exclude other ethnic groups. A significant reason is the inclusive rather than exclusive character of Bosnian nationalism. Bosnian nationalism is constructed through spatial rather than ethnic-religious dynamics and this construction is seen in football fandom as well. Contrary to the general opinion, the majority of acts of violence in football in BiH do not take place between fans with different ethnic identities but more as a reflection of the conflict between the capital city Sarajevo and other cities. Particularly when the teams from Sarajevo play with Čelik, the team of Zenica city, acts of violence are commonly

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witnessed. In the Bosnian league where Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim teams are together, Sarajevo fans consider Čelik as their greatest rival, the team of Zenica city and Sloboda, the team of Tuzla city, both being Bosnian Muslim-intensive settlements. Especially the games played with Čelik are considered by the fans of Sarajevo the most important games. A Željezničar fan being stabbed and killed after a Željezničar-­ Čelik game played in Zenica in 2006 caused the intensity of rivalry to rise further. Although the Željezničar-Čelik competition is not a determinant in the struggle for championship, these are the most popular games in the BiH league, after the Sarajevo derby. Rivalries between football fans that emerge as a reflection of competition between cities are not limited to the teams of Sarajevo and teams of other big cities of Bosnia, but also occur between the teams of these cities as well. For the fans of Mostar, Tuzla and Zenica teams, the games they played with each other have always been regarded as important. On the other hand, the games that the teams of these three cities play with Sarajevo teams are always the most popular fixtures. Football fans of Sarajevo agree on the fact that the football team of Zenica has the fans’ group they hate the most. Compared to Sarajevo and many of the other Bosnian cities, the city of Zenica, located 80 kilometres west of Sarajevo, was not damaged much during the war since it was relatively far away from the front. The city is known as a heavy industrial city and the name ‘Čelik’ comes from the iron and steel plant located here [steel being ‘çelik’ in Turkish]. The name of the fans’ group of Čelik is Robijaši, meaning ‘prisoners’ in Bosnian. This is simply because the biggest prison of BiH is located in Zenica. The contention between the cities of Zenica and Sarajevo is an example of contention that exists in almost every country, between the biggest city and the second biggest city—just think of Marseille and Paris, or Milan and Rome. Since Zenica was away from the frontline, locals of Zenica had expected Zenica to become the capital city after the war, but with Sarajevo not falling, this expectation failed to come true. Sarajevans claim that the inhabitants of Zenica are jealous of them whereas inhabitants of Zenica claim that Sarajevo collects the whole national income and foreign investments and does not share this wealth with the rest of the country, particularly with Zenica.

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Apart from the rivalry based on ethnic identities and the rivalry between Sarajevo teams and those football teams representing other cities, the traditional derby of the capital city rules over all sort of rivalries. A brief glance on football in Sarajevo will give us more hints to understand the dynamics of the Sarajevo Derby.

 he Sarajevo Derby: FK Sarajevo Versus T FK Železničar Several teams were established in Sarajevo during the Habsburg Era. However, following the end of the Second World War and the establishment of Socialist Yugoslavia, only Željezničar survived and the rest, namely Slavija, SAŠK, Djerdzelez, Hajduk and Makabi, were banned for being clubs identified with their ethnic/nationalist claims (Kajan 1999, p. 23). Željezničar was different among those pre-war teams since it was established by railway workers in 1921, without any ethnical principles. Declaring itself as opposed to being a mono-ethnic club, Željezničar was not only subject to financial problems, but was under political pressure as well. However, just after the war in 1946, a new team was established in Sarajevo by the involvement of new city elites and the government officers: SD Torpedo (Sportsko Društvo: Sports Society), which the name transformed into SDM Sarajevo (Sportsko Društvo Metalaca—Metalac [name of the settlement] Sports Society) the following year, and transformed to FK Sarajevo in 1949 (Kajan 1999, p. 22). The city elites and the government officers regarded FK Sarajevo as the football team representing the city and gave support to the team, while Željezničar did not have such an official support. Moreover, Željezničar lost most of the players to Sarajevo, where the new club of the city was enjoying better financial conditions in addition to a vast political support. FK Sarajevo, during the Yugoslav era, was the most successful team of not only in Sarajevo but in the whole ‘Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ winning the Yugoslav championship title twice in 1966/1967 and 1984/1985, and winning the Yugoslav cup twice in 1967

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and 1983, thus representing Yugoslavia several times in European cups (Interno Izdanje Fudbalskog Kluba ‘Sarajevo’ 1983, p. 19). On the other side, Željezničar was relying on their own resources during the Yugoslav era. Giulianotti mentions that in urban rivalries, it is very common that financially weaker team has the potential to be considered as the true representative of the city (Giulianotti 2003, p.  12). Željezničar is no exception to this rule. Despite the official support given to FK Sarajevo, Željezničar garnered support not only from the railway workers, but also from the workers of other industrial plants (Kajan 2003, p. 22). As a result, the club’s destiny of being subject to financial problems because of not being identified with any ethnic group before the war, and not being linked with current politics, made Željezničar stand only on their fans’ support. While FK Sarajevo was the officially supported mainstream team, Željezničar was considered as the ‘public, alternative’ team by the football fans. Despite the lack of financial support, Željezničar thus succeeded to win the Yugoslav championship once in 1971–1972. The trend of organizing fan groups in Yugoslavia was followed by the Sarajevo teams as well. Both fan groups of FK Sarajevo and Željezničar, namely Horde Zla and Manijaci, were organized in the same year: 1987.

The Sarajevo Stadiums Željezničar did not have an own football field before the Second World War. Most often, they used to use the military training pitch ‘Egzercir’ (Kajan 1999, p. 25). After the war, the football pitch of FK Slavija, an ethnic Bosnian Serb football team banned after Second World War, was donated to FK Sarajevo and Željezničar. It was located where the Holiday Inn rises now in Marjin Dvor (which used to be UN quarters during the Sarajevo siege 1992–1995), renamed as ‘6th April Stadium’ honouring the date when Sarajevo was liberated by Partisans from Nazi occupation in 1945 (Kajan 1999, p. 25). For some time, both Sarajevo and Željezničar played their home matches in Skenderija, where the Skenderija Sports Complex is now located in the city centre just a couple of hundred metres from the

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Presidential Palace and the City Council. However, with the voluntary involvement of fans, a new stadium for Željezničar was built in 1953 in Grbavica, next to the rail track connecting Sarajevo to Belgrade. It was also the time when Grbavica was opened to settlement and new dwellings were built for civil servants and government officers (Kajan 2003, pp. 19–20). A new district was arising, with a new stadium constructed by the voluntary labour of the real Sarajevo team! In the meantime, the new stadium officially named ‘The Olympic Stadium’ began to be built in the Koševo valley in 1947 for Olympic purposes, and it was already allocated to FK Sarajevo (Kajan 1999, p.  26). The ‘Koševo’ Olympic Stadium was BiH’s pride in the Balkan Games in 1960, and even more so at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. During the Yugoslav war, both of the stadiums were under the devastating effects of the siege of Sarajevo. The Grbavica settlement, which was recognized as the home of Željezničar, was under occupation by the Bosnian Serb Army (official name: Army of Republika Srspka); during the war Grbavica Stadium was standing just on the borderline of the territories controlled by the Bosnian Serb Army and the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina and was much more damaged because of that. During the invasion of the settlement, not only the Bosnian Muslims but also the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat population of the neighbourhood were living under the same pressure and conditions. The stadium is located at the centre of the settlement whereas the club house of Željezničar and its training facilities are right next to it. Open to fire from both sides, the stadium was destroyed heavily during the war. Both teams suffered from the war, but FK Sarajevo, previously supported by government officers of the Yugoslav era, was now supported by the new government elites of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina and awarded the task to represent the Bosnian nation by organizing friendly matches abroad during the war. On the other side, Željezničar not only lost players during the war, but also lost their stadium, which was under Bosnian Serb Army occupation. However, since Željezničar gradually increased their financial resources, there has been an ongoing improvement of facilities in the Grbavica stadium. There is no doubt that rent income gathered from the shops in the stadium complex affects the financial prosperity, but a second factor is

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even more effective: Edin Džeko. The world famous Sarajevo born football star began his career in the youth team of Željezničar. At each of his transfers, thanks to a clause in his contract according to which Željezničar would get a certain per cent of the transfer fee at every move, the club benefited financially. Džeko, identifying himself as a loyal Željezničar fan, enjoys the honour of helping to improve the conditions of his home team, while Željezničar benefits from the money to improve facilities. Željezničar holds the Bosnia and Herzegovina Premier League titles of 1997/1998 (as the champion of ‘First League of Bosnia and Herzegovina’), 2000/2001, 2001/2002, 2009/2010, 2011/2012 and 2012/2013, and 2015/2016, being the most successful team of Bosnia in the post war era where FK Sarajevo holds the titles of 2006/2007, 2014/2015, 2018/2019, 2019/2020. Especially the earlier three championships won by Željezničar in 1997/1998, 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 attracted many of Sarajevo’s new residents migrated from Eastern Bosnia, escaping from ethnic genocide during the war, where those settlements fell under the administration of Serbian entity by the Dayton Agreement. Since supporting the leading club in the city is seen as a tool for social integration, the newcomers were more on the side of the successful team during those years. On the other side, another factor attracting newcomers to support Željezničar is that, as a result of support of government officers, Sarajevo is perceived as a team representing the Bosniak nation, while Željezničar is more regarded as the urban club, or ‘the club of the city’. The location of the home stadiums of each team is also effective in this perception. While Željezničar plays in Grbavica, which is at the heart of city and part of daily urban life seven days a week, Sarajevo plays its games in Asım Ferhadovic ‘Hase’ Stadium, which is placed one and a half kilometres away from Marshall Tito Avenue, at Koševo Hill. Željezničar fans’ denomination themselves as being the ‘real representatives of the city’ was visually manifested during the 100th year celebrations of the club in 19 September 2021 where the whole city was dominated by the thousands of flambeaus and hundreds of fireworks lit, brightening the city of Sarajevo.2 The long distance of the stadium from city centre prevents Koševo Stadium to be part of daily city life, a component of regular urban life. In this sense, considering the fact that the promise of identity is the

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stronghold of football and one of the reasons of the game’s tremendous popularity, the spatial location of stadiums in the social perception of urban actors becomes a determinant factor in giving the decision on supporting a football club.

Stadiums: A Determinant in Identity Construction During an ethnographic research conducted by the author in 2007/2008 in Sarajevo on ‘Football Fandom as a Factor Behind Formation of Cultural Differences: A Case Study on FK Sarajevo and FK Željezničar Football Fans’, fans’ spatial perception of the home stadiums within the spatial contextualization of city space was given priority. Belongingness to the city and stadium plays an important role in the identity construction process, not only because a stadium is a structure with its back turned to the city (Perelman 2009, p. 49) but also since stadiums play an important role as being places of collective memory (Gaffney 2008, p. 4). As also mentioned by Lefebvre; ‘time and space are not separable within a texture so conceived: Space implies time, and vice versa’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 11). In this sense, stadiums as a spatial formation exist in the very essence of the notion of historical construction of a collective memory. Stadiums do not only play an important role in the construction of fandom identity but also in terms of representing the constructed spatial form by the active involvement of the fans, which transforms the ‘space’ into a ‘place’ of identity. Yi Fu Tuan examines how space is transformed into a place by the involvement of human action and thought (Tuan 1977, p. 8). In this sense, Yi Fu Tuan’s conception of ‘topophilia’ does not only consider a ‘stadium’ in its spatial location in the city sphere, but also as a place which is socially constructed by the fans. Bromberger identifies stadium as a mirror of the city, dreams of a city, the mirror of the marvellous colourfulness of a city (Bromberger 2001, p. 55). In this sense, it can be argued that the stadium is the reflection of the social and cultural structure of the urban space referring to Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as a social product (Lefebvre 1991). For Michel

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de Certeau, it is not only the space which shapes the cultural formations, but also the cultural formations, or to say the social action of human beings is the one which produces the social space. In this sense the stories as forms of narrations which include streets, the buildings of our daily lives play a dominant role on manipulation of space, since the spatial forms are indispensable forms of narrations (de Certeau 1988, p. 119). Grbavica Stadium, the home of Željezničar, being at the centre of the city, not only including the playing pitch, training field and club management, but also including two supermarkets, a pie shop, a grill restaurant, a sports substitutes shop and an electrician’s shop, and a newly constructed sports hall next to it, is not only a ‘public’ space, or a space of everyday life on Sundays, but it also functions as a place of entertainment during the match days. While Grbavica Stadium gives a local perception, a part of everyday urban life, Koševo Stadium is perceived more as a monument rather than a part of everyday life, where fans pay visit to the stadium only on the match days, but Grbavica Stadium is at the heart of daily life. Horne and others mention that: ‘Summer Olympic Games is the mega event with the ability to create, reinforce and consolidate global city status’ (Horne et al. 2013, p. 224). Similarly, Koševo Stadium was the home of the 1984 Winter Olympics, part of a global mega-event, thus being more like a monument of representation of the previous Yugoslav nation, perhaps now the Bosnian nation, but not a place representing the urban inhabitants. Contrary to postmodern claims over time and space dimensions, the power of spatial references and historical imagination is still valid in constructing local identities in Sarajevo. However, the number of fans following the local matches decrease in Sarajevo, while the postmodern face of football fandom shows in the increasing support to internationally recognized football teams like Barcelona, Liverpool, Manchester United, Real Madrid and so on. Football fans are becoming more likely to follow the matches of those globally recognized teams where ‘globalization gradually erases distinctive localities and local identities’ (Bramham and Wagg 2009, p. 1). Referring to Bourdieu, Gratton and Henry claim that ‘sport as a popular cultural form, not directly associated with the old industrial politics of class, tends to lend itself to postmodern policies’ (Gratton and

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Henry 2001, p. 7). In this sense, the decreasing support to local competition might not be surprising. However, those who still insist on supporting local competition do also shape a form of resistance against postmodern cultural forms as well, since spatial forms in identity formation are still valid in local rivalries. It is not coincidental that the first appearance of postmodernism was in architecture. As Edward Soja claims, the success of postmodern social transformation is very much subject to its success in spatial and architectural transformation (Soja 1990, p.  113). In this sense, both Grbavica and Koševo stadiums in Sarajevo are free of postmodern spatial re-­ organization and still regarded as references for local identities. In spite of the main trend in many metropolises, neither Grbavica nor Koševo have been in the process of a spatial reform until now. Which does not mean that they will never be part of it. On the other side, a few years ago, an extension was constructed to the eastern terraces of Grbavica Stadium, where a legendary locomotive had been standing for decades, symbolizing the identity and the history of the club. The locomotive is not only a symbol included in the chants and banners of the team, it was actually part of the game standing proudly in the stadium. However, in order to respect UEFA standards, the club management decided to renovate the eastern terrace of Grbavica Stadium, which had been closed a decade ago by UEFA for not being within European standards. In addition to that, Željezničar could only play friendly matches in Grbavica, but no official matches in European competitions, so they played the official UEFA matches in the ‘enemy’ territory in Koševo. The construction of Eastern tribune was finished by April 2017 when the new stadium was inaugurated with the official match between Željezničar and Sloboda Tuzla. During the opening ceremony, Ivica Osim, the legendary ex-player and ex-trainer of Željezničar, as well as the last trainer of the national football team of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, passed away in 1 May 2022, expressed his enthusiasm to see the club playing on a pitch with high standards.3 When he was giving his short speech in the ceremony, the fans were cheering their chants for Željo, showing no interest in the famous player and trainer. Since then, not only Željezničar

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has played European matches in Grbavica, but also the national football team of Bosnia and Herzegovina has played five official matches there. As mentioned above, postmodern forms of identity find their reflections in Sarajevo, too. One can easily find a fan of Real Madrid who may never have been to Spain, who may have never watched a match of Real Madrid in a stadium. You can meet fanatic supporters of Manchester United who have never seen a match of the Red Devils with their own eyes. On the other side, both the fans of FK Sarajevo and Željezničar continue to claim quite distinct identities with the aim to differentiate from each other. Is this claim still true? During the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2007/2008 in Sarajevo, when looking through the dynamics of identity formation and cultural differentiation, we were able to affirm that both Sarajevo and Željezničar fans show absolute similarities in their perception of gender, lifestyle and family values and they both have similar dynamics in organizing sub-groups. As a matter of fact, neither of the fan groups claims that they differentiate from each other in those aspects. However, level of education and income level are disputed subjects where each of the fan groups claims that they are better educated or they are coming from a higher social class, for which neither qualitative nor quantitative research provided any evidence. An ordinary Bosnian or an ordinary inhabitant of Sarajevo, if asked, would distinguish two fan groups according to their ethnic and political structure. The general prejudice is that Sarajevo fans are more nationalist, right-wing and ethnically heterogeneous, whereas Željezničar fans are more ethnically mixed, left-wing and less nationalist. However, no scientific evidence could be provided in reality during the aforementioned study. Even though it is true that there are more Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat fans among Željezničar fans, compared to those of Sarajevo, their existence in the stadium can be identified as marginal, as they compose a visible existence neither in the stands of Koševo, nor in Grbavica. In fact, during the research it could be seen that some fans and/or some inhabitants of Sarajevo are aware that there are no significant cultural, political or economic differences between the two fan groups any more. It appears that historical constructions do continue to exist as imagined constructions, and collective memory and collective imagination still play important roles. Without doubt, spatial narrations play a primordial part in establishing identities founded in collective memory.

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Notes 1. Nickname used to protect individual privacy of the respondent. 2. For celebrations of 100th jubilee of Željezničar see: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=GLoGB6nXbr4 “Manijaci 1987—100 GODINA FK ZELJEZNICAR” (Uploaded: September 20th, 2021, accessed: September 25th, 2022). 3. For Ivica Osim’s speech in opening ceremony of Grbavica Stadium at April 1, 2017, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue=95&v=M59-­RdBxkqg “Svečano otvaranje istočne tribine na Grbavici i govor Ivice Osima” (Uploaded: April 1st, 2017, accessed: September 25th, 2022).

Bibliography Bramham, Peter and Wagg, Stephen. 2009. Sport, Leisure and Culture in the Postmodern City, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishers). Bromberger, Christian. 2001. ‘Stadyumdaki Kent: Marsilya’nın Kültürel ve Toplumsal Topografyasının Aynası Olarak Olympique’ (The City in the Stadium: Olympique as the Mirror of Marseille’s Cultural and Social Topography) in R. Horak et al. (ed.) Futbol ve Kültürü: Takımlar, Taraftarlar, Endüstri, Efsaneler (Football and Its Culture: Teams, Fans, Industry and Legends), 3rd edn (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları), pp. 41–57. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life (California: University of California Press). Duke, Vic and Crolley, Liz. 1999. Football, Nationality, and the State, (New York: Wesley Longman Ltd.). Foer, Franklin. 2004. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York: Harper Collins Publishers). Gaffney, Christopher Thomas. 2008. Temples of the Earthbound Gods, (Austin: University of Texas Press). Galeano, Eduardo. 1998. Gölgede ve Güneşte Futbol (Football Under Shadow and Sun), 2nd edn, (Istanbul: Can Yayınları) Giulianotti, Richard Football. 2003. A Sociology of the Global Game, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gratton, Chris and Ian Henry. 2001. Sport in the City: The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration, (London: Routledge)

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Horak, Roman. 2001. ‘Viyana’da Futbol Kültürü: İngilizce Başlangıcından Avusturyalı Gelişmeye’ (Football Culture in Vienna: From English Beginning to Austrian Development) in R. Horak et al. (ed.) Futbol ve Kültürü: Takımlar, Taraftarlar, Endüstri, Efsaneler (Football and Its Culture: Teams, Fans, Industry and Legends), 3rd edn, (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları), pp. 305–313. Horne, John et  al. 2013. Understanding Sport: A Socio-Cultural Analysis. (London: Routledge). Interno Izdanje Fudbalskog Kluba ‘Sarajevo’. 1983. Kratak Istorijat FK Sarajevo (od 1946 do 31.12.1982), (Sarajevo: GRAS Sarajevo). Kajan, Dževad. 1999. Sarajevski Derbi: 74 Prvenstvene Utakmice 1954–1999, (Sarajevo: Mediapress). Kajan, Dževad. 2003. Tandem, (Sarajevo: Roll Commerce). Lefebvre, Henry. 1991. The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers). Perelman, Marc. 2009. Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, (London: Verso). Sack, Allen L. and Suster, Zeljan. 1999. ‘Soccer and Croatian Nationalism: A Prelude to War’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24 (3), 305–320. Sterchele, Davide. 2014. ‘Fertile Land or Mined Field? Peace-building and Ethnic Tensions in post-War Bosnian Football’ in J. Hughson and F. Skillen (ed.) Football in Southeastern Europe: From Ethnic Homogenization to Reconciliation, (London: Routledge), pp. 31–51. Sterchele, Davide. 2007. ‘The Limits to Inter-Religious Dialogue and Form of Football Rituals: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Social Compass, 54 (2), 211–224. Soja, Edward W. 1990. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso). Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press). Udovički, Jasminka. 2000. ‘Introduction’, in J. Udovički and J. Ridgeway (ed.) Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia, (Durham: Duke University Press), pp. 1–11. Vrcan, Srđan and Lalić, Dražen. 1999. ‘From Ends to Trenches and Back: Football in the Former Yugoslavia’ in G. Armstrong and R. Giulianotti (ed.) Football Cultures and Identities (London, Macmillan Press).

8 Pitch Fever: Swedish Football and the Politics of Grass Katarzyna Herd

Introduction In Sweden, like everywhere else around the world, the football pitch is a recognizable design with its shape, white lines and shades of green grass, that has to be approved by national football associations. UEFA issues guidelines on standards of grass that shall appear in stadiums. The football season in Sweden is from spring to autumn, unlike most European countries that play from autumn to spring, and the early spring months in Sweden are filled with worried discussions about pitches, their quality and colour. Considerable amount of time and energy is spent every year regarding not only the quality of the grass, but also the type—natural, artificial and hybrid grass. In this chapter, I shall focus on the pitch as a crucial element of the game that is intertwined in many narratives surrounding football. Based

K. Herd (*) Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_8

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on research in the Swedish top-tier football league, named Allsvenskan, I shall present conflicting discourses that appear whenever grass is considered. The grass discussions often take a wider, political turn and reflect attitudes towards developments in modern football. The main problem, as perceived by supporters, is the growing number of artificial pitches. In spite of strong critical voices, green plastic carpets keep being rolled out around Sweden. Thus, grass has become a point of pride, protest and almost ideological fight against an elusive enemy of traditional football, as artificial pitches are seen by many as harmful for Swedish football. While tracing the grass discussions, I shall focus on the broader social meanings ascribed to grass and conflicts revolving around it. The presented ethnological study is based on ethnographic material gathered through individual interviews, observations, focus groups, internet ethnography (netnography), photos, football chat (an informal version of an interview) and phone interviews in a course of six years (Ehn and Löfgren 1996; Fangen and Sellerberg 2011; Kaijser and Öhlander 2011; Davies 2008).1 The core of the data was collected between 2014 and 2018 and used primarily in my PhD dissertation about producing history in Swedish football (Herd 2018). The informants’ voices presented here include supporters, players, club officials, a journalist and a person working professionally with football pitches. The data has been mostly collected from fans, players and employees of four clubs: AIK, Djurgårdens IF, Malmö FF and Helsingborgs IF. Three complementary interviews (two on the phone) were conducted in March 2019, together with internet ethnography.2 The ethnography of football allows to follow individual engagement that reflects broader social context. While the narratives are selective, they express the understanding presented by narratologist David Herman who regarded a narrative as: a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change—a strategy that contrasts with, but is in no way inferior to, ‘scientific’ modes of explanation that characterize phenomena as instances of general covering laws. (Herman 2009, p. 2)

The focus of my work on Swedish football was initially not on grass, but as more interviews and observations were collected, it became apparent how much attention was given to the pitch and how it went beyond

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its physical features. The discourses oscillate around the issues of (a) tradition and history; (b) safety and young players; (c) environmental concerns; (d) economic developments in football. This chapter presents an analysis of a number of voices from Swedish football, and the ethnography reveals personal narratives and attitudes reflecting bigger questions and issues of globalized football on a local, contextualized level. Bale and Philo, referring to the work of Henning Eichberg, commented on the modernistic properties of stadiums, their straight lines, seclusion and segmentation that Eichberg noticed and juxtaposed such structures with labyrinths (1998, p.  12). The clear-cut design of modern stadiums makes the grass discussion all the more intriguing.

Spring 2019—The Plastic Is Coming Football in Sweden is played from spring to autumn, which means that it does not follow the pattern of most European countries. When most leagues play their final matches, Sweden only begins. At the first game of 2019, in the first round of the national cup, previous year’s champions AIK played on their home arena temporarily fitted with an artificial pitch (waiting for the natural one). Their supporters came with a massive banner stating: Allsvenskan 2019: 135 matches on plastic. 105 matches on grass. Worthy of Swedish football? (field notes, 16 March 2019)

According to the estimate presented online, in the season of 2019 ten out of sixteen clubs in the highest league played on artificial turf. This trend has lasted about 14 years since in 2005 the first Allsvenskan club, IF Elfsborg, decided against natural grass in their newly built arena. An interviewed supporter said: When they were building the new arena in Borås there was no artificial grass at all. Now there is like 13 at least. (interview with Lucas, 13 March 2019)

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IF Elfsborg tends to be blamed for introducing plastic into the Swedish top league. In recent years a sort of conflict has developed, as several top-­ league teams have started playing on artificial grass, for example IF Elfsborg in Borås, Hammarby IF and Djurgårdens IF in Stockholm. The usage of plastic pitches has been backed by a narrative stating that Sweden is a cold country and artificial grass makes it possible to play outside even in February or March. The counter-narrative is usually constructed around the notion that all clubs used to have real grass all over Sweden before and it was fine even without modern technology. Criticism of modern football appears alongside nostalgia for bygones, locating the ‘golden age’ of green pitches in the past. Another interviewed fan, Daniel, mentioned bluntly that Borås is actually in southern Sweden, alluding to the discourse that Sweden has a harsh, cold climate, yet he took into consideration the length of the country and apparent closeness of Borås to the southern shore, which is about 300 kilometres away (interview with Daniel, 14 March 2019). The quality of a pitch is of course vital for football; and criticizing another club’s arena is a common insult. The dichotomies of real versus artificial, traditional versus new, natural versus plastic are strongly spelled out in the grass discussions. The ideological conflicts are then extended to the pitch. A slogan ‘football is played on grass’ appears often, especially when one is confronted with an artificial pitch. Before a league match against IF Elfsborg, the supporters club Black Army, connected to the Stockholm club AIK, posted a picture in April 2016 on their Facebook page with simple instructions of how to grow grass and a statement: ‘Information for Elf-whining; football is played on grass!’ The message indicates that it is easy to have a real pitch and that real football needs one, not a plastic turf. AIK’s ‘own’ grass at the Friends Arena has been criticized as being poor, brown and making the game horrible. A player from another Stockholm club Djurgårdens IF brought up the subject in an interview: Interviewer: How do you feel about DIF’s new arena? Kristofer: Tele2? Interviewer: Yeah.

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It is a fantastically good arena. One of Europe’s best in its class. Also with the acoustics … comparing to Friends Arena …. So the sound is better here? Oh yes. And of course there is the thing about the grass … but I would rather have the artificial grass we have at Tele2 than the grass at Friends that is never good really. So we have a much better arena than AIK have actually. (6 March 2015)

Kristofer mentioned sound quality, a feature that is regarded as necessary for a good match. He talked about grass and AIK had nothing to be proud of, in his opinion.3 The internet picture made by Black Army shows the ideal that is hard to achieve. Grass is often brought to arenas and assembled inside before a season begins. Black Army’s message is based on a construction that to some extent ignores practices present in football. AIK’s relation to grass, meaning AIK’s supporters as well as officials, seems to be influenced by the loss and demolition of their home arena Råsunda, which was AIK’s beloved stadium from 1937 to 2012. One of the banners at their new arena has the text ‘Råsunda’s grass now grows in heaven’ (see Herd 2018, pp. 144–158). When the stadium was officially closed and then turned to rubble, Råsunda and its green pitch emerged as a nostalgic spiritual hybrid of resistance and memory. The mention of grass strongly connects materiality with spirituality. Grass in a sense is immortal. As long as natural conditions are favourable, it will just keep growing. Individual blades of grass together make a strong structure that enables the game to take place, just as individual supporters make a wall of songs and emotions that makes football happen. The metaphor is both simple and powerful. The organic component of the stadium structure got spiritual life through collective memory. One hears now and then about fans buying small pieces of pitches when grass is changed or the structure renovated. I was told in an informal conversation that a person had a friend with one such piece of grass that was planted in their garden and it is carefully looked after (field notes 2016). Another story claimed that this piece of turf started to smell so it

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was thrown away after some time (field notes 2017). Players touch the pitch when starting the game or make the sign of the cross when stepping on the grass. They sometimes kiss it after scoring a goal. There are certain rituals embedded in the very function of the pitch. The sport sociologist Richard Giulianotti writes about football in an African context: ‘The rituals include wearing charms on fingers or toes, urinating on the field, smearing players’ faces with the blood of sacrificed animals, or burying the latter beneath the pitch’ (1999, p. 20). Northern European football may not be as explicit with its performing rites, but they are present and play a vital role. Old clubs with history and heritage use elements like ‘real grass’ as a form of capital to be weighed against nouveau riche clubs bought by wealthy investors and representing the new, ‘plastic’ form of football that is money-centred and focused on quick success. Grass in the Swedish context is used to a similar effect. It needs time and care, it is a living organism and it connects players and fans to the environment. It stresses the ‘olden days’, the mythical time when grass was green naturally all over Sweden. Stadiums as architectural structures become histories. Simultaneously, they create and interpret an identity of a fan as a city-­ dweller (Kayser Nielsen 1995, p. 31). The clubs who fight for their grass maintain tradition.

Plastic Solutions to Natural Problems Although the nostalgic discourse appears strong, it seems, nevertheless, problematic to grow a good pitch. Modern arenas are somehow not grass-­ friendly. In several discussions with football officials I was informed that the shape of stadiums that are closed structures prevents grass from growing evenly. One person said it was because the wind could not sweep the place freely, and he pondered on how that was needed to make the grass grow (interview with Linus, 15 August 2012). I was informed that when IF Elfsborg got their artificial pitch, fans from MFF came to the away match with seeds and threw them on the arena, thus making a strong point in contrasting the growing, living thing with a factory-made structure (field notes 2014). Later, when

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interviewing another fan, he told me the same story, adding that a year later supporters of Helsingborgs IF came to Elfsborg’s home ground with water, and watered the seeds that MFF fans planted a year before (interview with Daniel, 14 March 2019). The narrative acquires the characteristics of an event, as expressed by Phelan and Rabinowitz who regarded a narrative as ‘a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience’ (2012, p. 3). The meaning is caught in the experience of the tale as the comical effect serves the purpose of reflection. The development of the story suggests that it is used to make sense of the situation when artificial replaces natural (Stewart 1989). It has become a kind of a ‘running gag’, where supporters of rival clubs, with a long history of conflict and even physical fights, acknowledge each other’s actions and complement them. That results in creating a common understanding, or rather a form of agreement between the groups on how to deal with the situation. Mockery and laughter accompany a protest against plastic turf. Those two teams, Malmö FF and Helsingborgs IF, are both from the southernmost region in Sweden. They have only had natural grass and strongly agitate for it. Voices from other parts of the country often have a bitter undertone as the geographical position favours southern teams when it comes to grass. A person responsible for maintaining artificial pitches in Borås commented: When they built the new arena 2006 then they made a decision about artificial grass. It was chosen because one can use it for many years and many more hours per year. You can use natural grass for about 200 hours, and plastic about 2000 hours. It was so when it was built it was planned that many different clubs and teams would use it. (…) If you want natural grass then you compromise the season, it is going to be shorter. You can play like April to October. And the cup is already played in February. Last spring was really bad, so other clubs asked for permission to use our pitch because they could not use theirs. It is Malmö-Lund that has good grass (…). If Malmö wants to play on natural grass only they are welcome to join the German league, it is similar climate (laughs). (interview with Elias, 11 March 2019)

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In an interview from 2014 a person working for Helsingborgs IF remarked sarcastically about the football conditions: The weather is a problem too. We can play until December here. See, it’s all beach and sunny (laughs long and loud). (interview with Filip, November 2014)

Needless to say, the interview with Filip took place on a cold, wet and windy November morning. The quote was part of a list of problems in Swedish football, which he identified as too much control from the governing bodies. He finished with the weather and the fact that many Swedish supporters regarded the south of Sweden as lucky in having favourable weather conditions for playing football. Both of my informants, Elias and Filip, laughed at the end of their utterances when providing an evaluation to the requirements of flawless pitches. The laughter indicates distance, irony and reflection towards the reality versus the ideal. Several people, supporting different teams, pondered in interviews about expectations and demands from the governing bodies, like the Swedish Football Association and UEFA.4 For instance, Daniel remarked: ‘It has become so professional, so much money is in it’ (14 March 2019). The push for quality, as expressed by the Danish historian Niels Kayser Nielsen, meant that ‘[t]he stadium is gradually becoming an isotropic landscape, aimed at identical conditions for production of achievements’ (1995, p. 24). Money and economic developments are a constant worry to Swedish supporters. Tradition, heritage and history became ideological weapons against massive monetary investments that can push clubs without social capital to success, which, for some of my informants, jeopardized the very value and meaning of football (Herd 2018, pp. 99–133). Artificial grass became, as my informant Daniel remarked, a quick solution for many municipalities, yet maybe not much cheaper: When the plastic came, it was like everyone was in a rush, the municipalities for example. (…) Because it was supposed to be cheaper. (…) It became a fashion almost. Usually the municipalities are not that quick with

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changes, but in that case they were onboard. (…) It is municipalities that own arenas, I think Malmö FF is the only one that owns their stadium, probably one of the very few anyway. (14 March 2019)

Daniel pointed out the structural dependence that clubs face. The cities and towns are legal owners of arenas. Football is dependent on local politics as well as budgets, and playing football is expensive. Hence, artificial pitches were supposed to be an answer to the problem of high-­ maintenance costs of natural grass. When asked about problems in Swedish football, one supporter, after praising the Bundesliga as the best league in the world, remarked: Problems … well you can say hooligans, but it goes down and there are not that many incidents, it is history mostly, it used to be like that in the past … so why this dark picture? The real problem is the artificial grass, and the referee level is really uneven. The economic requirements are too high, SvFF [Svenska Fotbollförbundet—Swedish Football Association] is just strange, and then clubs end up with debts. (interview with Kristian, 28 April 2016)

Artificial pitches have to be changed often, and the costs are not much lower than for natural grass, which was pointed out by my informants. In other words, the logic presented when plastic was introduced does not hold, but the discourse seems strong enough to motivate municipalities to invest in more artificial pitches, though some already started banning new artificial ones, as expressed in some informal conversations (filed notes 2019). The discussion highlights how Swedish football is caught in its locality and how decisions are dependent on some of the voices, but perhaps not all of them. The pitch plays a special role in constructing failure and success, glory and suffering. The pictures painted in interviews make a clear distinction between genuine and artificial, real and unreal. Quoting the sociologist Dorothy Smith, one can comment that ‘the rules, norms, information, observations, etc., presented by the teller of the tale are to be treated by the reader/hearer as the only warranted set’ (Smith 1978, p.35). It is how the teller presents the tale that facilitates its interpretation.

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As an alternative, the golden middle ground, hybrid grass is often brought into the discussions. The so-called hybrid grass makers, for example Desso Grass Master,5 state on their website that they are perfecting the natural sport pitch. It is considered a great thing, demanded by fans in Sweden. One person strongly advocated for it and asked rhetorically why clubs would be so stupid not to invest in such pitches, as it was not more expensive than the plastic carpets they had already (field notes 2016). That grass is a mix of artificial blades and real ones being planted around them. The degree of ‘realness’ or ‘naturalness’ is disputable and the approach is pragmatic. Faced with the inevitability of ‘plastic’, one might at least opt for a hybrid. A person working with artificial grass remarked that the hybrid does not solve many problems, and instead adds new ones: Hybrid grass is natural grass with support. It’s not like you can start playing earlier or anything like that. It’s a plastic carpet with grass basically. You can play more hours on it yes. But hybrid is going to get harder, it is not aired like just grass, you cannot use normal mowers on it because you are going to destroy the plastic. It is not true that it is in the middle between plastic and natural, it is natural grass anyway. (interview with Elias, 11 March 2019)

Still, fans root for the hybrid. One argument is many European leagues use hybrid, which would bring Swedish football closer to them (interview with Daniel, 14 March 2019). The hybrid appears as the ideal solution in some narratives, but it is also regarded as expensive, bringing football back to the discussion about resources. The plastic-natural dichotomy has another costly dimension that includes players, youth players and the style of the game.

Children Growing on Green Plastic In 2016, the Swedish football magazine Offside promoted the English Premier League, stressing that football has been played there on real grass since 1994, thus being ‘100% plastic-free’. The quality of English football seems to be reflected in the quality of the pitches according to this

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advertisement strategy in Sweden, where a growing number of top clubs opt for artificial turf, or rather the municipalities do, having in mind other users than Allsvenskan teams, and grounding the logic in youth development. The biggest advantage of artificial grass is its durability. It can be used for many more hours and also in cold winter months. Also, it can be used by many clubs and youth teams. Elias said during the interview: They [Swedish Football Association] are convinced that the artificial pitches helped the youth football and made it better because now they can play all year round and so the kids are better than 10 years ago. (…) Young players think that it is natural to play on plastic, they have grown with it. It is the older players that talk about a feeling, that there is more feeling when you play on natural grass. I do not know what they are talking about. Is it so good with bad, uneven real grass when the ball can go wherever? (interview with Elias, 11 March 2019)

From the quote above one can see the textuality of a changing pattern when artificial becomes ‘natural’ as youth players often develop their playing skills on plastic grass. Hence, they are not as critical towards the change taking place within Swedish football. However, this shift alarmed some supporters. First, young Swedish players could face an obstacle in playing in Europe as most pitches there are natural grass and Swedish youths might be regarded as not having enough experience on natural grass. Such a statement was disputed by other fans. Yet, there have been concerns about the well-being of players and the impact artificial pitches have on their bodies. In its official guidelines, UEFA included photos of poor grass maintenance that could cause injuries (UEFA Pitch Quality Guidelines 2018, p. 53).6 The pitch is important to players. Kristofer, a player from Djurgårdens IF, brought grass to the fore once again: Interviewer: What would be good to change in Swedish football? Kristofer: Just that more Swedish players would get to Europe and play there … so we need to have grass at all the arenas in Sweden.

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Interviewer: Real grass? Kristofer: Oh yes. The whole of Europe plays on real grass. We have to do that too. Then we have to have the same match tempo and the same season as in the rest of Europe. We should play like most of Europe autumn to spring instead of spring to autumn. And not like having the vacation in December and January when the national team plays. Then they are in full season and we are on vacation. I think we need to do that. (06 March 2015) Kristofer, like many supporters, was critical of developments in Swedish football. The artificial pitches were discussed, criticized and framed in a narrative that relates to the past ideal. Although the clubs choose artificial grass because it is supposed to save money, supporters look at it differently. Members of the HIF supporter club Kärnan regarded grass as one of the principles in modern football: Alex:

But it is important to us anyway that football should be played on real grass. Interviewer: And it is really common right now, the artificial grass. Alex: Yes, and it is just horrible. But we have a clear stand about it […]. Robin: I think you lose something; you lose some value in football, something that you probably cannot describe in purely economic terms. Alex: And we actually think often, that other supporters … that they just accept without protesting really. If you heard that together with the renovations Olympia would get plastic grass then you would have demonstrations outside the arena (laughs). You would have a hundred people screaming in front of the city hall that they can’t do it. Robin: You can’t really put it so that it can’t happen in Helsingborg. Alex: No no … of course not. Robin: It is an important principle for us. And you need principles in football as well. (16 February 2015)

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The ethical, moral meaning of the pitch was spelled out strongly. Grass becomes an objective in the ideological struggle between old and new, natural and artificial. Nature in the form of green blades is transformed into a surface of cultural meanings (Damsholt and Simonsen 2009, p. 17). Football used to be played in mud and snow, even at quite a high international level. Nowadays, clubs are punished by UEFA if their pitches do not meet required standards. The materiality of the pitch takes on a processual, relational and performative character (Damsholt and Simonsen 2009, p. 14). It is not only a surface required for playing a match. It is an element in the network that influences history and is influenced by history. It contributes to the narrative-making as a pitch can enhance a victory or be blamed for failure. In the 2016 season, some teams, it was claimed, were already playing better on the artificial grass than the others. The disappointed comments based on the statement that ‘football is played on real grass’ contributed to the framing of this rather new challenge in Swedish football7 (field notes 2016). The grass, or lack of such, could potentially influence match results. The grass can be described as one of the actants in a narrative, acting in a context that is present around it and generating new impulses that cause action. The agency given to the grass comes up in the narrative form; grass is ‘talked to life’ (Hébert 2019, p. 73; Herman 2005, p. 1).8 The term ‘actant’ has been used in narrative theory to describe the relation of the subject and object of a tale and the possible exchange of their positions. When agency is attributed to the pitch, it becomes an active element in the network, contributing to the speed, the style of the game, to scoring and conceding goals, at least in the opinion of my informants (interview with Kristian, 28 April 2016). The emotional evaluations focus on animated grass; it grows; it needs soil, water and sun. It is vulnerable to the seasonal changes and weather. Just like players, it is always there, always performing the same function, and yet different, renewed and replanted, rejuvenated from one season to another. According to the linguist Algirdas Greimas, the total of six possible actants in narratives can be arranged in three oppositions. The grass in the football narrative could follow the distinction of helper–opponent (Hébert 2019, p. 71). The grass helps or creates problems, enhances or

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threatens the game. It is given life in the way it is described and referred to. Its immediate materiality/activity on the pitch is transformed in narratives that produce history. When enclosed behind stadium walls, trampled match after match, grass needs all the possible technological help to stay green and strong. As Smith pointed out, ‘The actual events are not facts. […] A fact is something which is already categorized, which is already worked up so that it conforms to the model of what that fact should be like’ (1978, p. 35). It is a hybrid of the ideal, of nature’s possibilities and limitations, and of the game’s requirements. This layering exemplifies the very character of football, its hybridity that connects the real with the unreal, the artificial with genuine, emotions with economy. The meaning of grass stretches far beyond the pitch. It ties into the discussions of modernization, historical developments and the intrinsic character of football. Dorothy Smith argued that ‘social rules and definitions of situations can be viewed as if they provided a set of instructions for categorizing responses’ (1978, p.  38). While talking about grass, fans talk it through, making it an actant that is relevant and displays agency. It can be both a chivalric figure and a villain, depending on the narration and on the narrative produced.

The Pitch and the Climate Questions The pitch is affected by the technological and structural developments that have entered modern football. Clubs take into consideration international requirements, and the responsibility for the playable pitch stretches far beyond stadiums’ walls. In addition, playing cup and training matches is tricky in early spring and the surface has to be acceptable. As artificial components on the pitch have become gradually more and more acceptable, more clubs considered this option, provoking judgements and critical opinions. It appears that the current environmental debates and concerns found their way into Swedish football and imposed themselves as both the main topic and a tool to discuss grass. The preparation for the 2019 season has resulted in a rather new dimension of the discussion concerning artificial pitches. A new level of

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logic and reasoning was added to the fierce protests against the increasing number of ‘plastic carpets’: it is not good for nature and it is harmful for soil and water. An article emerged, claiming that the high plastic pollution in water was due to the number of artificial pitches using black plastic granulate (microplastic) that would then end up in water and thus severely polluting the environment (Sydsvenskan 8 December 2016).9 Echoes of that narrative were still heard in 2019, when my informants remarked that ‘It is also an environmental question, it is not good for environment’ (interview with Lucas, 13 March 2019) or ‘There is an environmental aspect to it, it is dangerous for the environment’ (interview with Daniel, 14 March 2019). Daniel, during our meeting, had a story of snow being taken from an artificial pitch and being black, not white, because of the black granulate used on the pitch. He told it to exemplify how dangerous plastic grass was, as snow was turning black on it. The strong colour imaginary highlights the contrast of natural and artificial, as my interviewee wished to provide an account supporting natural and/or hybrid grass. His tale was based on emotional responses and an interpretation suggested in the presentation, as black and white imaginary demarcates the boundary of good and evil. The counter-narrative—not to disregard the plastic just because it is plastic—was provided by a person working directly with artificial pitches. Time and again he argued for the practical side of things, steering the narrative from the ideal, romantic, traditional path to the everyday realities and pressure of modern football. About the environmental issues he said: There was this nature research, they looked at microplastic in the sea, and it was a lot. So they started thinking where it came from and they asked how many artificial pitches there are in Sweden, and then asked how much of the granulate they use per year. The answer is well, 8-10 tons, and yes, it is a lot but you take for granted that all of it goes to the sea, which is not true. Like plastic in nature is not good but how about car tires? How about how much they contribute. And of course you can reuse them, we use them on the pitches. So it is not a bigger problem than anything else. (interview with Elias, 11 March 2019)

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It would appear that the grass narrative pulls all possible resources— emotional engagement, tradition rhetoric, physical safety and ecological concerns. Analysing the ‘historical sense’ of a stadium, Bale and Gaffney remarked: ‘Every stadium event is a historical experience’ (2004, p. 34). The pitch development is also a historical experience. It sits uneasily with supporters, although they are not immediate users of it. They just watch. However, the sense of the experience, transmitted through collective memory (see Halbwachs 1992) and media, proved to be hard to translate from natural to artificial. Rather than help to develop the football narrative, the plastic pitch seems to provoke different strategies to cope with it. As for now, it has not been absorbed or incorporated into the Swedish football logic, although it is used. Weaving the artificial pitch into a broader environmental discourse shapes it into a bigger problem than just muscle pains for players. It allows tellers of the tale to make it into an issue for a bigger public and thus possibly act against it.

Conclusions The historian Niels Kayser Nielsen remarked about constructions of modern stadiums: ‘The urban production of simultaneousness, and the homotopic production of space, play the part of handwriting, that is, as a rational ordering of elements which stand in relation to each other’ (1995, p. 26). Yet, the homogenizing process produces antagonistic narratives and colliding views that escape sameness and result in creative conflicts that allow for a broader discussion than just grass. Every story needs a stage on which it takes place, and also protagonists. As presented in the analysis, grass can play different roles in Swedish football, and simultaneously reflect global questions about equality, quality of football, tradition and history, football development and environmental concerns. A question I asked many times was why the artificial pitches have to be green. The answers varied from laughter accompanying statements like ‘supporters would burn them otherwise’, to ‘it is a romantic picture of the grass’ or ‘there are regulations to be followed’. The so-­ called mallification of football, that is the consumer approach that places the game within the realms of experience economy, is visible in colossal

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shopping malls constructed next to new arenas, but also in the uniformity of modern stadiums that need to be comfortable, warm, family-­ friendly and spacious (Giulianotti 1999, p. 83; Hellspong 2013, p. 105). Although the goal is a neat layer of even, playable grass, both fans and players, as well as officials, struggle with accepting the ultimate solution of modernity—green grass produced in factories. Elias, during the interview, mentioned that there was an idea in Borås that the new artificial pitch could be in the colours of the club IF Elfsborg—yellow with black lines. As he put it: We asked the football association to have the pitch yellow with black lines, like the colours of Elfsborg. But they said absolutely not. And a year later they wrote it in the rules that the pitch has to be green. So now when you have teams that play on natural grass and it is sometimes bad and dry then they have to paint it green before matches (laughs). (interview with Elias, 11 March 2019)

It seems that the green grass is not always green enough. Making sense of grass in football reflects how people try to position themselves and their love for their clubs using discourses available in a broader social context. Commenting on common sense and production of such, Susan Stewart wrote: The common-sense construction of reality takes place in contexts of everyday life situations. Common sense underlies and is an outcome of the interpretations created in and by these situations; it is rooted in the reality of this everyday world. These interpretations depend upon the immediate situational context, on such features of the interaction as “settings, participants, ends, act sequences, keys, instrumentalities, norms and genres”. (Stewart 1989, p. 27)

Pressed by national and international actors, willing to fulfil the standards and struggling with global developments, the grass in Swedish football becomes both a playground and a battleground of different moral and ideological discussions that allow the participants to translate and communicate various issues that trouble Swedish football on and off the pitch.

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Notes 1. Some of the material and analysis comes from my PhD dissertations. The methods and methodological issues as discussed there in depth (Herd 2018, pp. 36–54). 2. The codification used in this article separates interviews from other forms of fieldwork. Thus, interviews are referred to as interviews and different ethnography is referred to as ‘field notes’. 3. Players interviewed officially in the press often display dislike of the artificial turf, explaining effects it has on the body and on the style of the game (e.g. an interview retrieved from https://fotbollsthlm.se/aik/aik-­ spelarna-­sagar-­konstgraset-­ett-­problem-­for-­svensk-­fotboll/, published 17 February 2019). 4. UEFA’s standards are very specific and available online for example the requirements about maintenance of the natural pitches or the requirements for playing international games like Champions League, where the matches can be played on both artificial and natural grass, but the final has to be on the natural pitch: https://documents.uefa.com/v/u/ UEFA-­Guidelines/UEFA-­Pitch-­Quality-­Guidelines-­2018 (accessed August 2022). 5. See for example: http://www.dessosports.com/hybrid-­grass (retrieved May 2016). 6. UEFA Pitch Quality Guidelines 2018 https://documents.uefa.com/v/u/ UEFA-­Guidelines/UEFA-­Pitch-­Quality-­Guidelines-­2018 (accessed August 2022). 7. The article in Aftonbladet stated that MFF proposed that artificial grass should be forbidden in Swedish football as it appeared to hinder Allsvenskan clubs from progressing in European-level tournaments (https://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet/fotboll/sverige/allsvenskan/ malmoff/article23409251.ab retrieved 23 May 2018). 8. Actant is a term associated with the STS field (science, technology, society) and used by ANT’s founding fathers Latour and Callon. The term was first introduced in structuralist narratology. 9. An article from Sydsvenskan was published in 2016 (retrieved from https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2016-­1 2-­0 7/konstgrasplaner-­s prider-­ mikroplaster). Another text, this time pointing out that artificial pitches can help with plastic recycling, thus help to save the planet appeared in

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2018 (retrieved from https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2018-­04-­02/ ratt-­skotta-­bidrar-­konstgrasplaner-­till-­att-­radda-­planeten). 10. Field notes represent a combination of observations, informal interviews and internet ethnography. To simplify the ethnography the term field notes is used throughout the article. The names and personal details of informants have been changed in order to protect their identity. The ethnographic material is in the possession of the researcher.

Primary Sources10 Interview with Linus, 15 August 2012 Interview with Filip, November 2014 Interview with Alex, Tom and Robin, 16 February 2015 Interview with Kristofer, 06 March 2015 Interview with Kristian, 28 April 2016 Interview with Elias, 11 March 2019 Interview with Lucas, 13 March 2019 Interview with Daniel, 14 March 2019

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Fangen, K. and A.-M.  Sellerberg. (2011). Många möjliga metoder. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Giulianotti, Richard. 1999. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Herd, Katarzyna. 2018. “We can make new history here”. Rituals of producing history in Swedish football clubs. Hébert, Louis. 2019. Tools for Text and Image Analysis: An Introduction to Applied Semiotics. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Hellspong, Mats. 2013. Stadion och Zinkensdamm. Stockholms idrottspublik under två sekler. Stockholmia Förlag: Stockholm. Herman, David. 2005. Actant. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 1–2. New  York: Routledge. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Kaijser, Lars and Magnus Öhlander. 2011. Etnologisk fältarbete. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kayser Nielsen, Nils. 1995. The Stadium in the City: A Modern Story. In The Stadium and the City, ed. John Bale and Olof Moen. Keele University Press. Phelan, James and Peter J. Rabinowitz. 2012. Introduction. The Approaches. In Narrative Theory. Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Eds. By David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J.  Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, 3–25. The Ohio University Press Smith, Dorothy. 1978. K Is Mentally Ill. Sociology 12 (1), 23–53. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857801200103. Stewart, Susan. 1989. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. London: The Johns Hopkins Press. UEFA Pitch Quality Guidelines. (2018). Natural turf pitch management – 2018 edition. 2018. Retrieved from https://documents.uefa.com/v/u/UEFAGuidelines/UEFA-Pitch-Quality-Guidelines-2018, 1–56. Accessed August 2022.

9 Stade de France and Wembley as Social Space: A Tale of Two Stadiums Hugh Dauncey

Introduction In November 2015, the French national stadium in Saint-Denis just outside central Paris was targeted by Islamist terrorists. Three suicide bombers died outside the ground after failed attempts to gain entry and wreak havoc amongst crowds watching a friendly international between France and Germany. A few days later, another friendly match—this time between France and England—was marked by England supporters’ fervent singing of the Marseillaise, and the social space was not Saint-Denis, but Wembley, London. And in June 2017, the Stade de France was the site of another act of solidarity, as a gendarme of the Garde républicaine’s military orchestra gave a heartfelt rendering of Oasis’ Don’t look back in anger to mark France’s support for victims of recent terrorist attacks in

H. Dauncey (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_9

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London and Manchester.1 These events—violence and terror perpetrated at the Stade de France, and solidarity and compassion demonstrated at both Wembley and the Stade de France—are some particularly striking instances of the ways in which the social space of these national stadiums can be understood as increasingly ‘political’. In fact, these two examples are case-studies of ‘political’ dimensions of national stadiums which are intrinsic to them qua symbols of national identity, but in addition to such unhappy ‘politicisations’ of Wembley and the Stade de France, these sites of sport and social space have experienced other less ‘catastrophic’ forms of political expression over their brief existences, and this chapter will endeavour to unpack a range of these politicisations, discussed in general terms below. Most recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Euro 2020 Final in Wembley (July 2021) and the 2022 Champions’ League final in the Stade de France showed how fragile the protocols of successful event management in major stadiums can be.

 tade de France: Communities, Commodities S and Identities Since the mid-1990s, when its construction was started, and particularly since France won the 1998 Soccer World Cup there in July 1998, the Stade de France has been the theatre of political expression. The politics of the French national stadium as social space have involved the choice of the site and issues regarding the local community, French traditions of sport as public service, understandings of neo-liberalism, as well as questions of national identity revealed and enacted through sport. In all these fields, sporting publics in the Stade de France have used and experienced its social space as politics.

 For the homage paid to victims in London and Manchester at the Stade de France, see https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=qycwy3PTR5o 1

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 lace and Social Space: A Difficult Birth for a New P National Stadium France’s eventual decision to locate the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was the final outcome of decades of debate and political confrontation between sporting authorities and audiences, central, regional and local government and other stakeholders of all sorts keen to host or not host the new national stadium in particular places. A few studies in English (e.g. Dauncey 1997, 1998) have analysed this process, concentrating significantly on the political tensions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in French society in general (and also within the Paris/Ile de France region), evidenced in the long-running debate (Perrilliat 1997) about whether to site the new national stadium in a location which would ‘develop’ an area in need of economic stimulus, or whether a national infrastructure of this kind should be located in a place which would ensure its own financial viability. Since the idea of siting the national stadium far distant from Paris was never feasible, the choice was essentially between the redevelopment of existing sporting infrastructures or areas in Paris intra muros or a ‘green-­ fields’ location in the Paris suburbs or the nearby Ile de France region. Taken to its extreme, the rationale of using the new ‘Grand stade’ as an instrument of economic and social development would have led, as its critics frequently pointed out in an urban-rural snobism, to its siting ‘in a turnip field’ so the Saint-Denis location just outside ‘central’ Paris was a political, economic, social, and sporting compromise. This is not to say, however, that this compromise was unproblematic or uncontested, as avoiding building a national stadium in a benighted rural location necessarily implied building it somewhere where existing infrastructures, and significantly, communities would be unavoidably affected. Whereas building the new stadium in Colombes or Vincennes had been rejected after local concerns about quality of life and environmental issues and political anxieties over the fall-out from such a choice. In theory, a ‘redevelopment’ of an existing stadium within Paris such as the Parc des Princes might have been possible, if politically and architecturally difficult (as the Parc’s designer Roger Taillibert still retains a right of veto

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against changes). But the Plaine du Cornillon site in the old banlieue of Saint-Denis was a location where the costs of social change to a run-­ down area were intended to be outweighed by economic benefits. Although much of the site was abandoned industrial terrain, concern was present from the outset for the breaking down of the sense of community and existing social networks, as evidenced in a three-year participant-­observation study of the changes to the social space of Le Cornillon as old inhabitants moved out, replaced by a shifting and mobile community of construction workers, architects and others (Fernandez-­ Récata 1998). The ‘resistance’ of some inhabitants who were rehoused was—amongst other concerns and changes—also chronicled in a documentary film (Robin 1998). In a sense, thus, the creation of the stadium was an act of violence, mitigated by attempts by the authorities and by local citizens’ associations to ‘include’ those at risk of change into the process, either through artistic involvement of children in chronicling the progress of building (Durand 1998) or through the ‘insertion’ of local inhabitants into the workforce (Gravelaine 1997). The management committee of the national stadium project—the Consortium du Stade de France—was at specific pains to spell out (in clumsy English translation) its desire for the new construction to be ‘open’ and consensual, stating in the first editorial of the short-lived ‘official newsletter’ of the Stade de France: ‘“No Entry”—two simple words which can’t be found anywhere on the Stade de France construction site. Playing more than a symbolic role, this absence of restriction is a real sign of the Consortium’s desire to make this new stadium into a national and international meeting place and forum for news and ideas. Everyone is welcome on the site’ (Clameur, December 1996, p. 1).

 ntertainment and Commodification: Sport E and ‘Neo-liberalism’ In this section we will focus on the ways in which the social space of the French and British national stadiums is managed ‘economically’ (and socially) through the careful commodification of the stadium experience and of sporting entertainment, taking Giulianotti’s linkage (Giulianotti

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2011) between security and commodification as a given. The Stade de France was always conceived as a modern multifunctional stadium able to host sporting competitions, music concerts and other large-scale events as well as providing ancillary entertainment experiences in conjunction with or independently of other events. The Stade de France can be understood as a result of what Giulianotti (1999) has posited as ‘mallification’, serving in essence, as what Bale (2000) has described as a ‘tradium’. This development of the national stadium as a permanent commercial powerhouse for the Plaine Saint-Denis was implicit in its siting, and the Stade de France has contributed significantly to the economic regeneration of the area. However, in terms of the relations that exist between different ‘categories’ of spectators within its social space, the commodification of sporting entertainment can be construed as political. As early as the 1998 World Cup, the apparent exclusion of ‘real’ fans from the stadium through over-exploitation of matches as profit-making corporate-­ hospitality events surfaced as an issue (Dauncey and Hare 1998a, p. 193). As became clear early in its existence (Dauncey 1998, p. 119) the Stade de France was ‘a complicated hybrid of public and private sector finance and motivations of service public and commercial profit’ and reflected ‘the gaining strength of the “neo-liberal” ethos in French politics and society’. Imitating North American stadiums with their polyvalent uses and integration of commercial and other services, France’s new ‘grand stade’ was planned as a social space of (Billouin 2005, p. 23) ‘meeting-up and […] business’, and the design included ample provision of ‘Premier’ seating and luxury boxes with VIP services. In addition to the five price ranges generally available for individual spectators booking standard seating (maximum price per person c. €125), the Stade de France currently offers five ‘packages’ for corporate hospitality, with prices per person averaging c. €700. Arguably, this is an example of how the Stade de France’s management body the Consortium du Stade de France is demonstrating a clear neo-liberal approach to pricing, in what Giulianotti (2011) terms a ‘hyper-commodification’. In Giulianotti’s analysis, UK ‘hyper-­ commodification’ is linked to a wide-ranging process of socio-spatial and product-service based ‘neo-liberal revanchism’ which has transformed the English Premier League (and also influenced the management of Wembley). Football in France has historically been less ‘commercial’ and

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less subject to neo-liberal pressures towards profit and commodification. In the early 2000s, Hare concluded his study of French football by suggesting that even though French football has traditionally ‘[…] believed in regulation, public service values and the importance of the State in intervening to protect the common good’ (Hare 2003, p.  177), this ‘exceptionalism’ was under threat from globalisation. The example of the ‘politics’ of socio-spatial segregation in the Stade de France is one indicator—in a national social sporting space—of how far the neo-liberal agenda has progressed in France since the mid-1990s.

 porting Politics: National, Regional S and Sporting Identities After the politics of its birth, the Stade de France developed as a social space of politics, the political, and sporting and national identity right from its inauguration. The opening match on 28 January 1998 was a soccer international between France and Spain, and the first goal ever scored in the stadium was claimed by the iconic (Recours 2006; Dauncey and Morrey 2008) Zinedine Zidane, in a 1–0 victory. The poster advertising the match had simply promised an evening of ‘football and fiesta’, but festivals have their own symbolic meaning, and as a (reluctant) talisman of race relations in France, Zidane was only too aware of the symbolic significance of an Arab name being the first on the list of scorers in France’s national ground (Billouin 2005, p.30). Even before the heavily mediatised and lengthily discussed significance of the multi-ethnic Black-­ Blanc-­Beur team’s eventual victory in the ‘98 World Cup, Zidane’s historic goal supported the Consortium du Stade de France’s desire (Billouin 2005, p. 9) for the ground to be a site and social space of diversity, as well as passion and emotion. France’s success in becoming World Champions on home turf in the Stade de France on 12 July 1998 sparked a furore of media, academic and political comment on the multi-ethnic team’s performance. At the time, the social space of the Stade de France was generally represented as harmonious and consensual, and French society basked in a self-indulgent belief that sporting success in the ‘divine surprise’ of 12

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July 1998 was the result and guarantee of social and political harmony, rather than of political tension, resistance and ultimately social conflict. The most trenchant dissident intellectual views on what had happened in the Stade de France and what was happening in French society infected with the sickness of commercialised, spectacularised sport, and duped by lazy political discourses of successful social integration through sport for France ethnic minorities came from the Quel corps school of sports historians and sociologists, who described football as an ‘emotional plague’ (Brohm and Perelman 2006). Other commentators such as Mignon (1998) suggested that the celebrations of the success of ‘integration’ and inclusive nationalism were in fact in reality calls for a unity that did not yet exist. Later in 1998, the Stade de France was again the scene of national success, as the French Rugby team completed a grand slam in the Five Nations Championship. France beat England and Ireland at the Stade, Scotland at Murrayfield and then beat Wales in the final game at Wembley. And in 2000, the European Champions League soccer final between Real Madrid and Valencia was both a ‘corrida’ and a ‘fiesta’ (Billouin 2005, p. 37) of sport and sociability, in which a drama of Spanish football was played out in the Stade with French stars Anelka playing for Real (with Karembeu on the bench), and Angloma appearing for Valencia. On a more domestic level of sport, French football’s Cup Final in 2000 was an emblematic moment of harmonious conflict between teams that epitomised contrasting levels of football in the French game. The small team from the amateur leagues—they were at the time playing in the CFA (fourth level of football in France)—RUFC Calais faced the top-flight Cup-holders FC Nantes, losing by a single goal (1–2) after a disputed penalty. Throughout their cup-run, Calais had been the subject of romantic discourses about underdogs and the ‘magic’ of the competition, and reports of the Final itself stressed how the Stade de France became a social space of communion through sport. But in 2001, the Stade de France notoriously became a site of political violence and conflict, as the international friendly match played on the evening of 6 October between the French and Algerian soccer teams degenerated into chaos. Abandoned after 76 minutes of play, the fixture

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had witnessed whistles of disrespect during the playing of the Marseillaise, a pitch invasion, and jostling of the then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Hare (2003, pp. 136–7) has described how the match had previously been presented by media discourses as a ‘moment of reconciliation’ between the French and Algerian peoples, and how the events before, during and after the match disappointed such hopes and reminded France of the divisions still existing between the French-Algerian community in France and French society in general. By showing how much many people in the French-Algerian community associated their allegiance with Algeria, rather than France, the events underlined both how significant football is as a site of identity formation in general, and, more specifically, how the social space of a national stadium can provide a highly charged arena for the political expression of contested and conflicting identities. The fact—alone—that Zidane was the only French player who was not whistled during warm-up and presentation of the teams gave the lie to the on-going discourses of satisfaction about inclusive nationalism and a ‘Black-Blanc-Beur’ society that had come out of the 1998 World Cup victory. ‘Beur’ World Cup hero Zidane had stated before the match that this game was the only one where he would not be sad to see France lose, but that the ideal result would be a draw. Black World Cup hero Thuram was incensed by the turn of events in the stadium, remonstrating on the pitch with demonstrators and afterwards in the media (Guardian 2001). Crolley and Hand (2006, pp. 160–63) discuss this match in some detail, dealing with the media coverage of the shocking realisation that the supposed consensus on national identity post-1998 was in fact riven by (Gastaut 2009) a ‘symbolic chasm existing between France and Algeria’. Only in passing, Crolley and Hand touch on another dimension of what happened in the Stade de France’s social space that night, namely the fact that—as the 1995 riots in Parisian banlieues had illustrated only too recently—the discontent of urban youth was as much inspired by social and economic deprivation as by conflicting, ‘dual’ identities. This multifactorial perspective on the meanings of the uses of abuses of the Stade de France’s social space on 6 October 2001 is supported by the sensitive study of various participants’ views published in the 30th anniversary number of the Staps review in 2010, which showed how individual social

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constructions of the events could range widely, above and beyond the central feature of protest against symbols of the Republic and exclusive interpretations of French identity (Staps 2010). On 11 May 2002, the social space of the national stadium was again the scene of conflict, this time on the occasion of the French Cup Final between FC Lorient and SC Bastia. Rather than an ‘international’ match between two nations united and divided by a shared past of conflict, in which the identities of supporters were engaged in terms of immigrant communities and their long-term on-going integration into their host nation, on this occasion, the Stade de France was the theatre of regional/ national political protest and dissent. Lorient (in Brittany) and Bastia (in Corsica) represented two far-flung regions of France, and even on this level, their clash in the Cup Final was arguably a conflict between two areas on the periphery of France’s highly centralised polity the Celtic north-western fringe versus the southern, Mediterranean island. Both regions have a proud history of specific—and even separate—identities within the French nation, based on language, culture and other factors, but whereas Breton nationalism has in recent decades become less active, Corsican nationalism—often armed and violent—has been more enduring. Football as a site of identity formation, catalysed by presence in the ‘core’ of France (Paris) and the highly charged social space of the national stadium, therefore brought tensions to a height. As the Marseillaise was sung during the opening ceremony, the music was drowned out by intense whistling from the Bastia supporters in expression of Corsica’s troubled place within the French Republic. President Chirac, Prime Minister Raffarin, Interior Minister Sarkozy and Sports Minister Lamour reacted initially by leaving their official seating area, and Chirac ordered the head of the French Football Federation (FFF), Claude Simonet, to intervene to restore order. When Simonet’s attempts to silence the protests failed, Chirac himself took the step of speaking live on television from the Stade de France (where TF1 was covering the match) in order to contradict the expressions of separatist nationalism: ‘A small number of unthinking individuals have chosen to whistle at the singing of the Marseillaise this evening. This is inadmissible and unacceptable. I have therefore delayed kick-off and requested that the president of the FFF

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present immediately, publicly in the stadium, his excuses to France, which has been humiliated by these actions. I will not tolerate and will not allow attacks on the core values of the Republic and those who express them’ (Dhers 2002). Unlike during France-Algeria, some months previously, when Prime Minister Jospin had remained passive, the recently re-elected Chirac (who had defeated the Front National challenger Jean-Marie Le Pen in the final round of the Presidential election, to the relief of most of France) responded directly to the political challenge to the French Republican project of national unity. Implicit in Chirac’s reaction was the fact that what are known as ‘délits d’outrage aux symboles impersonnels de la République’ (or ‘insult to the impersonal symbols of the Republic’) are punishable in French law. On Friday 13 November 2015, the Stade de France became a target for a terrorist attack perpetrated by Islamist extremists, in part of a wave of attacks carried out across Paris against restaurants and, most notably, the Bataclan theatre. Although it was the hostage-taking and fatalities at the Bataclan and the shootings at nearby bars and restaurants which were the most shocking to public opinion at the time, it was perhaps the failed attempt by suicide bombers to wreak devastation within the national stadium which was the most significant element of the attack overall in terms of the political symbolism of the violence. By targeting the Stade de France, when the ground was hosting a high-­ profile (albeit friendly) match between France and Germany attended by the President of the Republic François Hollande, the terrorists were perpetrating violence not so much against the French public in the random generality of Friday-night concert-going and dining out, but against a physical manifestation of French national identity (the national stadium), against a symbolic ‘site of memory’ of France’s most recent hour of sporting glory (the 1998 World Cup), and against the national team and Head of State. Moreover, in terms of the socio-cultural and political significance of football in France—as the major national sport, and as an emblem of socio-political integration—Daech’s attacks against the French people at leisure specifically focused on football. Four days after the attacks on the Stade de France, the French national team was engaged in another

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friendly international fixture, against England at Wembley, and as we mentioned before, the event was marked by a gesture of political solidarity as England fans sang the Marseillaise and brandished tricolore flags. We discuss this very different political use of the social space of England’s national ground elsewhere in this chapter, but it should also be pointed out the Garde républicaine’s solidarity in June 2017 with British terror victims showed a similar usage of the social space of the Stade de France. On 28 May 2022 the Stade de France hosted the Champions’ League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid. The stadium again became a theatre of politics, specifically the politics of policing under COVID. The July 2021 UEFA EURO 2020 final in Wembley had already shown how policing of sports events—complicated by COVID tensions—in major stadiums could go drastically awry. Involving non-French clubs and foreign supporters, the errors of organisation of the Champions’ League final by France focused domestic criticisms of the French government, and international outcry at French policing techniques. Relocated from Saint Petersburg in sanction of Russia’s war against Ukraine, the match saw fans suffer unacceptable queueing, confinement and police harassment, including unwarranted use of teargas. Failures of transport, stadium organisation and policing delayed kick-off, denied fans access to seats, and post-match, breakdowns in law and order outside the stadium subjected supporters to crime and violence. This was exploited by some far-right politicians, who equated such delinquency with the failure of ethnic integration in the Seine-Saint-Denis department and France generally (Cohen 2022). Errors of organisation and security were compounded—fomenting the political scandal—by the police and French authorities’ rejection of responsibility, and by their repeated attempts at self-justification through inaccurate allegations about counterfeit tickets, late arrivals and indiscipline. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin in particular repeatedly overstated the scale of fake ticketing, and steadfastly rejected blame. Questioned by a French Senate enquiry, Darmanin eventually accepted that deployment of CS gas had been unwarranted, and conceded that British and Spanish fans could undertake legal action against their treatment (Leclerc 2022). Former Sports Minister Marie-­ George Buffet, author of a National Assembly report on ‘supporterism’ (Buffet and Houlié 2020), stressed how the organisational errors reflected

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a breakdown in the State’s understanding of fandom, and under Macron, a failure of sports policy in general to relate to citizens’ needs (DeloucheBertolasi 2022). Two years before the 2024 Olympics, as a report to the French prime minister acknowledged, the mismanagement of the Champions’ League final was ‘seriously damaging to France’s image’ and undermined confidence in the nation’s ability to organise major sporting events (Cadot 2022). The brief life of the Stade de France thus demonstrates how stadium social space reflects political uses and expression, in various forms, from the structuring of social relations through the commodification of sport, through discourses on identity of various types, and through the choices made in siting new stadiums in particular communities.

 embley New (and Old): More than World W Cup 1966 and its Memory Discussing the politics of social space in the ‘new’ Wembley is impossible without reference to some of the history of the old, ‘original’ Wembley, so what follows attempts to bring out not only some of the contrasts and similarities between new Wembley and the Stade de France in terms of the political uses and abuses of its social space, but also necessarily locates these considerations in the context of the meanings and uses of ‘old’ Wembley. Mostly, however, we shall concentrate on the period from the mid-1990s, in an attempt to mirror the brief lifespan thus far of the Stade de France. Much of the meanings that can be attributed to the social space of the ‘new’ Wembley are determined at least in part by the memory of ‘old’ Wembley, and this would appear to be, along with contemporary developments in the commodification of the football and stadium experience, the main plausible analytical perspective to be useful in unpacking how new Wembley functions as social space. One event that we will not discuss, however, as it has previously been dealt with in myriad other studies, is England’s staging and winning of the 1966 World Cup. In many ways, the defeat of Germany in Wembley Stadium in 1966

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is the major iconic event of the ‘old’ Wembley, and as such stands as the datum line for subsequent (international) matches.

Place and Social Space: Birth or Regeneration? The current Wembley Stadium opened in 2007, built on a site made available by the demolition (2002–2003) of the old, ‘historic’ Wembley Stadium, which had served as England’s national football ground since 1923. The last football matches played in Wembley (1923) were the 2000 FA Cup Final, the 2000 First Division Play-off Final, the 2000 Charity Shield and the England-Germany international of October 2000. By the mid-1990s, the Sports Council had been investigating options for the siting and construction of a new English National Stadium, as— although the stadium was to host all of England’s games during the 1996 European Championships, and the Final—the facilities and safety offered by ‘old’ Wembley were no longer adequate for major events. Although there was much emotional attachment to the old stadium because of its long history the demolition of the old Wembley and construction of a ‘new’ Wembley on the original site was deemed the most appropriate solution to the conundrum of locating a national stadium in an accessible location, and developing a run-down area. Given the weight of historical memory associated with the old stadium, part of the challenge for the design, organisation and management of the new stadium was how to integrate the ‘heritage’ of 80  years of sporting, cultural and political history into the new architectural and social space. Initial plans included the preservation of the famous ‘twin towers’, but they failed to survive the demolition of the rest of the ground. Less ambitiously, but in a more focused attempt to imbue the new venue with an explicit link to its and the nation’s greatest sporting achievement, a statue of the England captain of the World Cup winning side from 1966 was erected at the stadium end of Wembley Way. Paramio-Salcines et al. (2008) briefly discuss these ways in which newly developed stadiums can attempt to ‘provide environments that recreate “unique” old and new experiences directed at a wider spectrum of people from traditional fans to tourists and corporate clients’ in what can be described as

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“nostalgia sports tourism”’ (Gibson 2003). Unable to preserve significant heritage features of the architecture of old Wembley, the architects concentrated on new features such as the ‘arch’ and the retractable roof as elements that would give the physical space of the stadium a special character. Depending on the taxonomy of stadium construction/operation that one wishes to employ, ‘new’ Wembley is either a postmodern ‘fourth-­ generation’ stadium (John and Sheard 2000), a fourth-period stadium (Bale 2003), or (Stevens and Wootton 1997) a ‘millennium’ stadium. The shared feature of these categorisations is arguably that new Wembley is, like the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, a polyvalent, multi-function venue, contributing to the economic development of the local area as well as its own profitability, in which audiences attending events of all kinds are controlled and surveilled/monitored by high-technology and careful design of their physical environment. The difficulties of re-creating any historic stadium apply in the case of Wembley, whose social space and spaces have been progressively complexified over decades by the repeated patina of events and their political and social meanings. As Knutt (2004, p. 18) remarks in an apt formulation during a brief discussion of the (economic) redevelopment of the Wembley site and its surrounding area: Wembley has always been more of an idea than a place’: this is perhaps the issue at stake for any attempt to ‘recreate the old Wembley’. Not only is the stadium itself a new ‘generation’ of venue, constructed in a different ‘period’ of sporting, social, commercial and cultural environments, and thus providing a different ‘experience’ in a different architectural space, but in addition, the physical site as a ‘place of memory’ and therefore of ‘special’ social space has been denatured. The famous phrase ‘We’re on our way to Wembley’ chanted by hopeful or elated supporters has always arguably been more about travel to a shared social space and an ‘idea’ than a mere location,— the idea being that ‘The team we support has reached the final of the FA Cup/the League Cup/the Championship playoffs or whatever’, but when the historical dimensions of the ‘idea’ evident in architecture and place have gone, the idea somehow needs re-creating. And in the new stadiums of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries such as Wembley and the Stade de France, the recreation of ideas which make a sports

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venue a ‘site of memory’ and a social space significant enough for political expression has arguably been made more difficult by trends towards the commodification of sporting experiences. In short, the old Wembley ‘idea’ had not been contaminated by the belief that ‘our team has reached the final, but there are so many VIP seats and boxes that there are not enough standard-priced seats left to accommodate all the “real supporters” like ourselves’.

Entertainment and Hyper-Commodification Attempting to unpack the meanings and uses of Wembley’s social space requires us to relate the sporting, social, cultural and political dimensions of events at Wembley to developments in English football more widely. For example, Giulianotti (2011) has pointed out how British football in general, and he stresses including games played at Wembley, has become ‘less of a social experience as the corporatised regulation of the soccer “fun house” undermines the play of carnival “fantasy lives” in and around the stadium’. Giulianotti (2011) also reminds us that the ‘political-­ economic transformation’ of UK football has allowed the English Premier League to develop into a ‘fully diffuse sport mega event’ characterised by massive commercial expansion and burgeoning annual revenues, driven in essence by extreme commodification, and catalysed by the urban spatial transformation of stadiums, such as that required in Wembley. He points out that Wembley’s £1 billion ‘overhaul’ (in what we can see as something of a rebirth) was part of a process which saw almost half the major grounds in the UK being newly constructed during the later 1990s and 2000s. Indeed, the term used by Giulianotti is ‘hyper-­ commodification’, and he suggests that the ‘corporate-oriented’ Club Wembley’s preferential access to the best seats, and the queue-jumping for tickets facilitated by clubs sponsorships, executive box-holders and match-day packages have created a context where ‘socio-spatial divisions and inequalities have become more evident’ (Giulianotti 2011, p. 3308). Without going into the details of pricing structures and market segmentation that now characterises English Premier League venues in general, and Wembley, we can approach some of the socio-political effects of

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‘hyper-commodification’ within Wembley’s social space by considering a specific media representation of Wembley supporting. The left-leaning weekly newsmagazine New Statesman hosts a column—‘The Fan’—providing wry but insightful commentary on football and football supporting. The author regularly attends high-profile matches at Wembley, and intermittently chronicles acts of minor violence (Davies 1999, 2014). Another theme stressed by Davies is the socio-demographics of ‘fans’ he sees at Wembley. In 2011, he remarked on the changing nature of England fandom at Wembley: ‘How did England get ranked fourth in the world? […] Why are they always rubbish at Wembley? The answer is that the Wembley fans are not football fans, they are celeb spotters on a family outing, hoping, fingers crossed, they will see Becks or similar. They get restless otherwise, which transfers to the players, who get nervous’ (Davies 2011). As much as they are ‘England fans’, those who attend England games also explicitly lay claim to regional—or, more precisely—local footballing identities. Banners displayed in the stands denote the often relatively lower-league teams that attenders support in addition to England. Such local sporting constructions of identity are often in stark contrast to the corporatised anonymity and passivity of premium seating. More generally, Davies also describes this kind of ‘hospitality’ fandom that is now a major part of the stadium experience and social space: ‘[…] out of the blue I got invited as a VIP guest of the Football League. Never happened before. Were they confusing me with Lord Bragg? […] I wondered who the other VIP guests could be for the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final. […] When the official invitation arrived, it revealed I would be sitting in the royal box. […] The posh hospitality suite had 34 tables of eight, all stuffing their faces, while elsewhere in Wembley there were dozens of other hospitality feasts and functions, just like it is in the Prem every match day, with people who normally never go to League games being waited on hand and mouth, feted and stuffed like Christmas turkeys. […] My fellow VIPs at my table were people from PR companies who seemed to do a lot of football hospitalising’ (Davies 2011). Attending the first FA Cup Final to be staged in the new stadium, Davies was struck by the nature of the crowd and, although it was not his main point, by the fact that the new venue was an impressive ‘experience’: ‘Footer fans are now today’s quality. You have to be, to afford a £95 seat and a £10

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programme. […] a pretty dreary match, alas, but the new Wembley is spectacular. An experience in itself ’ (Davies 2007). In a sense, then, the social space of Wembley is now not created by the match, but by the venue.

Sporting Politics: National Identity, Inequality During the hey-day of the ‘old’ Wembley, the political, socio-political and socio-cultural uses and meanings of the arena’s social space were perhaps more substantially related to the sporting events being staged. It was these highly charged sporting events that allowed the stadium to develop into a ‘site of memory’ for English sport and society. Most significant amongst these events were major international matches, but other events were also sites of memory and meaning, such as the ‘White Horse Final’ in 1923, and the ‘Matthews Final’ in 1953. In 1953, the FA Cup was won by Blackpool, whose senior player Stanley Matthews was the most famous star player of his era—‘the most dazzling sportsman in world soccer’, according to Pathé News’ coverage of the match (Pathé news 1953)—but had never won the Cup. Watched by a massive crowd of 100,000, Matthews provided the pass for the winning goal for his team to snatch victory (4–3) from the jaws of defeat in the last two minutes, and received his winner’s medal from Queen Elizabeth, awaiting her Coronation the following month. The match was also broadcast live on radio (to the UK and the world) and, allegedly a first (Whannel 2002), on television. The most replayed few seconds of film of the match is Matthew’s trademark feint to beat the fullback and his cross for Perry to score. Stan Mortensen’s contribution of a hat-trick for Bolton is usually overlooked, although it has more recently been recognised (White 2014). As well as being what we might now term a highly mediatised encounter of celebrity culture (arguably the most famous woman in the world, and world soccer star), Johnes and Mellor (2006) have shown how this match also embodied the meeting of modernity and tradition in British culture through its broadcasting on television as the first mass-audience sporting event (ushering in what we may remind ourselves was the new Elizabethan age) and also through staging a respectful meeting between

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the new Queen, the working-class traditions of English football, and the mainly working-class crowds. They discuss how the event was both a ‘Northern Final’ and a ‘Royal Final’, as well as ‘The Matthews’ Final’. It was an event certainly brimming with sentimentality, brought to the boil by the climactic final minutes witnessed live on TV, in what Benedict Anderson describes more generally as a ‘simultaneous moment’ of spectatorship and shared consciousness of national events that matter (Anderson 1983, pp. 15–16). For our purposes here, it is clear that Wembley’s social space on 2 May 1953 was one of complex and fertile socio-political and socio-cultural tensions between fans’ somewhat atavistic attachments to social and cultural tradition, to class, to monarchy, at the same time as forward-looking hopes for the future, for technology, for a more self-confident society. As well as these meanings and uses of Wembley, the meeting between Blackpool and Bolton was also, clearly, an invasion of London generally, and of the national, Empire Stadium in particular, by representatives of the Northern working classes, from western Lancashire. Rather than a North-South final, with all that connotes—politically, socially, culturally and economically—in terms of rivalry, the crowds at the Matthews’ Final were celebrating (shared) Northern identity and their ‘difference’ to the South, at the same time as they acclaimed the new Queen and a brighter modernity for the nation, within a stadium dedicated in name to a now declining Empire. Apart from the annual Cup Finals, from 1923 until 1951, the national stadium was perhaps somewhat underused. Because England matches were staged in other venues around the country, the only ‘international’ fixtures hosted in Wembley were the ‘home’ internationals—played 1872–1989—between England and Scotland. For all that these were only ‘domestic’ internationals, their significance in terms of the use and experience of stadium space is considerable. These matches were traditionally highly competitive and highly charged with symbolic meanings relating to the place of Scotland within the UK polity and Scottish ‘nationalism’, the cultural, social and linguistic differences between Scotland and England, and other aspects of traditional English-Scottish tensions.

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The most significant games at Wembley were in 1967, when Scotland defeated the newly crowned World Cup Winners by a score of 3–2, 1977, when Scotland won 2–1 and the event was marked by a post-match pitch invasion by Scottish fans, who removed pieces of turf and destroyed the goalposts in a key example of 1970s football hooliganism—but, if seen from Scotland, with symbolic overtones different to ‘ordinary’ football hooliganism—and the European Championships of 1996, when both sides desperately needed to win to progress in the competition. Writing in The Guardian on the eve of the match, in an only slightly tongue-in-­ cheek article entitled ‘A Kind of Loathing’, respected English and Scottish sports journalists Euan Ferguson and John Sweeney (1996) described the ‘mutual antipathy’ between the two home nations teams and their supporters. Such mutual antipathy was thus the underlying political meaning of the social space of Wembley before, during and after the match, and similar politics of national identity also marked England’s later European Championships qualifying match defeat by Scotland in November 1999. Wembley as a physical and mental site of tensions and a social space of direct confrontation between English and Scottish nationalism has receded somewhat in prominence and visibility, since the end of the regular series of confrontations in 1989, but there are regular debates over the wisdom or otherwise of reviving the fixture. Some commentators fear the possible return of hooliganism, whereas others (Bragg 1996) suggest that in an era of fluid national identities within the UK, the England-Scotland games could help define modern understandings of ‘Englishness’. During the building of the new Wembley, the 1977 destruction of parts of the pitch by Scottish fans was reportedly mirrored by the actions of Scots workmen, who allegedly buried Scottish flags, football scarves and team tops and other symbolic items under the new pitch (The Scotsman 2007). Later on in Euro ‘96, however, England lost to another ‘significant other’ rival in a Semi-final encounter with Germany. Whereas the slogan of the Championships had been ‘Football’s Coming Home’, after ‘thirty years of hurt’ in reference to England’s World Cup victory of 1966, the home/host team’s elimination at Wembley was a devastating blow. Although after the defeat, Trafalgar Square in central London (Staff Reporters, ‘England Fans riot after Defeat’, The Times, 27 June 1996,

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p.  1) became the scene of disturbances and hooligan behaviour, at Wembley itself, the atmosphere was predominantly festive and vibrant, the social space of the stadium being charged with national sporting rivalry. As described by a senior sports reporter, the match took place amidst ‘the tumult of more than 70,000 Englishmen’, and overall the ‘game was aflame from the first whistle, the desire between the two sides channelled into combative football’ (Hughes 1996). In October 2000, the last international match—a World Cup qualifier—played at the old Wembley was also marked by defeat 0–1 for England against Germany. Although England did subsequently reach the 2002 World Cup, atavistic memories were triggered for disappointed England fans: ‘It was the last refuge of the inadequate. Half-time neared, England were a goal down and a sizeable section of the crowd sullied the ever-dampening occasion. “Stand up if you won the War”, they sang’ (Ridley 2000). In the new era of the new Wembley, it is hard not to conclude that the change of stadium, and the loss of history and memory that this has entailed has somehow affected the uses and abuses made by spectators of it social space. Compared with the social and cultural politics of national sporting rivalries exemplified by matches with Scotland and Germany, the new millennium has witnessed little in the way of political expression within the stadium itself, apart from the minor interpersonal and intergroup incivilities typical of inter-club animosity detailed by commentators such as Davies, discussed above. What can be termed the apparent ‘pacification’ of Wembley’s interior social space has however been accompanied by increasing media attention paid to the socio-politics of events occurring on the perimeter of the stadium, and, specifically, on the pedestrian approach named ‘Wembley Way’. Some of these new uses of Wembley’s ‘peri-urban space’ are political expression and comment relating directly or indirectly to football, and others should be categorised more as general social and political expression exploiting the visibility of Wembley’s public and social space. One example of football-related events is the scuffles and fights outside the stadium around the May 2007 FA Cup Final between Chelsea and Manchester Utd, and the boycotting by fans of merchandising and

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catering facilities at the stadium because of high prices and poor ticket allocation. Another example, less related to the processes of commodification, gentrification and securitisation discussed by authors such as Giulianotti (2011), but nevertheless tying current uses of a new national stadium to past issues of club football was the protests by Liverpool fans attending the February 2012 Carling Cup Final Liverpool and Cardiff, outside and inside the stadium against The Sun newspaper, judged to have sullied the memory of Liverpool fans killed in the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. In April 2013, the FA Cup semi-final between Millwall and Wigan Athletic was marred by violence by Millwall fans. Specifically outside the stadium, on Wembley Way, there are regular uses of social space for political, social and religious expression: a habitual presence is that of a Christian preacher equipped with a megaphone, and in May–June 2011 the organisation Christian Voice organised leafletting around the stadium protesting against alleged use of halal meat in Wembley catering. In March 2012, a Gay rights activist made interventions at the England-Holland friendly, protesting against homophobia. Very early in the life of the new stadium, Wembley Way was the scene of anti-Israel protests condemning Israel’s record on Palestinian rights. In contrast to the divisive and oppositional nationalism that has often characterised the use of Wembley’s social space, and occasional exploitations of the stadiums peri-space for direct political protest, what occurred on November 2015, in the wake of the Paris shootings and bombings a few days previously was an example of more positive and constructive uses and meanings of the stadium. Originally planned as an encounter publicising the England FA’s official charity partner, Breast Cancer Care, the England-France match became an event symbolising solidarity in the face of terrorism, and demonstrating sport’s often-claimed ability to transcend national divisions. Wembley became the site of the ‘impersonal symbols of the Republic’. The architecture of Wembley was used to display the French tricolore colours on the famous arch and the words ‘Liberté’, ‘Egalité’ and ‘Fraternité’ were lit up on the facade of the building, fans inside the stadium used coloured cards to paint the blue, white and red of the French Republic, a minute’s silence was observed for the victims of the Parisian shootings, all the players wore black armbands,

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and PM Cameron, Prince William and other dignitaries were in attendance. And everyone inside the stadium sang the Marseillaise, in what French manager Deschamps described as a ‘grandiose moment’ of emotion. Unfortunately, the life of Wembley as social space has most recently been negative, reflecting typical long-standing difficulties of managing major sporting events, but, in the case of the UEFA Euro 2020 final staged on 11 July 2021, aggravated by the tensions and restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 epidemic. Opposing England against Italy, ‘Euro Sunday’ was hoped to be a joyful and cathartic match marking the potential victory of an England team and manager hailed as role models, which would finally ‘bring football home’ 55 years after World Cup 1966 (Hattenstone 2021). But disorder and criminality around and inside the stadium, and outpourings of racist abuse against England players who missed their penalties in the shoot-out in which Italy became champions made Wembley the theatre of negativity and uncertainty about the state of British society in terms of incivility, criminality and diversity. In her independent review of events, Baroness Casey suggested that ‘we […] need a national conversation about greater civility and responsibility that goes far beyond what one sport alone can do’ (Casey 2021: 7). In concrete terms, the delinquency and criminality that characterised the match included alcohol- and drug-fuelled incivilities committed by England fans around the stadium, ‘tailgating’, the storming of disabled supporters’ entrances to the stadium and fire-doors by fans without tickets, and other pressures on the safe management of spectating. Within the stadium during the match disorder, racism, drinking and consumption of drugs, and violence marred legitimate fans’ support of the England team. The Casey review suggested that the constraints imposed by managing COVID— ‘spare’ seating within Wembley, the absence of adequate fan zones—had attracted many individuals without tickets hoping to access the stadium illegally whose behaviour outside and inside the ground had not been adequately controlled. Far from being ‘England’s dreaming’ (Liew 2021), the Euro 2020 final represented a ‘day of shame’ (Casey 2021: 121).

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Conclusions Major modern sporting stadiums in general are now ‘sports entertainment complexes’ as much, if not more than they are venues for the playing of sport. The larger the stadium, the larger the scale of the (sports) business to which it is ‘home’, the greater the degree to which venue itself is likely to developed as a ‘complex’ allowing a diverse range of activities, commercial and potentially non-commercial, existing in parallel to ‘sport’. Although the notion of a spectrum stretching from the humblest of amateur sports clubs (no ‘entertainment complex’ and little activity that is not sport) through to the most glittering professional clubs of (say) the English Premier League (where sport is a vehicle for promoting ‘entertainment’ and maximising revenue of all kinds) might seem attractive as a model, it is clear that there is much possible variation at all points on the scale. Small amateur sports clubs may also be sites of entertainment and sociability which are non-sporting in nature, and major professional clubs may engage to greater or lesser extents with commodification, entertainment and marketisation. Where on this model spectrum—with all its blurring of distinction— might national stadiums find their place? Again at the risk of positing a model that is too simplistic, it could be considered that the inherent nature of a national stadium is to be an episodic venue for the infrequent coming-together of far-flung spectators, and that between these periodic festivals of national sporting fervour, the stadium is simply an empty shell. But in the fallow periods when sporting competitions are not staged, the stadiums have to be maintained, either through the hosting of other sporting events or spectacles of entertainment, or increasingly, through ‘everyday’ services of conferencing, restauration and hospitality or other activities. The on-going debates in France and Britain during the 1990s and 2000s about the need to find sports clubs to ‘inhabit’ the new national stadiums, and thereby contribute to their long-term profitability between the occasional paroxysms national sports festivals attest to this concern. Thus national stadiums are perhaps a slightly special case of the general requirement for sports venues to be multi-use facilities rather

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than (mere) temples of sport providing space for the fleeting sociability of transient crowds. The social space of national stadiums is similar to but not the same as that of stadiums whose vocation is to host the regularly repeated spectating crowds of (say) the English Premier League: the fixed constraints and determinants of the sociability and social relations that exist within a stadium may be the same or similar (seating, stadium design, scale and so on) but the participants are not, or less so. Whereas in ‘local’ stadiums, social space is shaped by infrastructures and organisation in conjunction with the repeated presence of the same groups of spectators generally in the same locations within the ground, the social space of national stadiums is more exposed to the vagaries of more fluid groups of subjects. Despite the fact that some groups of supporters—usually defined ‘geographically’—will attend national matches and occupy the same or similar locations within the stadium, the crowd is less familiar with itself than on Saturday afternoons in regular leagues in fans’ home venues. For most spectators, attending the national stadium is always—irrespective of nationality—an ‘away’ trip: the national ‘home’ of football (say) is generally somewhere more geographically distant, more socially heterogeneous, more financially and logistically challenging and more ‘other’ than the casual experience amongst friends of a true ‘home’ game. Where national stadiums may take on something of the familiarity of more local stadiums, is of course, during extended competitions, when to some extent, groups of different supporters may—depending on the success and rotation of their team between different cities—be able to develop ‘habits’ in their usages of a particular ground and the specific social space that it helps to enable.

Bibliography Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bale, J. 2000. ‘The changing face of football: Stadiums and communities’, Soccer & Society, 1(1), 91–101. Bale, J. 2003. Sports Geography, London: Routledge.

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Billouin, A. 2005. Stade de France. Entrez dans la légende (Paris: Timée éditions). Bragg, B. 1996. ‘I am looking for a new England’, New Statesman, July 26, p. 18. Brohm, J.-M. and M.  Perelman. 2006. Le Football, une peste émotionnelle (Paris: Folio). Buffet, M.-G. and S. Houlié. 2020. Rapport d’information sur les interdictions de stade et le supportérisme (Paris: Assemblée nationale). Cadot, M. 2022. Rapport sur l’organisation de la finale de la Ligue des Champions de l’UEFA le samedi 22 mai au Stade de France et le renforcement du pilotage des grands événements sportifs (Paris: Délégation interministérielle aux grands événements sportifs). Casey, L. 2021. An independent Review of events surrounding the UEFA Euro 2020 Final ‘Euro Sunday’ at Wembley (London: Football Association). Cohen, D. 2022. ‘Fiasco du Stade de France: pour Jordan Bardella, le ministre de l’Intérieur est un “menteur pathologique”’, Le Figaro, 31 May, 12. Consortium Stade de France. 1996. CLAMEUR. Le Magazine officiel du Stade de France (Paris: Isi médias d’entreprises), No. 1, December. Crolley, L. and D.  Hand. 2006. Football and European Identity: Historical Narratives Through the Press. London: Routledge. Dauncey, Hugh. 1997. ‘Choosing and Building the “Grand stade de France”: National Promotion through Sport and incompétence technocratique?’, French Politics and Society, 15(4), 32–40. Dauncey, Hugh. 1998. ‘Building the Finals: Facilities and Infrastructure’, Culture, Sport, Society, 1:2, 98–120. Dauncey, H., & D. Morrey. 2008. ‘Quiet contradictions of celebrity: Zinedine Zidane, image, sound, silence and fury’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(3), 301–320. Davies, H. 1999. ‘Beaten up in the toilets at Wembley, for being a fan’, New Statesman, 11 January, p. 66. Davies, H. 2007. ‘Creature Comforts’, New Statesman, May 28, p. 47. Davies, H. 2011. ‘I had no truck with one-minute silences - until Eddie’, New Statesman, 18 April, p. 57. Davies, H. 2014. ‘The Fan’, New Statesman, April 18, p. 90. Delouche-Bertolasi, C. 2022. ‘Finale de la Ligue des champions. Marie-George Buffet: “Considérer les fans de Liverpool comme premiers responsables des débordements, je ne l’accepte pas”, Libération, 30 May, 12–13. Dhers, G. 2002. ‘Chirac: zéro tolérance au Stade France’, Libération, 13 May. Durand, R. 1998. Regards d’enfants (Paris: Fragments éditions). Fernandez-Récata, D. 1998. Chroniques du Stade de France (Paris: la Dispute).

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Ferguson, E. and J. Sweeney. 1996. ‘England v. Scotland: A kind of loathing’, The Observer, June 9, p. 62. Gastaut, Y. 2009. ‘Les footballeurs algériens à l’épreuve des identités nationales’, in (eds.) D. El Yazami, Y. Gastaut, N. Yahi, Générations, un siècle d’histoire culturelle des Maghrébins en France (Paris, Gallimard). Gibson, H. 2003. “Sport Tourism”, In Contemporary Sport Management, Edited by: Parks, J. and Quarterman, J. pp. 337–60 (London: Human Kinetics). Giulianotti, Richard. 1999. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Oxford: Polity Press. Giulianotti, Richard. 2011. ‘Sport mega-events, urban football carnivals and securitised commodification: the case of the English Premier League’, Urban Studies, 48: 15, 3293–3310. Gravelaine, F. de, ed. 1997. Le Stade de France. Au coeur de la ville pour le sport et le spectacle. L’histoire d’une aventure architecturale et humaine (Paris: le Moniteur). Guardian. 2001. ‘Fans force abandonment of watershed France v Algeria match’, 8 October. Hattenstone, S. 2021. ‘Win or lose on Sunday, England have given us something to be proud of ’, The Guardian, 8 July, p. 30. Hare, G. (2003) Football in France. A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg). Hughes, R. (1996) ‘Gallant England miss Final Chance’, The Times, 27 June, p. 48. John, G. and R. Sheard (2000) Stadia, a design and development guide (Oxford: Architectural Press). Johnes, M. and G.  Mellor (2006) The 1953 FA Cup Final: Modernity and Tradition in British Culture, Contemporary British History, 20 (2), 263–80. Knutt, E. (2004) ‘Born Again’, Regeneration & Renewal, 2 July, pp. 18–19. Leclerc, J.-M. (2022) ‘Fiasco au Stade de France: face au Sénat, Gérald Darmanin persiste et signe‘, Le Figaro, 1 June, p. 9. Liew, J. (2021) ‘Euro 2020 final offers opportunity to scratch 55 year itch’, The Guardian, 7 July, p. 32. Mignon, P. (1998) La Passion du football (Paris: Odile Jacob). Paramio-Salcines, J., Buraimo, B. & C. Campos. 2008. ‘From the modern to the postmodern stadia: The Development of Football Stadia in Europe’, Sport in Society, 11, 517–534. Pathé News. 1953. ‘1953 FA Cup Final (Matthews Final)’. http://www.britishpathe.com/workspaces/rgoldthorpe/BC18ZRnX.

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Perrilliat, J. (1997) ‘Pourquoi la France a attendu si longtemps son Grand Stade: la logique et la patience’, in F. de Gravelaine (ed.) Le Stade de France. Au coeur de la ville pour le sport et le spectacle. L’histoire d’une aventure architecturale et humaine (Paris: le Moniteur), 10–17. Recours, R. (2006) ‘Zinédine Zidane vu par les adolescents. Pour une analyse poétique, matérielle et dynamique des images de la célébrité sportive’, Sociétés 2/2006 (92), pp. 91–101. Ridley, I. (2000) ‘Keegan’s Shambles’, The Guardian, 8 October. Robin, M.-M. (1998) “Lignes de vie”: “Grandes et petites histoires du Stade de France”. Documentary film, first screened Sunday 7 June. France 2. Scotsman (2007) ‘Scots stash souvenirs under Wembley’, 31 March. Staps (2010) ‘Les constructions sociales du match de football France-Algérie’ Staps, vol. 88 (2), pp. 43–60. Stevens, T. and Wootton, G. (1997) ‘Sports Stadia and Arenas: Realising Their Full Potential’. Tourism Recreation Research, 22(2), pp. 49–66. Whannel, G. (2002) ‘From Pig’s Bladders to Ferraris: Media Discourses of Masculinity and Morality in Obituaries of Stanley Matthews’, Culture, Sport, Society 5 (3) pp. 73–94. White, J., ‘How Stanley Matthews’ wing wizardry lifted a nation in austerity and eclipsed hat-trick hero Stan Mortensen’, Daily Telegraph online, 21 November 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/blackpool/11247332/ How-­Stanley-­Matthews-­wing-­wizardry-­lifted-­a-­nation-­in-­austerity-­and-­ eclipsed-­hat-­trick-­hero-­Stan-­Mortensen.html (accessed 14 Feb. 2016)

Part IV Protest Cultures

10 Football Fans, Social Movements and Contentious Politics: Cairo and Istanbul Burak Özçetin and Ömer Turan

Introduction In the Middle East and North Africa region, the history of football, which goes back to the late nineteenth century, is associated with several social and political phenomena including colonialism, nationalism, workers’ movement, women’s movement, urbanization, industrialization, state-­ making, globalization and political uprisings (Raab 2012, p.  620). In many cases, football (and the stadiums) turned into a milieu in which

We would like to thank Başak Alpan, who encouraged us to do a study of football and enriched our chapter with her comments and insightful suggestions. Some early parts of this chapter were presented at ‘From Habermas to Fanblogs: Exploring the Public Sphere of European Football’, a conference organized as part of the project Football Research in an Enlarged Europe (2014, Ankara) and at ‘Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space’, a conference organized by the University of Amsterdam, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science and the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS) (2014, Amsterdam).

B. Özçetin (*) • Ö. Turan Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_10

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political, economic, social, ethnic and national grievances are expressed (Dorsey 2011, p. 1); and stadiums functioned as, what Negt and Kluge (1993) referred to as ‘counter-public spheres’. Tuastad (2014, p.  376) noted that in anti-democratic settings ‘football has remained one of the few if not the only arena open for exposure of social and political identities, and the football arenas are where political messages are first communicated and struggles with authorities initiated’. Football fan groups’ involvement in political uprisings in the Arab Spring, and in the Gezi protests in Turkey made the football-politics tandem a clearly distinguishable phenomenon. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the role played by fan groups in social movements in Egyptian and Turkish settings. While the analysis of Ultras in Egypt rests on second-­ hand sources, the analysis of the role played by football fans (more specifically Beşiktaş Football Club’s fan group Çarşı) in the Gezi protests is supported by in-depth interviews and participatory observation. We find comparing Egyptian and Turkish cases meaningful for two basic reasons. First, the Arab Spring and Gezi protests are both parts of the same global wave of resistance. Tejerina et al. (2013) label this protest wave as ‘occupy social movements’ and propose that these uprisings, which started in Tunisia and spread to the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and the USA, are different expressions of the same phenomena. According to the authors, there are four defining characteristics of this wave: protestors occupy the public spaces, activists use new media extensively, occupations turned into civil disobedience actions and unorganized and inexperienced activists took part in demonstrations (Tejerina et al. 2013; Bennett and Sergerberg 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). On a similar account, Tuğal (2016) interprets the 2011 revolt in Egypt and the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey in the same context, as revolts against authoritarian liberalism. The second reason for the comparison, and main theme of this chapter, is that in both contexts football fan groups, with their repertoires of action and resistance, became important agents of ‘contentious politics’. Evidently, these two points justifying the comparative thinking do not undermine the differences in terms of repercussions: in Egypt, the Mubarrak’s regime could not survive the Tahrir Square protests, whereas in Turkey Justice and Development Party could consolidate its power position.

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This chapter analyses the politically motivated activisms of football fans in Egypt and Turkey within the framework of social movements. Most social movements come into being on the basis of a shared collective identity. Obviously, fandom identity does not often lead to a social movement, but in different instances, it functions as a common ground facilitating the mobilization of the masses. Social movements are networks of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, and groups, engaged in a conflict (Diani and Bison 2004). One-off interactions are less than a movement as such, and a sustained series of interactions is necessary in order to talk about a social movement. Most often, these interactions are between ‘powerholders and persons successfully claiming to speak on behalf of a constituency lacking formal representation’ (Tilly 1984, p. 306). In this chapter, we consider football fans’ political activisms within the context of contentious politics, which is a tense collective political struggle (McAdam et al. 2004, p. 5). For Tilly (2008), contention means above all ‘claim making’, including condemning, opposing, resisting and demanding. Contentious performances are generally a result of accumulating experiences and external constraints, and they are displayed through a variety of repertoire of action. In this sense, fandom constitutes a concrete basis of accumulated experiences and shared identity, potentially leading to political contention.

Football and Politics in Egypt Assad, leader of Al-Ahly football team’s fan group Ahlavi, highlighted the key place of football in politics by his words, ‘the two biggest political parties in Egypt are Ahly and Zamalek’ (referring to the rivalry of the Cairo-based top-clubs).1 According to Asssad, in the absence of any opposition movement, stadiums (Ultras) and the mosques (Muslim Brotherhood) turned into the only political spaces in which alternative political identities found opportunity to express their dissent. This is why the ultras were the ‘unusual suspects’ of the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt (Woltering 2013, p. 290). However, the role of football fans should not be overestimated. Despite the history of a severe repression, by the 2000s, the dissident voices started to find channels for expressing their

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discontent. They included Kifaya, Women for Democracy (‘The Street is Ours’), Youth for Change, Journalists for Change, Artists for Change and Workers for Change (El-Mahdi 2009, pp. 88–89). We will have a clearer picture when we add to the frame the increase in trade union movements (Beinin 2009). Football and politics have always been intertwined in the region and associated with the history of colonialism and nationalism (Raab 2012, p. 621). Like in many other Northern African and Middle Eastern countries, it was the colonial forces who introduced football to Egyptian society (Di-Capua 2004, p.  146). English colonizers ascribed football a modernizing and disciplining mission (Raab 2012, p. 622). However, in the course of time, national football clubs turned into symbols of national pride and resistance (El-Zatmah 2011; Di-Capua 2004). Founded in 1907 Al-Ahly (The National) Sporting Club was one of the cultural centres for the nationalist Wafd Party (founded in 1919) (El-Zatmah 2011, p. 44), and played a crucial role in socialization, politicization and organization of university students against the colonial rule (Tuastad 2014, pp.  377–378). Al-Ahly, known as ‘the People’s Club’, also helped the popularization of the nationalist cause (El-Zatmah 2011, p. 52; Bora and Ziya 2013, p. 26). Zamalek Sporting Club had a similar story in which the history of the club and of nationalism were intertwined. Following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, nationalization of sports in general and football in particular became an official policy of the Free Officers, a group of revolutionary nationalist members of the armed forces. For them, football was a handy instrument for social control (Di-Capua 2004, p. 156). However, state control was not absolute, and the Officers were far from maintaining an absolute control on fan groups, more specifically the Ultras. The term ‘Ultra’—as derived from Latin and Italian—is generally meant to refer to supporter groups that display an extraordinarily deep and faithful devotion to their team.2 According to Pilz and Wölki-­ Schumacher (2010, p. 10), these individuals can be described as, particularly passionate, emotional, committed and—above all—very active fans who are fascinated by a south European culture of spurring on their team and have made it their job to organise a better, traditional atmosphere

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in the football stadiums in order to be able to support ‘their’ team creatively and to the best of their ability. This Southern European culture includes not only visual support by means of choreographed displays in the curva, two-pole banners, hand-held flags, and the use of pyrotechnics but also acoustic support by means of drums or songs and chants led by megaphone/microphone.

Compared to sport spectators, the Ultras believe in their superiority and extraordinariness (Woltering 2013, p.  291). Different from other supporter groups in Egypt, which are mostly under state control, Ultras stand as autonomous and independent groups.3 The Ultras in Egypt are against commercialization, commodification and industrialization of football (Pilz and Wölki-Schumacher 2010, p. 8), and they accuse the Egyptian football authorities, FIFA and the media on these grounds (Woltering 2013). According to Beshir, being ultra is about ‘the art of football support and cheering’,4 and as popular blogger Mahmood Salem stated, ‘theirs is a way of life, a subculture, with its own rules, music and art’.5 Within this subculture, being part of a community and solidarity are of key importance: For them, what counts is solidarity (in the sense of unity on the terraces, especially in the group, mutual support and loyalty to the club), masculinity (in the sense of courage, strength, endurance, fearlessness, chivalry and ‘being a power’), triumphant success (choreographed displays on the terraces, fan singing, chanting, banners, clothing, etc.) and territorial sovereignty (as a claim by fan groups to hold power in every part of a stadium or town that they have symbolically taken over). (Pilz and Wölki-Schumacher 2010, p. 9)

The relationship between the Ultras and politics is, however, more complicated. The Ultras lack a clear ideological and political identity, and they may have left or right-wing political leanings (Pilz and Wölki-­ Schumacher 2010, p. 20). As demonstrated in Radoslav Kossakowski’s chapter in this book, in a country like Poland, Ultras are closer to radical right-wing politics. Be it right or left-wing, the tension with the police forces is one of the distinctive traits of ultras from all around the globe. For Gaffar, a member of White Knights (Zamalek football club’s ultras),

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the feud with the police forces is what unites different Ultras in Egypt.6 However, community building and charity activities are other distinctive traits of the Ultras (see Dikici 2009). The history of the Ultras in the Middle East and North Africa goes back to the late 1980s. The first Ultras group was Ultras Dragon of Ittihad, from Libya, which was founded in 1989 and immediately repressed by the Gaddafi regime.7 We had to wait until the 2000s for the emergence of Ultras in Algeria, Morocco and Egypt.8 Ultras Ahlavi of Al-Ahly, in Egypt, was founded in 2007 (Woltering 2013, p. 293), and the formation of each Ultras group triggered the emergence of another in the region. Currently, the number of Ultra members in Egypt is around 25.000, with 500 core members.9 The emergence and politicization of Ultras in Egypt were related to the birth of youth opposition groups and movements such as ‘April 6’ and ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ (named after the emblematic victim of police violence). These groups reflected the frustrations of middle-class youth who were badly affected by the economic decay (Raab 2012, p.  624). Although there were some pro-Palestinian demonstrations and protests since 2009 (Tuastad 2014, p. 377), the 2011 Revolution was a turning point in politicization of Ultras in Egypt. The feud and continuous struggle between the Ultras and police forces further alienated the Ultras from the regime; increased the Ultras’ in-­ group solidarity and unity, and turned the members of Ultra groups into disciplined, coordinated and experienced fighters. This meant accumulation of knowledge and experience for Ultras, and promoted the emergence of ‘networks of trust’ among the members (cf. Tilly 2005, p. 2008). The know-how and experience were quite handy during the mass demonstrations in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria (Dorsey 2011, p. 1). The Ultras played a key role in occupying and defending the Tahrir Square, and their presence heartened other protestors. By words of a demonstrator, ‘they have the tendency to struggle in hard times; they are perceived to be comrades in the project of the revolution and have robustly supported the revolutionaries all along.’10 Tuastad noted that, Tahrir Square could not have been occupied without the Ultras’ disciplined and firm stand, and added:

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Crucially, in order to stay at the Tahrir Square a frontline had to protect them. This frontline was organized by and mainly manned by the Al-Ahlawi ultras. The years of confronting the police had made the ultras the optimal guards of the revolution. They knew how to act collectively, to hit and run, to survive and escape prolonged exposure to tear gas, to change their front fighters so as to rest them periodically, to bang the drums to warn of police attacks, to identify provocateurs, to cheer and whistle when in need of tactical withdraws, to avoid collective running knowing the danger of stampings and panics, to regroup, and return fireworks, to suffer and endure pain as many having been subject to mistreatments and even torture at the police stations. (Tuastad 2014, p. 378)

When, in ‘The Battle of the Camels’, supporters of Hosni Mubarak charged the protestors in Tahrir Square on 25 January 2011, it was the Ultras who repelled the attackers (Raab 2012, p. 624). They knew how to move in harmony and coordination; how to evade and circumvent the police forces. In the following months of the protests, the Ultras became the major actors of street action in Egypt. As Ahmed, a leader of Zamalek’s Ultras White Knights group, told, ‘We know how the police run, when we should make them run. We are teaching the protestors how to throw bricks.’11 A tragic episode in the story was the Port Said Stadium massacre in 2012 when 72 people were killed by Al-Masri supporters who were backed by security forces in a match against Al-Ahly. Al-Ahly supporters blamed the government for the attack and considered it as a payback organized by the remnants of the previous regime.12 The Ultras were, of course, not alone in their fight. Islamist youth groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and marginal youth from the outskirts of Cairo fought with them. These people, with their clubs, habitus and lifestyles, were proud men who watched each other’s backs and fought for the honour of their groups (Woltering 2013, p. 294). In Mohamed Mahmoud street in Cairo, where the conflicts are concentrated, Ultras, Islamic youth and urban outcasts fought together, which blurred the lines separating different groups.13 Rather than sharing a clear ideological or political vision, Ultras have what Tuastad (2014, p. 380) describes as a ‘negative class consciousness’, defined for the most part with reference to common enemies. Mohamed

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Gamal Beshir, an expert on Ultras in the region, notes that Ultras do not know anything about politics … you can find all kinds of people in the Ultras groups.14 By Tuastad’s (2014, p. 384) words: [T]here is no common political or ideological denominator of supporters’ political orientation, it might be left or right wing, secular or Islamist, pro-­ regime or anti-regime. But crucially, in the political volatile situation of the Arab world—with the youth struggling for breaking patriarchal ties and the socio-political arenas for participation largely lacking save for football—coalescing the street power of the football fans with the organization of revolutionaries (or contra-revolutionaries) might be just what it takes to bring down a regime or start a civil war.

Football and Politics in Turkey: Locating Çarşi15 Football was introduced to the Ottoman lands by foreigners and quickly adopted and internalized by the local cosmopolitans. In 1899, Black Stockings FC was established in Istanbul, as the first club made of Turkish players. Three significant sport clubs which were established under the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II were Beşiktaş (1903), Galatasaray (1905) and Fenerbahçe (1907). Like in other Middle Eastern cases, football and politics have been intertwined in Turkey, and associated with the history of nationalism. When Istanbul was under the Entente occupation in the aftermath of World War I, football clubs became a platform for articulating nationalist sentiments. During the Armistice Period (1918–1920), there were around 80 football games between the Turkish and occupying forces’ teams, and each defeat of a foreign team taught the public opinion that football corresponded to something more than a mere sports game. Eventually, when the republic was declared in 1923, football was already a well-accepted, popular sport. Professionalism in Turkish football started in the 1950s. In 1952, the first professional leagues were established in Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. The 1950s was also the decade of construction of a new transportation network in Turkey, facilitating national integration. When the movement of people

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from one city to another became easier, a national league was established in 1959, with professional players and away games. Since the beginning of professionalization, the aforementioned three big clubs have dominated the football scene in Turkey. Generally speaking, their fans avoid political connotations in their attachment to their clubs. However, Kozanoğlu (1990) notes that in the 1970s Beşiktaş fans were the only left-leaning fan group among the big three football teams in Istanbul. Beşiktaş fans adapted popular left-wing songs and the ‘iconography and ideologies of the leftist cause’ (McManus 2013, p. 7) at this time. This left-wing orientation fitted well with the club’s financial woes and limited athletic achievements. For many, Beşiktaş was originally an underdog working-class team (Fişek 1980), and this identity turned into a badge of honour and distinction. By supporting the football team not for its success or power but for its values, the Çarşı fan group generated a considerable volume of subcultural capital16 through representations of themselves as genuine, authentic lovers of the team. The Çarşı fan group was established in 1982 by a group of young fans who were living in the Beşiktaş neighbourhood. Naming the group ‘Çarşı’, which means ‘marketplace’, signifies the importance of the neighbourhood for the fans’ group identity. ‘Since we were the youth of Çarşı’, Sarı Cem says in the documentary Asi Ruh (Rebel Soul),17 ‘we named the fan group as such’. The relationship between the club and the neighbourhood is one of the factors that gives Beşiktaş and Çarşı their specific characters. Both the club and the fan group are connected to a locality. Any account of fan organizations must start by emphasizing the fact that they are not homogenous and resist a clear-cut definition or description (Giulianotti 2007; Pearson 2016). This also holds true for Çarşı. Known for being a left-wing fan group, Çarşı was founded by a core group who, as revealed during our interviews, belonged to different political and social backgrounds. However, some of the founding figures, such as the late Optik Başkan, were known for their left-wing identities. Eventually, Çarşı’s logo ‘A’ was replaced by the symbol of anarchism (an ‘A’ inside a circle). The rebellious soul of the fans finds its most poignant expression in one of the group’s rhyming chants: ‘Çarşı her şeye karşı’ (‘Çarşı is against everything’).

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Over the years, Çarşı has established a reputation for fighting for social and political causes beyond the pitch, taking positions on issues like the environment, animal rights, fascism, paedophilia, military interventions and many others. The identity of Çarşı as a fan group that actively protests again injustices also found expression on the pitch and in stadiums. For protesting against Galatasaray supporters who call their manager Imparatore, Çarşı called for ‘full democracy’. Çarşı proudly embraced the working-class background of Beşiktaş’s former manager Rıza Çalımbay, who has been mocked by rival fans for being the son of a concierge. Çarşı still enjoys an autonomous position with respect to the football club’s establishment. It also enjoys being at the heart of Beşiktaş fandom. In this sense, it is a central group, not a marginal one, and it is able to disseminate its discourses among other Beşiktaş fans. The fan blog, ForzaBeşiktaş (forum.forzabesiktas.com), operates as a platform where members can debate, organize and consolidate group solidarity. The club has ties with public intellectual figures and this is a source of pride. A Çarşı member stated, ‘When you talk about Çarşı, you are talking about strong intellectual capital, strong people in various fields’ (Helvacı et al. 2013, p. 49). Çarşı counts many intellectuals among its members, including acclaimed movie directors, famous singers and journalists. For instance, Çarşı’s anti-capitalist manifesto, which emphasizes ethical values and fair play, was written by a prominent left-wing journalist Rıdvan Akar (Salman 2011). However, we must avoid attributing a clear and coherent political and ideological identity to Çarşı; rather, ‘the politics of Çarşı operates less as a specific political doctrine and more as a set of ethics; that is, it is framed around moral principles deemed fundamental to humanity’ (McManus 2013, p.  12). Seeing Çarşı’s position as an ensemble of ethical codes makes it easier to understand the ‘unity’ that emerges from heterogeneity. Our key informant Metin18 believes that there is not one Çarşı, but many: Çarşı … is indeed a complex entity. It’s hard to explain to outsiders, but something you come to know when you are inside. Now … there is no formal structure. Let me tell you this: there is no inner group of 40 people, 50 people, 30 people, 20 people, you name it … No established staff, no centre whatsoever. No core group coming together, discussing plans. No

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formal structure. And for these reasons, there are many Çarşıs at the same time.

These qualities distinguish Çarşı from the ultras in many European countries. Roversi highlights sharing ‘common and unifying cultural models’ as being the defining characteristic of ultras in Italy (cited in Giulianotti 2007, p. 46). Many accounts highlight the overtly political (right- or left-wing) and more organized, goal-oriented and relatively uniform structure of ultras in both European and non-European contexts (Kennedy 2013; Testa 2009; Testa and Armstrong 2008; Tuastad 2014). Çarşı’s heterogeneity, loose political and ideological orientation and flexible and changeable forms of group identification thus prevent it from being labelled as an Ultra group. Before June 2013, Çarşı was already a social phenomenon with a reputation beyond the football realm. When the local government had declared a plan about converting the Gezi Park, in the city’s centre, into a shopping mall, a new episode began for Çarşı’s involvement into activism beyond football habitus. Following the cutting down of a number of trees, protesters occupied Gezi Park intending to undermine government plans. The protests started with a specific demand, the invalidation of the plans and the protection of the trees. Soon, these demands were coupled with more general concerns about the brutality exercised by police forces and demands to curb it. The Gezi Park protests were first and foremost about reclaiming the public sphere (Göle 2013). They had a greater number of participants than any other protest in the recent history of Turkey. In this sense, it was an episode of contention, where the boundaries of the public sphere, urban space and democracy were to be redrawn. Football fans, especially Çarşı, played a crucial role in the Gezi Park protests as they were very active during clashes with the police. It has been already noted that the Gezi Park protests attracted people without street protests experience. For the inexperienced protesters, the presence of Çarşı at Gezi Park was crucial. Throughout the protests, people wearing Beşiktaş jerseys and bearing the Çarşı logo were the ones protesters could always turn to. Also, Çarşı’s Twitter account was one of the few reliable news sources and means of communication throughout the protests. Almost all of the political parties and grassroots organizations were silent on

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social media. Moreover, Çarşı was functional in keeping up the protesters’ spirits by giving them an emotional boost during clashes with security forces.

Çarşi in the Gezi Park Resistance Collective learning and accumulated experiences play a crucial role in the formation of collective action and acts of contention. Although for many, Çarşı’s involvement in the Gezi Park protests was unexpected, a closer look at Çarşı’s identity and recent encounters with the security forces will help us better understand the course of events. There were three key moments when Çarşı clashed with the police forces before the Gezi Park protests broke out. The first encounter took place on 7 April 2013 on İstiklal Street, a pedestrianized area adjoining Taksim Square, and concerned with the demolition of Emek Sineması, a historical movie theatre. Among the protesters was a group of young men wearing Beşiktaş jerseys and holding a banner that read, ‘Çarşı is against the demolition of Emek Theatre’. The peaceful protest being carried out by artists and citizens was violently interrupted when the police intervened with tear gas and water cannons. The second incident took place on 1 May, Labour Day, when the governor of Istanbul stated that Taksim Square would be closed for a mass demonstration. The Beşiktaş neighbourhood was one of the centres where clashes erupted between protesters and the police, and the whole area was infiltrated with tear gas. The third incident took place on 11 May when the last game was played at the legendary and historic Beşiktaş İnönü Stadium before it was demolished and replaced by a modern stadium complex (the Vodafone Arena). The violence erupted when one of two policemen on motorbikes fired his gun into the air as they passed by Beşiktaş supporters. The subsequent police intervention with tear gas and water cannons turned the event into a scene of chaos. An old Beşiktaş chant echoed around the neighbourhood: ‘Go on, spray, go on, spray. Go on, spray your tear gas. Take off your helmet, drop your baton. Let’s see who the real man is!’ That chant would later become the ‘anthem’ of many Gezi Park protesters.

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Although Beşiktaş and Çarşı were not the central actors in all these incidents, all these incidents impacted the neighbourhood. Çarşı members, as we will see, perceived the well-being of the protesters to be their responsibility and whenever there were clashes with the police in or around Beşiktaş, Çarşı became involved. The Emek Theatre protests, the events of 1 May and 11 May, and former experiences of clashes with the police were moments of ‘collective learning’ for Çarşı members. To put it simply, they had every reason to hold a grudge against the police and they had accumulated experience that was desperately needed at the end of May. This collective learning process was emphasized by Ankaralı Ayhan, a leading figure of the group, in one of his interviews: Let me tell you this, this is our training; we are trained for this. Ordinary people do not know what to do when they clash with the police. Thanks to the game days and the events of 1 May, we were trained. During the Gezi protests, no fan of Çarşı carried cleavers or big gyro knives. We know how far the police can go and we know the maximum effective range of tear gas; therefore, we know better than ordinary people how to protect ourselves from tear gas. That is what Çarşı has done, without going too far, by staying back. (Helvacı et al. 2013, p. 57)

Our key informant, Metin, also emphasized the same point. In his words, fandom is based on clashes with rival fans, as well as with the police and the state: ‘the tension and the clash are always there’. In Metin’s opinion, all fan groups are very similar in this respect, including the fan organizations of Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Karşıyaka, Adana Demirspor, Göztepe and other football clubs. During the Gezi Park resistance, Çarşı’s accumulated experience of clashes and contention was transferred into politically loaded collective action. Çarşı also showed us how emotions— ‘joy, anger and fear’—can shape political contention as primary forms of collective action (Lofland 1993). The Gezi Park protests had two major phases: the first concerned clashes with the police, which involved tear gas, water cannons and plastic bullets. That phase lasted from Friday 31 May to the Saturday afternoon of 1 June. The second phase started when the police withdrew from the park and it lasted until the violent police intervention on 15 June.

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This phase was characterized by relative calm in the park. The calm and the absence of police made it possible for the protesters to set up tents, talk to each other, organize forums and enjoy music. Moreover, several political groups set up their own stands and voiced their ideas. Castells (2012, pp. 10–11) aptly notes that ‘occupied spaces have played a major role in the history of social change, as well as in contemporary practice’. First, they create community and a sense of togetherness, which are fundamental mechanisms for overcoming fear. Second, occupied spaces have symbolic and ideological meanings. Last, occupied spaces, by constructing a free community in a symbolic space, become public spaces of political deliberation. During the occupation of Gezi Park, many people contributed to the establishment of solidarity networks and furthered gift-giving relations (Turan 2020). The protesters imagined the park as a commune and attempted to convert it into a space without money exchanges. During our in-depth interviews with both Çarşı members and Gezi Park protesters, we found a consensus about the key role played by Çarşı during the first phase of the protests. However, ideas and observations diverge with respect to Çarşı’s role in the second phase. In some of the interviews, the role that Çarşı played outside of clashes with the police was described as negligible. According to this view, during the two weeks of the second phase when political groups and volunteers were active in the park, the football fans did not have much to offer. Yet, the opposite view was also expressed. Cengiz19 is a young Kurdish activist. He has links with the Kurdish political movement, and he had contact with various people and groups in the park. Cengiz emphasized the heterogeneity that existed in the park and the potential for clashes between hostile political groups. Therefore, avoiding and preventing clashes was the primary challenge for Gezi Park residents. According to Cengiz, Çarşı, as a neutral force, played a crucial role as a buffer between Kurdish political groups and the Youth Union of Turkey (TGB). A mutual atmosphere of tolerance was, thus, achieved. Cengiz recalled that some members of Çarşı had gone to May Day demonstrations but, for him, Çarşı was a politically neutral group and, hence, could defuse the tension in the park. Cengiz said that Çarşı was able to create joy and fun, which in his eyes is what made the group such a phenomenon. Çarşı was, indeed,

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successful in creating a buffer zone between the TGB and the Kurds, simply because there are Kurds and Turks in Çarşı, as well as ‘fascists’ and also people with all kinds of other political and non-political views. And it is less likely to beat them by force. This understanding of Çarşı’s role at Gezi Park overlaps with another catch-phrase we came across during our interviews: ‘Çarşı was the force maintaining order at Gezi’. The ability to maintain order that was attributed to Çarşı has two dimensions: first, during clashes, they acted as a collective force able to establish a certain parity with the police. Second, for some of our interviewees, Çarşı played a role in creating order in the park. For instance, protesters made a collective decision to prevent the sale of alcohol in the park and it was members of Çarşı who implemented the decision. A member of Çarşı called (Kabataş) Hakan said: After the police withdrew from Taksim, our guys did their best to watch over the park but only with limited success. The vendors buy a can of beer for two liras and sell it in the park for twenty. He’s trying to make a living. There’s no difference between a flag seller and a beer seller; both are there to make some cash. (Helvacı et al. 2013, pp. 63–64)

However, Bülent Ergenç, one of Çarşı’s leading figures, was stabbed in the park after he warned a street vendor not to sell beer. When we discussed these observations with our key informant, Metin, his first reaction was disagreement. He told us that shortly after the protesters entered the park, Çarşı went back to Beşiktaş neighbourhood. There were some small groups in the park that were planning to attack the prime minister’s office. Metin told us that thanks to Çarşı they were dissuaded, and those people were sent to Gezi Park. According to Metin, Çarşı didn’t do anything else at the park. In his words, ‘it was like a 90-minute game. We started playing when the whistle was blown. Ninety minutes later, there was another blow of the whistle and the game was over for us. We felt we were the winner. The game was over, so we went home.’

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Conclusions In Egypt and Turkey, football fan groups became crucial actors in recent social uprisings. The relative absence of similar groups in other ‘occupy social movements’ in Spain or Greece has some theoretical and comparative implications. First, in countries where political parties, trade unions and other organized movements are powerful, football fan groups do not play such a prominent and determining role. For instance, Tuğal (2016, p. 153) notes the importance of workers’ strikes during the 2011 revolt in Egypt and adds that the trade union officials adamantly resisted the strikes. Second, we must stress a significant difference between Egyptian and Turkish cases. Compared to Egypt, in which freedom of association and opposition is brutally suppressed by the state, in Turkey one finds a more lively and pluralistic political system. Bayat (2010) notes that today the major arena of contentious politics is the streets. In the absence of formal mechanisms for participating in politics and expressing dissent, the streets become the primary milieu for political action and community building. This is why football fan groups, with their command over the streets played such a critical role in Egypt, and again why in the Turkish case the fans refrained from politicizing their stand and withdrew from the park immediately. In both cases, fan groups are both internal elements of the social movements and they play a strategic guidance role. This is due to their accumulated experiences of contention and clashes with official authorities and the police, which are important constituents of fandom rituals. In this chapter, we have argued that it is not ideological orientation but rather this contention culture and experience, which causes fan groups to participate in social protests. In both cases, courage and masculinity are glorified with reference to the aesthetics of fighting and not surrendering. This populist fan culture also includes an imagined duality between the righteous and corrupt, weak and strong, good and bad; and positions fan groups on the positive side of this division. Drawing on Laclau (2005, 2012), we suggest naming this imagination as ‘populist fan culture’. We have also drawn on the framework of contentious politics offered by McAdam and his co-authors, which suggests that social change (or

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grievance) is most often the triggering factor leading in a mediated way to contentious interaction. Social change may lead to ‘mobilizing structures’ (increasing potential communication and commitment among actors), ‘opportunities and threats’ and ‘framing processes’ (producing shared definitions of what is happening). These changes, then, create new repertoires of contention and contentious interaction. For McAdam and his colleagues, framing is ‘a collective process of interpretation’, meditating between opportunity and action processes, which has the power to determine the repertoire of contention (McAdam et al. 2004, p. 41). The comparative analysis offered throughout the chapter suggests that in both cases of occupation, football fandom functions as a framing process. Fandom disseminates shared meanings, symbols and discourses; hence it corresponds to a strong identity and capacity to generate new symbols. In this sense, in both cases of occupying Tahrir Square and Gezi Park, fan groups contributed to contentious protests by offering collective processes of framing through the use of existing symbols and creating new shared symbols and meanings. These framing processes first and foremost was about deciding a shared understanding of who is right and who is wrong and actively voicing this shared understanding. In other words, by following Tilly’s terminology, we can say that fandom creates networks of trust, which might mobilize the fans for causes not related to football. Hence, we argue that analyses of social movements need to pay attention to unusual actors such as football fans and fan groups.

Notes 1. James Montague, “Egypt’s politicised football hooligans”, http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122215833232195.html. 2. Mahmoud El-Wardani, “The Ultras and the Egyptian Revolution”, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3759/the-­ultras-­and-­the-­egyptianrevolution. 3. “The Ultras White Knights: Football hooliganism or social movement?”, http://www.masress.com/en/dailynews/132718.

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Mahmoud El-Wardani, “The Ultras and the Egyptian Revolution”, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3759/the-­ultras-­and-­the-­egyptianrevolution. 4. “The Ultras White Knights: Football hooliganism or social movement?”, http://www.masress.com/en/dailynews/132718. Mahmoud El-Wardani, “The Ultras and the Egyptian Revolution”, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3759/the-­u ltras-­a nd-­t heegyptian-­revolution. 5. The Ultras White Knights: Football hooliganism or social movement? http://www.masress.com/en/dailynews/132718. 6. Sherif Tarek, “Egypt’s Ultras: Politically involved but not politically driven, yet”, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentPrint/1/0/31904/ Egypt/0/Egypt%E2%80%99s-­Ultras-­Politically-­i nvolved-­b ut-­n ot-­ politi.aspx. 7. Amany Aly Shawky, “‘The Ultras Book’: Ethnography of an unusual crowd”, http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/%E2%80%98ultras-book%E2%80%99-­ethnography-­unusual-­crowd. 8. Mahmoud El-Wardani, “The Ultras and the Egyptian Revolution”, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3759/the-­u ltras-­a nd-­t heegyptian-­revolution. 9. The Ultras White Knights: Football hooliganism or social movement? http://www.masress.com/en/dailynews/132718. 10. Sherif Tarek, “Egypt’s Ultras: Politically involved but not politically driven, yet”, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentPrint/1/0/31904/ Egypt/0/Egypt%E2%80%99s-­Ultras-­Politically-­i nvolved-­b ut-­n ot-­ politi.aspx. 11. James Montague, “Egypt’s politicised football hooligans”, http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122215833232195.html. 12. Sherif Tarek, “Egypt military rulers accused of instigating Port Said disaster”, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/33589/ Egypt/Politics-­/Egypt-­military-­rulers-­accused-­of-­instigating-­Port-­.aspx. 13. Amany Aly Shawky, “‘The Ultras Book’: Ethnography of an unusual crowd”, http://www.egyptindependent.com//news/%E2%80%98ultras-­book%E2%80%99-­ethnography-­unusual-­crowd. 14. Sherif Tarek, “Egypt’s Ultras: Politically involved but not politically driven, yet”, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentPrint/1/0/31904/ Egypt/0/Egypt%E2%80%99s-­Ultras-­Politically-­i nvolved-­b ut-­n ot-­ politi.aspx.

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15. This section and the next one draw on an earlier publication, see Turan and Özçetin (2019). 16. Here we use the concept of Giulianotti (2002) and Thornton (1995). 17. The documentary is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5PI203fJwoU&t=14s (accessed June 2022). 18. Metin (anonymous name) is an active member of Çarşı and one of the intellectual leaders of the group whose opinions matter. In-depth interview on 5 March 2014. 19. Anonymous name. In-depth interview on 23 March 2014.

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Fişek, K. 1980. Devlet Politikası ve Toplumsal Yapıyla İlişkileri Açısından Spor Yönetimi. Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Yayınları. Gerbaudo, P. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. New York: Pluto Press. Giulianotti, R. 2002. Supporters, followers, fans, and flaneurs: A taxonomy of spectator identities in football. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 26(1), pp. 25–46. Giulianotti, R. 2007. Football: A Sociology of the Global Game. Cambridge: Polity Press. Göle, N. 2013. Gezi – Anatomy of a Public Square Movement. Insight Turkey, https://www.insightturkey.com/editors-­n ote/gezi-­a natomy-­o f-­a -­p ublic-­ square-­movement, last accessed on 21.01.2019. Helvacı, A, Dadyan, S. and Erte, Ö. 2013. Çarşı Geliyooor! Istanbul: Okuyan Us. Kennedy, D. 2013. A contextual analysis of Europe’s ultra football supporters movement. Soccer and Society, 14(2), pp. 132–153. Kozanoğlu, C. 1990. Bu Maçı Alıcaz. İstanbul: Kıyı Yayınları. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London and New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2012. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London and New York: Verso. Lofland, J. 1993. Polite Protesters: The American Peace Movement of the 1980s. New York: Syracuse University Press. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. and Tilly, C. 2004. Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McManus, J. 2013. Been There, Done That, Bought the T-Shirt: Beşiktaş Fans and the Commodification of Football in Turkey. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45, pp. 3–24. Negt, O. and Kluge, A. 1993. Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pearson, G. 2016. Ethnography and the study of football fan cultures. In Schwell, A., Szogs, N., Kowalska, M. Z., et al. (eds), New Ethnographies of Football in Europe: People, Passions, Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 7–20. Pilz, G.  A. and Wölki-Schumacher, F. 2010. Overview of the Ultra Culture Phenomenon in the Council of Europe Member States in 2009. http://www.coe. int/t/dg4/sport/Source/T-­RV/T-­RV_2010_03_EN_background_doc_Prof_ PILZ.pdf. Son erişim tarihi 01.05.2015. Raab, A. 2012. Soccer in the Middle East: An Introduction. Soccer & Society, 13(5–6), pp. 619–638.

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11 Places of Resistance and Right-Wing Ideologies: The Politics of Polish Football Stadiums Radosław Kossakowski

Introduction Sport has never been a space free from political agendas, conflicts and ideologies. Even if some idealistic statements (e.g. by the initiator of the modern Olympic Movement—Pierre de Coubertin; see Chatziefstathiou 2012) pretending to keep sport competitions free from political influences, the opposite appeared to be true. The cases of Berlin 1936, Munich 1972 or Beijing 2008 demonstrate that sport arenas have often been used for political reasons over time. It is only coherent that the most popular global sport—football—was and is not free from similar influences. Politicians perceive football matches or the organization of football events as a flawless space for promotion or demonstration of power and efficiency. Particularly, big football events like the European Championship or the World Cup can provide possibilities to convince international audiences that the host country (and its host politicians) is well-­developed,

R. Kossakowski (*) University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_11

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reliable and modern. For example, an aura of modernization and being a part of the Western world and culture was created by the Polish government during the preparation and organization of Euro 2012 (see Kossakowski 2017a, 2019). Political engagement is also observable in the football fans culture (in this article, I use only ‘fan’ term to describe people supporting football team; in one of the next paragraphs the term of ‘kibol’ is also introduced as reference to more ‘hardcore’ fans in Poland). Mostly, fans perform some ideological stances which are related to both the local identity they represent and the political preferences they are attached to. In this context there are many examples of various political ideas displayed by fans. Political performances have gained even more importance due to development of the ultras culture. The latter is associated with the most ardent, loud and passionate fans who are responsible for the match atmosphere. Ultras use many utensils to realize their performances: flags, banners, drums, scarves and flares. Thanks to their enormous size and media coverage, ultras performances are a perfect way to demonstrate not only passion for the club and football but also political attitude (see Doidge 2015; Kossakowski et al. 2018; Doidge et al. 2020). In the European area, the ultras culture has spread from Italy (where it started developing in the 1960s, see Doidge 2015) to many different regions. It has been incorporated into many local fandom environments as it provides a respectable platform for the expression of emotions and ideas. Local ultras present many political topics related to their engagement as well as current affairs. The political engagement in fandom culture has been investigated by a large number of researchers. Many papers and books evaluate the situation in the Balkans (Hodges 2019), Poland (Kossakowski et  al. 2018), Italy (Doidge 2015), Russia (Glathe 2016), Spain (Spaaij Viñas 2005) and Germany (Totten 2014). The variety of investigated cases illustrates that football fans in Europe are not unified in terms of political engagement. There are groups devoted to left-wing ideas (using Che Guevara symbols) as well as right-wing ones (fascist salute, racist chants etc.). Ultras across Europe differ when it comes to attitudes towards refugees, LGBT people and the nation-state. However, the ‘Against Modern Football’ movement seems to connect ultras from different countries even if they represent opposite political backgrounds. Being ‘against’ modern football means

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protesting against the commercialization of football, the transformation of ‘the beautiful game’ into business and media entertainment and the pushing out of devoted fans by means of restrictive laws or high tickets prices (Doidge et al. 2020). ‘Modern Football’ manifests itself differently in particular regions and countries (e.g. high tickets prices in England; political restrictions in Turkey or Italy). In the Polish context, the clash between ‘modern’ football and ultras culture means—most of all—conflict between government and fandom and the developing a political attitude that seems to be a consequence of this conflict. This chapter is dedicated to bringing the Polish case closer to the international audience. Its principal aim is to present the main political agendas appearing at Polish stadiums. Due to the limitations in space, the following pages do not encompass the entire fandom culture in Poland, but will focus on some aspects of identity politics. The chapter starts with a section addressing the development of a ‘resistance identity’ among Polish fans (resulting mostly from conflict against the government and, to a lesser extent, the football authorities). The second part of chapter includes the analysis of results of this process: the main consequence seems to be the development of a strong, collective identity drifting towards a political, distinctly right-wing agenda. The argument is based on the assumption that during the conflict with the authorities, fans— searching for some symbols and ideas to identify with—have turned to conservative, right-wing ideas. As a result, contemporary Polish ultras present extreme political attitudes. The chapter presents the main ideological dimension of those attitudes based on data collected by author during his long-standing research on fans in Poland (including secondary sources, e.g. fragments from newspapers and websites; as well as quotations from interviews conducted by author).

Fandom and Authorities in Post-Transformation Poland During the first years after the system transformation starting in Poland (1989), fan culture seemed to be ‘outside’ the system—prevailing economic and social problems meant that the authorities did not focus on

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the situation in the stadiums. It was not until 1997 that the Polish government introduced the first law after 1989, which aimed to tackle stadium violence (law called ‘act on mass event safety’). The situation began to change at the turn of the century, when vandalism and acts of aggression came to be increasingly stigmatized. Systematically, various institutional agencies implemented increasingly restrictive control over fans (Antonowicz and Grodecki 2018). In the summer of 2003, the Polish Football Association (PZPN) proposed the introduction of chip cards. While this move was suspended in spring 2004 after talks with fans, an increasingly restrictive approach to dealing with the ‘hooligan problem’ became the dominant trend. As of 2006, stadium bans (for individuals) and closing stadiums (legal procedure initiated as a result of riots—the local governments have right to punish club in form of closing stadium for next match[es] as a result of riots on the stands) became a reality for many fans. In the second half of that year, many stadiums were the venue of a fan action called ‘Ultraprotest’, held against the ever-increasing penalties for firing flares. For the fan movement, flares—also referred to as ‘pyrotechnics’—became not only a means of cultural expression (Kossakowski 2014), but also, to a large extent, a symbol of rebellion (Antonowicz et al. 2016). It is worth mentioning that in the follow-up institutional authorities were less and less inclined to engage in dialogue with fans, which significantly strained their mutual relations. It also seems that the period between 2006 and 2007 saw the emergence of what could be named the ‘resistance identity’ and ‘conflict identity’ of the fan community. Law, which develops in the process of state formation and provides a means of control over human affects (Foucault 1977), began to be an important source of discipline for fans. In 2011, the fans invaded the pitch and clashed with the police after the final match of the Polish Cup between Legia Warsaw and Lech Poznań. The incident took place a year before Euro 2012 and became a landmark in the relations between the fans and the authorities (the government declared a ‘war against hooligans’).

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Fandom as a Legal Issue As mentioned above, the first legal act dedicated to football matches had been implemented in Poland in 1997. However, it is mainly its further amendments—particularly in 2009 and 2011—that may be considered a genuinely restrictive tool for controlling fans’ behaviour. There is no doubt that these amendments were motivated by the preparations for Euro 2012, co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, as well as the violence observed during the above-mentioned Polish Cup Final in 2011. In that period, the number of stadium bans increased rapidly. As interpreted by many fans, the increasingly higher number of bans in the period preceding the Euro 2012 finals came because of government policy aiming to purge the stadiums of ‘steadfast’ fans. Stadium ban is an effective tool—it requires the individual concerned to report at the police station during the match, which means separation from the group. Following the increasing problem with bans, the fans of some clubs decided to give up supporting their team during matches played in the home stadium for some time. In the following years football banning orders became an even more popular form of punishment. Practically every single match day of Ekstraklasa had at least one match with no away fans present (in the 2015/16 season 66% of such cases came as a result of bans, see PZPN 2016). There is no doubt that when Poland was selected as a co-host for the Euro 2012 championship, state structures began to interfere in the conduct of fans, particularly in the context of using pyrotechnics, an important element of ultras culture. In the photographs from the turn of the century, it can be seen that the fans holding burning flares wear the same clothes as others and do not cover their faces. There was no need for doing so because although pyrotechnics had been declared illegal since 1997, the law was not enforced. Today, the ban on pyrotechnics is very strict and implies the penalty of a prison sentence of between three months and five years. This explains why fans take precautions, such as forms of disguise, for example painters’ overalls, dark glasses or masks. The risk related to pyrotechnics increased even more following the amendment of the Law on the Safety of Mass Events in 2015, which criminalized the mere possession of pyrotechnics while travelling to a sports event.

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Fandom as Uncivilized Domain The changes in the legal area can be also related to general changes in terms of social sensitivity and the ‘civilizing process’ of Polish society (Kossakowski 2017a, 2017b). Poland is becoming a country where ‘more individually oriented concerns’ (Waiton 2014) play an increasing role. Individuals acquiring their habitus in the capitalist culture of consumption have different needs and expectations when it comes to comfort, safety and aesthetics. Many ‘unorthodox’ fans expect that the match will be an excellent form of spending leisure time in a modern stadium equipped with all facilities (catering, clean toilets etc.), and that the atmosphere will not be disturbed by ‘uncivilized hordes’ of vulgar and roaring ‘fanatics’. Thanks to the uninterrupted growth of the Polish economy and the assistance through EU funds, the country has made a ‘civilizational’ leap, which is apparent not only in its modern highways, railway stations, airports and stadiums (including those built for Euro 2012). The expectations of—at least a significant part of—society go further: to make social habits and norms follow the ‘modern’ spirit of the times. The elimination of acts of hooliganism from the stadiums led to peculiar consequences: The fact that they became less frequent during football matches meant that other forms of misbehaviour by fans in the stadiums not only came to be viewed as dangerous and thus requiring immediate intervention, but— importantly—also labelled as football hooliganism, even though they had not been previously regarded as such and were actually permitted. (Drzazga 2016, p. 260)

In the wider social sense, it is a process that Elias calls ‘the change in standards of social behaviour’ in social and human life (2009, p. 32). In this case, then, the current approach stems from shifting the limits of unacceptable behaviour rather than actual physical threat: as things stand today, the likelihood of being attacked at matches in Poland is insignificant when compared to, for example, the 1990s or the early years of the twenty-first century.

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Legal restrictions, together with growing social sensitivity and changing media discourse made it possible to identify the most fanatical fans as a ‘social problem’ and a kind of ‘deviation’ that spoils the image of a modern and developing country. To some extent, what earned the fans their reputation was their uncompromising behaviour. The incidents of vandalism, which were publicized by media, also played a major role. One of them was the above-mentioned riots after the Polish Cup Finals in 2011. After this match, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced an uncompromising campaign against stadium hooligans: Even if the struggle for peace and security for people in the stadiums is going to take weeks, (…) or months, as of today we will not step back an inch. (…) This struggle must bring results as soon as possible and the victory must be on the side of decent people who want to watch matches and not brawls in the stadiums, people who do not want to listen to the endless stream of verbal abuse. (…) this war can be won. (Premier idzie na wojnę… 2011)

In the language of politicians there was a clear division between ‘decent’ people and those who behave contrary to the expected norms: ‘Poland has more important problems today than the comfort of those who want to riot in the stadiums. For those who disrupt order there is no alternative: the state must be ruthless in law enforcement’ (Kibice i premier… 2011). There was an observable semantic shift: opinions about fans now involved the use of such terms as ‘bandits’, ‘rogues’, ‘hordes’, ‘stadium bandits’, ‘aggressive adolescents in tracksuits’, ‘stadium hordes’, ‘fascists’ and even ‘terrorists’ (Kossakowski 2017a). Fans became an important element of public discourse, and the growing conflict with the government turned them into an ‘enemy within’. Following the rhetoric of Prime Minister Tusk, the minister of internal affairs in his government stated in 2013: ‘We are dealing with the savagery of a part of society. (…) either kibole will get socialised, or other solutions will need to be applied’ (Fal 2013). The term of ‘kibol’ (kibole in plural) refers to the particular kind of football fans—perceived as ardent, violent and breaking rules of ‘civilized’ behaviours. The term comes from local dialect but now is

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universally used to describe ‘deviant’ fan. Moreover, the media favourable to the government published articles which stigmatized the behaviour of fans and created a moral panic about them (Woźniak 2013).

Resistance Identity As one could expect, the growing restrictions imposed by the government, coupled with building the media image of fans as ‘deviants’, provoked an oppositional reaction among the fan community. Fan actions reached their peak in late 2011; the most famous slogan presented in match choreographies at several stadiums was ‘Donald, you moron, kibole will bring your government down’ (Donald, matole, twój rząd obalą kibole); another one was: ‘Project Euro 2012—stadiums: overpaid; highways: won’t be there; railway stations: a splash of paint; airports: provincial; players: weak; red herring: football fans; the government: satisfied’ (see Antonowicz et al. 2016). Football fans also followed Prime Minister Donald Tusk on his tour around Poland and displayed banners saying, for example, ‘And now you will only hear lies’ (Teraz usłyszycie same kłamstwa). A comment by a Widzew Łódź fan aptly sums up the situation: Fans should be grateful to Prime Minister Tusk for his choice of their community as a scapegoat before the parliamentary elections in a bid to improve his ratings in the polls. This proved to be a great opportunity for them to unite and build a real social group that has its own representatives, postulates, demands and values and a common enemy. (Małecki 2014, p. 11)

Indeed, this antagonism consolidated the line of division and contributed to the strengthening of fans’ collective identity: It’s an extraordinary situation in a mature democracy when (…) fans try to fight for the protection of their civil rights in a formal way, by proposing a draft of the amendment to the Law on the Safety of Mass Events (…). This comes as the best proof of whether we are only clients of clubs and sports associations, or maybe someone more, someone with their own identity. (F. 2011, p. 1)

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This case of identity creation perfectly confirms Lewis Coser’s proposal that ‘conflict with other groups contributes to the establishment and reaffirmation of the identity of the group and maintains its boundaries against the surrounding social world’ (1964, p.  38). In more modern terms, being opposite against ‘them’ (broadly understanding) influences ‘identity fusion’, when individual identity is aligned with group and the sense of oneness with the group reinforces willing for fight against ‘out-­ group’ (see Tajfel 1982; Besta and Kossakowski 2018). The experience of public exclusion has been one reason why the identity of fans is largely based on opposition and hostility. The sense of discrimination and victimization necessarily had a significant impact in the process of reconstructing the identity politics of Polish fans. Such a process starts with an analysis of the degree and type of oppression, and proceeds to develop the ways of transforming attitudes that support discrimination. Politics of public exclusion and stigmatization not only enable the manifestation of an identity that was previously invisible, but also point out the reasons for this invisibility (e.g. structural conditions, political interest). Conflict with a ‘stronger’ opponent (in the institutional sense) induces the construction of a firm framework that gives the impression of ‘steadfast’ identity. However, apart from street protests and choreographies in the stadiums, the fans did not reach for more advanced means of civil disobedience. They have never decided, for example, for a nationwide boycott that could have had a breakthrough result. It seems that particular, local ‘deals’ and interests decided that fans did not go beyond reactive protests. With low match attendance as such, their boycott could have been a significant bargaining chip in talks with the authorities. A boycott would actually have meant empty stadiums, and this would have come as a shocking image for politicians preparing Poland for Euro 2012.

 ight-Wing Tendencies as a Form R of Collective Identity Shaped by the conflict with the authorities, the resistance identity of Polish fans has also evolved into a specific discourse of ‘anti-system’ identity. As used here, the term ‘anti-system’ does not mean that the fans

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operate outside the social or economic system as such. In many cases, they even use the mechanisms it offers; for example, they conduct commercial activities (sale of fan gadgets) or register their official organizations. Rather, ‘anti-system’ refers to a kind of ‘resistant’ and ‘independent’ attitude, as well as unpredictability. An interesting question is to what extent this ‘anti-systemness’ is discursively produced in connection with the need to create an ‘identity of difference’. It is evident that in the context of Polish fandom, being ‘anti-system’ (or anti-mainstream) means something different that in many Western environments. In contrast to many Western European countries, Polish fans do not use leftist symbolism or the rhetoric of class struggle (Kossakowski et al. 2018). There are no images of Che Guevara or the hammer and sickle, and no anti-capitalist slogans in Polish stadiums. One consequence of this has been the rejection of critical theory, concepts and analytical tools derived from Marxist thought as irrelevant for the explanation of antagonisms between fans and the establishment. By contrast, this approach is something natural in studies concerning Western European countries (see Kennedy and Kennedy 2016). Polish fans reject leftist ideology because of the reign of real socialism in the country before 1989. Indeed, many of them equate being ‘leftist’ with being ‘communist’. Expressions of anti-communism or anti-leftism are very frequently visible and audible on the terraces. Even though the law today formally bans the promotion of communist ideology and there is no single political party referring to communism in Poland, it remains an umbrella term present in the stadiums’ choreographies. Former members of the communist party are frequently mentioned on the banners together with the journalists representing media that are critical towards the right-wing ideology. It seems that the fan community in Poland does not have any other means of expressing community experience and social discontent than a set of conservative-patriotic religious symbols. Such an identity kit is also associated with the specific structure of the fan movement: the hermetic, coherent, ‘militant’ and non-democratic nature of fandom promotes identification with symbols referring to national and conservative ideas. The reluctance against leftist, progressive ideas is multi-dimensional. This can be seen in such slogans as ‘Good night left side’ and crossed-out images of Che Guevara (treated as an emblem of the left) or the hammer

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and sickle (a symbol of the Soviet Union). When it comes to more modern leftist–liberal values, Polish ultras radically oppose identity policies of ethnic or sexual minorities. For example, Lech Poznań ultras presented a banner with the slogan: ‘The Lech Poznań stadium and fans—the last bastion of freedom in the city frazzled by the leftist paranoia’. The term ‘leftist paranoia’ referred to the fact that the mayor of Poznań had taken part in the local March for Equality and supported the rights of the LGBTQ community. Recently, after the implementation of the ‘LGBT Card’ (dedicated to rights for sexual minorities) by the mayor of Warsaw, ultras from many Polish clubs presented choreographies with hostile content: ‘Sodomites, faggots and paedophiles from LGBT! Hands off our children!’ (Lechia Gdańsk); ‘Warsaw free from gaydom!’ (Legia Warsaw); ‘Always and everywhere gaydom and paedophilia will be exterminated’ (Śląsk Wrocław); ‘Simply message for Poland: we protect children from perverts’ (Stomil Olsztyn); ‘United Poland screams: the perverted ideology won’t spoil our children’ (Wisła Płock). In a moral sense, Polish fans are strictly conservative (see Kossakowski and Besta 2018), and even considering the performative hyperbole they use for promoting their values, some displays are ruthless. For example, ultras of Obra Kościan prepared a rather small-scale banner with the crossed-out image of a homosexual couple having sex and the two sentences: ‘Homosexuality forbidden’ and ‘Boy and girl = normal family’. Such a homophobic message is related both to the conservative values most fans are cultivating and to the ‘hegemonic’ masculine (Connell 1987) character of fandom in general (Kossakowski et al. 2019). The fans usually associate being on the right side of the political spectrum with embracing such categories as nation, identity, tradition and history: Fans are strongly in favour of the traditional approach in more general terms, in terms of history and tradition. It’s about the attitude to tradition and statehood, remembering about your identity, and a sense of pride about this place. And these things have negative connotations for the left. [Legia Warsaw fan]

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The values referring to Polishness are a consequence of cultivating local traditions—football clubs are a keystone of regional identities, which is a phenomenon observed not only in Poland (Kossakowski 2013; Doidge 2015). Supporting a more conservative agenda goes hand in hand with the creation of a common iconography strengthening and popularizing the unifying symbols and narratives. The sacralization of history and religious tropes are clearly visible in most ultras’ choreographies, which often include overt references to divine elements. A Legia ultras choreography featured the face of Christ accompanied by the inscription ‘God, save the fanatics’. The religiosity of the fans is also demonstrated during their annual pilgrimage to the most important Polish sanctuary of the Virgin Mary in Jasna Góra (Bright Mountain), Częstochowa. At the time of the pilgrimage hundreds of fans participate in the Holy Mass during which the priests bless their club scarves and flags. Fans’ conservative and rightist tendencies are strongly permeated with attachment to Christian values. This is particularly visible in choreographies appealing to members of different nations, cultures—as in the case of so-called refugees crisis. Many ultras employed slogans suggesting that there is a threat of introducing Muslim believers in Poland. Lech Poznań fans displayed a banner saying: ‘For us it’s simple and clear: We don’t want refugees in Poland’. Lechia Gdańsk ultras presented the slogan ‘Welcome to hell, stray sheep’. Although the number of refugees from the Middle East is extremely low in Poland (as the Polish government refused to accept refugee quotas set by the European Parliament), Polish ultras perceive refugees as a danger for national and Christian identity. This vision was strongly supported by Śląsk Wrocław ultras, who prepared a large choreography featuring the image of a knight in armour (with the logo of Śląsk on his shield) ‘defending’ the European continent against the Muslim invasion from the sea. The image was accompanied by the slogan: ‘When the Islamic plague is flooding Europe, let’s stand in defence of Christianity’. In searching for symbols, ideas and frames of reference—essential to establish and strengthen collective identity—Polish fans have reached for some historical ‘role models’. In recent years, an increasing number of ultras choreographies have been devoted to restoring the memory of the so-called Cursed Soldiers (Żołnierze Wyklęci), guerrilla forces fighting

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against both Nazi Germany and, later, against the communist regime in Poland. Most of them were executed by the communist authorities or murdered by the secret police. Glorification of the Cursed Soldiers by fans is hardly surprising. Indeed, with their utmost devotion, radicalism, uncompromising ‘anti-system’ attitude, loyalty to the Fatherland, attitude of honour and sense of brotherhood they ideally fit the description of heroes and role models. In the world of hardcore fans, where radicalism, physical violence and an authoritarian mode of management prevail, appealing to the noble attitude of courage and honour fulfils an important identity need. The men’s world of Polish ultras promotes—even if only discursively and symbolically—an idealistic image in which hard-­ working fighters, obeying the principles of honour, struggle in the name of noble values, defend local/national soil and bring up young, ‘healthy’ generations. It is worth emphasizing that some fans undertake an active role in events dedicated to the ‘Cursed Soldiers’. Fans participated in remembrance ceremonies, visited the cemeteries, met with the surviving members of the ‘cursed’ guerrilla forces and wore clothes with symbols relating to them. One of the fans explains the meaning of ‘Cursed Soldiers’ for the Polish fan movement: [they] are perceived as ideal role models, romantic and tough-minded fighters for a lost cause who were fighting in the name of honour, principles and their oath of allegiance. Additionally, they fought against communists and—according to fans—Polish elites who try to destroy fandom descend from the communist circles. Therefore, the fans feel they are not only successors, but also continuators of the Cursed Soldiers’ struggle. (Jantych 2016, p. 137)

Although fans in Poland do not engage in any political movement as a group (but only tend to express their preferences), they are visible at events commemorating local and national holidays as well as so-called patriotic initiatives. One explanation here is that such events provide them with an opportunity for mobilization on the one hand, and allow them to highlight their ‘performative’ skills (e.g. pyrotechnic shows) on the other. Patriotic events refer, for example, to celebrations of important national anniversaries (such as the Independence March, held on 11

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November). In this regard, the majority of fans are consistent—they feel obliged to take part: ‘We have participated and we will participate as fans in the celebration. It’s also politics. When we go, we go as a group: fans’ [Lech Poznań_fan]. The majority of informants noted the importance of the concept of ‘patriotism’, which is understood as almost synonym to ‘nationalism’: ‘In recent years, fans have started to approach patriotic issues differently. They stress them quite a lot. (…) In Poznań, fans are focused on pro-national patriotism’ [Poznań_journalist]. One of the Śląsk banners included the sentence: ‘We want patriotism in schools’. Commemorative activities are not only limited to participation at national holidays or events. Huge ultras choreographies play an extremely important role for presenting patriotic ideas. This is related to the performative nature of choreographies which constitute a means of communication with other actors, even if they do not belong to fandom culture. That’s why ultras present political, patriotic (mainly anti-communist or commemorative) themes during matches. For example, Legia Warsaw ultras are ‘specialized’ in the commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising (which broke out on 1 August 1944). Every year, in August, they present choreographies dedicated to it (as do club authorities, for instance by launching alarm sirens before kick-off and inviting survivors for the game). One of these choreographies, prepared in 2017, stirred a considerable controversy. It was particularly large scale and contained the sentence: ‘1944: During the Warsaw Uprising the Germans killed 160,000 people. Thousands of them were children.’ It was accompanied by the image of a Nazi soldier holding a gun to a child’s head and presented as the final episode in the long series of themed choreographies. The image was reproduced by many newspapers across and beyond Europe. Thus, from the fans’ perspective, the message fulfilled its purpose.

Conclusions It is something unusual that football from a big country like Poland (the sixth largest member state of the European Union in terms of area and population) should be completely undiversified in terms of political attitudes. Literally, there are no fan groups in Poland who promote a leftist,

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progressive agenda. As has been shown in this chapter, ideological radicalization stems—to some extent—from the backlash to a historical conflict between fans and authorities. However, it needs to be added that there are other factors that should be included to provide a full analysis. The history of Polish society and nation is very complicated—consider only the time of disappearance of Poland from the map of Europe between 1795 and 1918, the devastating period of World War II or the times of communist reign in 1945–1989. All of these critical moments have engraved a deep emotional footprint in the hearts and minds of many Poles. Fandom, as one of the most extreme and hardcore subcultures, tends to reinforce these emotions, ideas and attitudes. Moreover, after the ‘war’ against the government, many fans are even more prone to radicalization and the creation of a ‘besieged fortress’ mentality. The structure of fandom—based on a hierarchical and punitive order, a high level of cohesion, a limited amount of trust towards others, hegemonic masculinity and a militant nature—is a fertile ground for exclusion tendencies and perception of the world in black and white. Ultras are well-known for their radical attitudes and behaviours in most European countries, and the Polish case is no exception. However, the nature of ‘radicalization’ in Poland is dissimilar to the European mainstream, due to a particular local history and exceptional circumstances and experiences.

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12 Stadiums as the Sites of the Political: The Case of Passolig in Turkey Başak Alpan and Bora Tanıl

Introduction Since April 2014, the Super League and League One in Turkey require all supporters to have a so-called Passolig Identity Card prior to purchasing tickets, which triggered intense criticism and protest by football supporters, activists, political actors as well as lawyers. The Passolig Card was introduced with the aim of fighting against the rising levels of violence at the stadiums, in line with the 2011 ‘Violence in Sports Law’, famously known as ‘Law 6222 on Sport’. Apart from the fact that spectators are obliged to pay for a pre-paid card, debit card or credit card from Turkey’s AktifBank, the bank associated with the e-ticket system, onto which they can “upload” tickets, thereby giving away their private data to state authorities and to a commercial bank, the Passolig Card has been fiercely criticised on the grounds that it now “tames” and “disciplines”

B. Alpan (*) Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_12

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football spectators and thus depoliticises the stadiums. On a different note, it has also been claimed that the Passolig decision had a political dimension in the sense that the choice of AktifBank was political, the bank was known to be politically close to the ruling party (AKP) and to make unjust profits through a clientelistic relationship with the Passolig tender (Erturan-Öğüt 2020, p. 2; Cumhuriyet 2014). This point was also raised in the National Assembly by MHP1 MP Lütfü Türkkan as a parliamentary question, questioning whether the issuing of the Passolig Card has been tied to AktifBank due to the latter’s proximity with the government (Haberler 2014). In this chapter, drawing upon previous analysis by Michel Foucault and the Paris School we will argue that the Passolig experience in Turkey should be thought in line with the general global tendency to introduce “surveillance” in every small part of the society, thereby turning football supporters into consumers and bodies to be controlled. This act is utterly political, in the sense that it renders the football identities individualised, controlled and privatised, displaying the extended scope of the political. In the first part of the chapter, we will delve into the literature on how politics (with its traditional meaning) and football in Turkey have been historically interwoven. Secondly, we will explore the conceptual frameworks by Foucault and the so-called Paris School, focusing on the notions of “surveillance” and “domains of insecurity” to unveil how the meaning of the political had extended starting from the 1980s. We will then move on to identifying Passolig practice in Turkey by comparing it to other e-ticket examples in various country settings. The final endeavour will be to discuss why the Passolig practice is itself political although it tries to wash the stadiums “clean” from political exposition and violence by mapping out the three strategies that the Passolig employs to transform stadiums into “domains of security”, gentrification, infantilisation and commodification, creating a secure, atomistic and consumption-oriented football spectator identity.

B. Tanıl İletişim Publishing, Istanbul, Turkey e-mail: [email protected]

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Politics and Stadiums in Turkey It is no well-hidden secret that stadiums are political spaces. With the onset of modern football in the nineteenth century, stadiums have both been the cradle of ideologies such as banal nationalism and an area where multiple political identities are not only reflected on but also constructed. The main reason for the association between politics and football is the latter’s power to mobilise large numbers of people. ‘As the most popular sport, and the form of popular culture with greatest worldwide appeal, football has been referred to as “weapon of mass distraction”’ (Tuastad 2014, p. 376). As has been demonstrated repeatedly, throughout history, football has been used to control masses and attract voters and political supporters in question. Politicians have latched on to the popular and potentially unifying aspects of football while distancing themselves from its more partisan aspects. Politicians court the votes of the tens of thousands of spectators that show up at the stadiums (Guschwan 2014, p. 888). Aktükün argues that football has been used as a political propaganda tool (as an extension of the already existing ‘war of ideologies’) from the post-First World War years until the end of the Cold War (Aktükün 2010, p. 9). In the 1954 World Cup, the defeat of Hungary by West Germany in the finals was interpreted as a victory won by capitalism against socialism (Aktükün 2010, p. 22). The Portuguese dictator Salazar’s famous ‘Triple-F’ to keep his dictatorship in place—fado, football and Fatima— had been the preferred formula for many political figures around the world, such as Franco in Spain. Franco’s use of football and Real Madrid in particular as a political tool to consolidate the regime’s power both domestically and internationally had been unfathomable. After the Civil War, the Franco regime sought to turn football stadiums into “patriotic churches”, where the Spanish nation and its values could be celebrated. Thus, players were ordered to give the fascist salute and sing the Falangist anthem Cara al sol before matches started (Quiroga 2015, p. 509). His reference to the Bernabéu Stadium as ‘a sleeping bag for 150 thousand people’ also supports Franco’s take on football (Aktükün 2010, p. 9).

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Similarly, the new regime after the Islamist Revolution in Iran has used football as a tool to penetrate the masses, while criticising it on the surface as being the source of ‘moral destruction’ (Gerhart 2002, p. 38, see also the contribution of Caroline Azad in this volume). When Iran beat the US national team at the 1998 World Cup in France, the victory was celebrated by a crowd as big as had last been seen in the streets for celebrating the Islamist Revolution in 1979 (Gerhart 2002, p. 36). Another case study is the example of South Africa, where the democratic elections in 1994 marked the final end of racial segregation in the country. Since the fall of apartheid sport has served as a vehicle for reconciliation and increased social cohesion in the country. When the South African rugby team, a majority white team with only one black player, won the World Cup in 1995, ‘the newly elected president, Nelson Mandela, clad in a Springbok jersey, handed [the white] captain Pienaar the trophy in a symbolic event of reconciliation likely to be unmatched in modern day sports’ (Reiche 2011, p. 262). In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi has gone to great lengths to associate himself with the success of his AC Milan soccer team. Journalist Patrick McCarthy noted how Berlusconi, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, substituted ‘the victories of AC Milan’ for the British triumph in the Falklands (cited in Guschwan 2014, p. 889). Moreover, he infamously stole the name for his political party, Forza Italia (Let’s Go Italy), from a stadium chant (Guschwan 2014, p. 889). In Turkey, too, football has been used as a political tool. Especially in the early years of the Republic, the organisation of the football clubs was left to the ruling Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s competence, as the government explicitly stated that, ‘football fandom cannot be allowed to negatively affect public peace and security’ (cited in Gökaçtı 2008, p. 149). This pattern has remained intact in the multi-party period and the directors of the big football clubs such as Fenerbahçe have usually been chosen from the ranks of the ruling party, the Democratic Party (DP) during the 1950s (Gökaçtı 2008, p. 214). This was also the time when the professionalisation of football was introduced, whereas in the 1960s, the Second and Third Divisions were established, and every city had its football team. The MPs tried hard so that the team of their constituency would qualify for one of these professional leagues (Kılıç 2006).

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In the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 coup, Turkish football this time had been functional in creating the masculine, apolitical and capitalist football subject in line with the main aim of the coup (i.e. to tame the revolutionary potential of the masses rendering people unable to show political reflexes) (Irak 2015). The emergence of football as a tool to penetrate the electorate continued in the era after the coup. During the premiership of Turgut Özal, many teams from peripheral cities such as Denizlispor and Kocaelispor were not relegated on purpose due to electoral concerns (Dikici 2014, p. 18). The main political reflex related to Turkish football during the 1990s was along the lines of denigrating the PKK and Kurdish nationalism. The slogans such as ‘martyrs do not die and the motherland cannot be divided’ often accompanying the national anthem before all football matches had been the usual practice during the 1990s. This tendency was also coupled during this period with the exclusive nationalist discourse prevalent in the international matches, especially with countries that were claimed to support PKK, such as Germany. After Galatasaray had beaten Eintracht Frankfurt at home in 1992, the Galatasaray supporters reportedly marched in the city centre and chanted, ‘PKK and Germany arm in arm, the army will beat both of you, pigs’ whilst passing by a military building (Bora and Erdoğan 1993, p. 239). In April 1997, Diyarbakırspor, the local team of the city Diyarbakır, located in South-East Turkey where the largest Kurdish population lives, had been saluted by chants such as ‘down with the PKK’ (cited in Mizrahi 2016, p. 39). In this vein, the capture of PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 put Diyarbakırspor on spot and underlined the potential role that the team would play in cancelling the ethnic tensions in the region. The fact that the team was managed by Gaffar Okkan, a high-level state official who stated that Diyarbakırspor should always stay in the First Division whatever the circumstances also points to this potential role assigned to the team (Mizrahi 2016, p. 39). Rising nationalist ideology continued to find resonance on the football pitches in the 2000s. In 2007, in a football match between Trabzonspor and Kayserispor in Trabzon and in another match on the same day, banners reading ‘we are all Turkish’, ‘we will not say we are Armenians even if you kill us’ were displayed. At a match between Malatyaspor, the team of Hrant Dink’s hometown Malatya,2 and

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Elazığspor, was condemned by a banner, saying ‘Armenian Malatya’ (Radikal 2007). The AKP period has been no different from this picture. AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has capitalised on the popularity of the game ever since coming to power in 2002, investing huge sums into an insolvent industry and building stadiums across the country (Mills 2019). Especially in the 2010s, his political power has been consolidated by the discourses and practices of famous footballers and football club-owners. For example, during the 2015 presidential referendum rally, famous football players like Arda Turan and Burak Yılmaz supported Erdoğan’s rally by shooting videos and sharing these videos in their social media accounts. Throughout the 2010s, the intertwinement of football and politics has taken a different twist in form of the uttermost politicisation of football fans. One of the important milestones in this respect was the match-­ fixing operation in July 2011 when important figures of Turkish football including chairman of Fenerbahçe, Aziz Yıldırım, and chairman of Sivasspor, Mecnun Otyakmaz, were taken into the custody as a part of police operation on the grounds that they had been involved in match-­ fixing in Turkey (Ergülen 2015). After the arrest, on 10 July, Fenerbahçe fans organised a big protest on Bağdat Avenue, the biggest street on the Asian side of Istanbul, and almost 400,000 people came to this protest (Aktükün 2016). The general belief of these people was that this case was a conspiracy organised against Fenerbahçe and Aziz Yıldırım by the Gülen Movement wanted to bring him down for taking Fenerbahçe under his control3 (Yanarocak 2012). During the Gezi Protests of 2013, football fans from the ‘Three Giants’ also played a major role, who manifested themselves under the banner of ‘Istanbul United’ (Irak 2015, p. 138). As football fans previously had experience of physical confrontation with the police, just like El Ahli supporters who played a major role in the Tahrir protests in Egypt, they were able to cope with the prolonged confrontation with the police. Their influence on the discourse of the protests could also be seen in the many football chants that were adapted by the protesters, such as ‘Biber Gazı Oley’ (‘Pepper Gas Ole!’) or ‘Sık Bakalım, Sık Bakalım, Biber Gazı, Sık Bakalım’ (‘Oh yeah, go ahead and spray your pepper gas, let’s see what happens’) (Irak 2015, p. 138). (For the protests in Egypt and in Gezi

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Park, see in more detail the contribution of Burak Özcetin and Ömer Turan to this volume.) As we can see, traditionally, politics had objectively specified rules (in form of elections or decision-making processes) and the political was something consensual. If we are talking about the relationship between politics and football, it took the form of a uni-directional relationship in which one influences the other, and which has narrow consequences on identities that are fixed and given. Moreover, politics was seen as a teleological process which has to do with being in government or in a political party. However, starting from the 1980s and 1990s, a different conception of politics has become prevalent in world politics. After the end of the Cold War, the drastic transformations of the social structure and newly emerging or shifting social and political identities required new approaches and explanations. This new conception of politics is understandable by ‘a theory of a society that stresses the open-ended process by which the social is shaped’ (Delanty and Rumford 2005, p. 12). Understanding politics merely as power relations or, alternatively, as competing interests or ideologies, could not sufficiently grasp new forms of identification that had been characterised by processes such as globalisation, new social movements and, last but not least, neo-liberalism. Politics, which is traditionally a conversation between fixed actors who pursue their already established goals, now emerges as the site of identity formation, contestation and renegotiation (Mouffe 1993). According to such a perspective, ‘political practice in a democratic society does not consist in defending the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable field’ (Mouffe 2000, p. 148). In this picture, the scope of power relations, which is traditionally confined to the realm of decision-making, permeates every sphere of society. It has become essentially ‘capillary power’ (quoted in Sutherland 2005, p. 189). Similarly, the most important power of neo-liberalism is its ability to penetrate every moment of our lives, to transform it and to turn it into a commodity (Alpan 2015, p. 280). Politics is now everywhere, as much as the free market relations are. In this context, the boundaries between sport, finance and politics have become suspiciously obscure. As

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Baudrillard explains, ‘politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere—economics, science, art, sport (…) Sport itself meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance’ (cited in Bar-On 1997, p. 1). The excessive interpenetration between sport, technology, politics and economics introduces a more extended scope for politics, logging into your e-mail account and donating to Greenpeace to save the penguins in the South Pole or tweeting in support of your favourite team and wearing its news jerseys is a political act in this new social context, as you are negotiating your identity and acquiring a new subject position as a “fan” or “environmentalist”.

 onceptual Framework, Surveillance C and Domains of Insecurity For Foucault, power is not only about fixed interests or identities but everything we can see or conceive of is a product of power relations (Shepherd 2008, p. 22). What is most noteworthy in the Foucauldian analysis is that from this perspective, power is not something yielded or seized, but something that disciplines. Indeed, Foucault (1991, p. 137) considered discipline to be a technique of dominance that worked to make the body both an object and a target of power. It is a technique specifically designed to achieve control and efficiency and “make useful individuals” by classifying and normalising them. “Bio-power” is described by Foucault as the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalise the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena that are characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population, health, hygiene, life expectancy, race and so on (Foucault 2003, p. 317). Through the exercise of disciplinary power, individual bodies become “docile” and normal (Foucault 1991). Foucault suggested that within institutional spaces (such as a football club), disciplinary power operated through the fabrication of individuals into an organised social order, ‘discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile bodies”, that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (p. 136).

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For Foucault, in order to do this, you need a new plane of reference where the act of governing is not only about economy or judiciary, as it had been the case with regard to the traditional conception of “sovereign”, but about life itself, which is the core of Foucault’s definition of “governmentality”. ‘Governmentality’ is ‘understood in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human behaviour. Government of children, government of souls and consciences, government of a household, of a state, or of oneself ’ (Foucault 1997, p. 82). In this respect, ‘governmentality’ defines the ‘art of governing’ more broadly as the ‘conduct of conduct’ (Foucault 2003, p. 138). This word play on “conduct” encompasses any calculated attempt to direct human behaviour towards particular ends (Dean 1999). The mechanism to achieve this is called “surveillance”. Foucault introduced Jeremy Bentham’s notion of Panopticon as an exemplar of the shift in mechanisms of surveillance and social control (Foucault 1991). The result of this architecture was ‘to arrange things so that the surveillance is permanent in its effects’ (Foucault 1991, p. 201). For Foucault, this is how power works in modern societies for remaking people and societies, by expansion of the scope of surveillance through various technologies. Panopticism, the social trajectory represented by the figure of the Panopticon, the drive to self-monitoring through the belief that one is under constant scrutiny, thus becomes both a driving force and a key symbol of the modernist project (Wood 2003, p. 234). This is very much ‘the development of the Orwellian society and its transformation, as it moves from a society of discipline to a society of management and monitoring the life of populations’ (Bigo 2006, p. 46). According to Ball and Webster, there are at least four categories of surveillance, categorical suspicion, seduction, care and exposure (Ball and Webster 2003, pp. 7–8). While the first and the third are concerned with threats and risks either to public security or to health, categorical seduction involves marketing, in particular the aim of tracking the patterns of consumption (Fonio 2007, p. 1). Exposure deals with the media and its invasive nature. Since the 1970s, Foucault’s work has been seen as inspirational and insightful by a variety of scholars coming from various disciplines such as history, natural sciences, modernity studies, queer studies and security studies. The Paris School has been one of the sites of critical security

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research since the early 2000s, predominantly influenced by the works of Bourdieu and Foucault. The idea of an Orwellian society in the making, through a “liberal” agenda, has been much discussed by the School, which is exemplified by highly securitised policy agendas where anything and everything is about “security”. The main presumption of the Paris School is that there is a merger of “internal” and “external” security into a “field of security”, whereby the border between the two ceases to exist. The border between “internal” and “external” here is tantamount to the borders of sovereign nation-states (Bigo 2001, pp. 91–116). According to Bigo, the end of bipolarity and the emergence of the EU have both contributed to the blurring of this distinction. Instead, security is a field which is mainly about the Other, entailing the excluded parts of the society (Bigo 2000, p. 175). For Huysmans, another prominent scholar of the School, ‘this interpretation broadens the notion of insecurity from the [traditional] threat definition to the political and institutional framing of policy issues in what can be referred to as “domains of insecurity”, which is the crux of “the political”’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 4). That is, to decide what creates insecurity and what does not is itself a political move and the state of insecurity is ‘politically and socially constructed’ (Huysmans 2006, p. 6). This is very close to what Foucault earlier described as “governmentality”, where the limits of the “normal” are drawn by the disciplining aspect of power. Another Foucauldian concept used by Bigo, which also contributes to the aforementioned theoretical framework, is Ban-opticon. Unlike Foucault’s Pan Opticon, which is permanent and characterised by eternal surveillance, Ban-opticon is shaped and customised in line with the needs of the society (Bigo 2002, p. 82). It ‘is characterized by the exceptionalism of power (rules of emergency and their tendency to become permanent), by the way it excludes certain groups in the name of their future potential behaviour (profiling) and by the way it normalizes the non-­ excluded through its production of normative imperatives’ (Bigo 2008, p. 32). The point of emphasis here is the political use of Pan-Opticon technologies (such as CCTVs) as if they were the only possibility to resolve any issue and to remove the uncertainty which is at the heart of modern life (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008, p. 8).

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In sum, following the line of the conceptual framework by Foucault and Paris School, the political is about controlling the bodies (surveillance) and keeping them away from insecurity (“domains of insecurity”). We now move on to exploring country cases and the Passolig experience in Turkey to understand how and through what strategies the latter addresses to the stadiums as “domains of insecurity”.

 tadiums as a Domain of Insecurity: Country S Cases and the Passolig Experience in Turkey The reflection of this trend to discipline and tame the masses and to rehabilitate ‘the domain of insecurity’ as conceptualised by the Paris School has shown itself best at the stadiums. The security techniques developed and used in the football context seek to pre-empt and minimise the probability of any undesirable conduct by football spectators in the future (Spaaij 2013, p. 167). Starting from the 1990s, the collective experience of sports spectators has increasingly become one of “segmented and panopticised confinement” characterised by seemingly indispensable technologies and surveillance (e.g. CCTV, surveillance, security personnel, assigned entrances and seating and directed spectator traffic flows) (Bale 1994, p. 84). In almost all countries, attending a professional football match was quite straightforward up until 1980s. This began to change in the 1990s, when football stadiums became increasingly segmented into different sectors and sections, automatic entrance controls and numbered seats were introduced, CCTV systems and central command posts were set up and spectators were searched at the entrance (Spaaij 2013, p. 169). This is also the time when the so-called club cards were introduced. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the Passolig system in Turkey came as a result of the 2011 Violence in Sports Act (Law 6222 on Sport). The idea behind the system was explained as ‘sanctioning individual fans instead of clubs themselves for the actions of the fans’. The Passolig Card not only allows fans to “safely” enter stadiums without waiting in queues, but it also provides clubs a chance to know more about their fans. Moreover, this card offers its users a wide range of shopping

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options with its widespread contracted merchants. Its personalised campaigns will both enrich and facilitate the subscribers’ lives. However, of course, e-ticket arrangements are not peculiar to the Turkish case. The first fan identification system was implemented in England in 1989, after the Hillsborough Disaster,4 after which every fan was forced to have an ID that contains personal data of the supporter, with an assigned number and a photograph. In 1996, on the stadiums of Premier League clubs, the Photophones computer system was installed. It takes photos of hooligans that within 30 seconds are transmitted to the stadium police stations, enabling a quick response of the police to the stadium (Mikrut and Malicki 2016, p. 42). One of the countries that has introduced e-tickets is Italy. The Tessera del Tifosi, launched in February 2007 with the aim to eliminate violence in stadiums, is ‘a fans identity card scheme brought forward by the Italian Government via ministerial protocol ostensibly to tackle violence and other forms of disorder’ (Kennedy 2013, p. 141). The card has been compulsory since the 2009–2010 season for away tickets and season tickets and has to be made available by all clubs in Serie A, Serie B and Lega Pro, and only to supporters whose names have been checked and cleared for acceptance by the police (Mizrahi 2016, p. 58). In addition to this control element of the ID card, it also serves as a payment card for match tickets and also possesses a points collection scheme (Kennedy 2013, p. 141). (As a side note, it is quite ironic, if not revealing, to find out that in Florence, some people who are not even remotely related to football are purchasing Fiorentina e-tickets in order to benefit from certain “shopping deals”). Recently, the fans in Italy have been labelled as “glass fans”, pointing to the ultimate transparency of fans in the stadium, always under control and surveillance. Another country which introduced a similar arrangement in 2009 is Poland, the Karta Kibica, which had been designed ‘to protect spectators from stadium hooliganism’ (Mikrut and Malicki 2016, p. 40). Features of the system included the identification of persons, management of ticketing, control of the fans’ site during the matches, control of an access to specific sites and verification of information on stadium bans and judicial decisions (Mikrut and Malicki 2016, p. 41). Since these regulations, it had become harder to enter a stadium in Poland than getting on an

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aircraft (Mizrahi 2016, p. 60). Due to the decreasing numbers of spectators in the stadiums, the regulation was abolished in the 2015–2016 season in Poland.

 hree Strategies of the Passolig in Making T Stadiums “Domains of Security” Gentrification5 Football isn’t the opera, if you can’t take deal with the banter, swearing, edginess, tribal mob mentality then you should follow a sport like tennis or golf. (From a fan blog named XtraTime, 2014)

To start with, it is a very well-known ‘modern’ credo that economic strategies based on stimulating retailing, leisure, tourism and the arts are accompanied by the desire to attract ‘the right sort of people’ (Coleman and Sim 2000, p. 623). ‘Undesirable’ people are identified by how they look and behave—their bodies and their embodied displays are routinely scrutinised as a result of private sector strategies which are profit driven and ‘underpinned by the construction of a preferred and particular moral order built on the politics of inclusionary respectability and exclusionist otherness’ (Coleman and Sim 2000, p. 629). Indeed, especially since the industrialisation of football, football spectators at the stadiums have usually been from urban, middle and upper-middle socio-economic categories, presumably with higher education, who have time and money to go to the stadium almost everywhere, including Turkey. Their fandom experience in the stadiums complies with the European standards defined by UEFA; therefore, they are expected to behave according to contemporary criteria (Irak 2015, p. 137). Modern football requires that the football fandom experiences in the TT Arena of Galatasaray or Şükrü Saraçoğlu Stadium of Fenerbahçe should not differ dramatically from those in the Amsterdam Arena or the Stade de France (Irak 2015, p. 137). This tendency to attract ‘the right people’ very much explains one of the strategies of Passolig. As the Passolig website attests, by purchasing the card, you will ‘enjoy watching a match safely and comfortably with

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your acquaintances on your own seat away from all the negativity’ (Passolig Website 2020). According to Nuhrat, the proponents of industrial football in Turkey tend to support the 2011 Violence Law and the subsequent introduction of the Passolig because they believe it can “clean up” and “civilize” football by prescribing “fair play” for fans. This insistence on “cleansing” and “civilizing” by way of “fair play” works to underline class distinction for the proponents, who want to distinguish themselves from resistant working-class fans (Nuhrat 2018, p. 393). Passolig’s focus on sorting out “undesirable fans” also shows itself in the prohibition to open banners and placards with political messages at the stadium in order not to harm the “peaceful environment at the stadium”. This being said, it is not always possible to understand the content of “the desirable”. On one of the controversial cases when the security forces did not allow a banner to the stadium reading ‘Yaşa Mustafa Kemal Paşa Yaşa’ (‘Long Live Mustafa Kemal Paşa’), commemorating the founder of the Turkish Republic, the then-Beşiktaş Manager Fikret Orman stated, ‘people come to the stadium not to yell political slogans but to watch the stars. If you would like to do politics, join a political party’ (cited in Blasing 2017). In this respect, Passolig aims to wash away stadiums from being “domains of insecurity” by rendering the football fans the “genuine”, middle-class spectators with their presumed interest in family football and spectacle.

Infantilisation Secondly, we argue that another strategy employed by Passolig to introduce surveillance and make stadiums “secure” places is bolstered by an assumption that football spectators cannot control themselves. What we mean by infantilisation is ‘a diminished view of human subjectivity, which regards individuals not as agents of change but as potential victims of the circumstances they face’ (Furedi 2017, p. 9). As is well-known, modern stadiums have been designed to invite people to collective pleasure, a carnivalesque imagination and idleness. In this framework, the subjects are expected to practise self-control (Çakmak 2018, p. 30). However, in modern society, the ordinary subjects who lack this self-control are

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exposed to the control of an external surveillance by security guards and remote-control cameras (Featherstone 2007, p. 24). Surveillance ‘tries to make visible the identities or the behaviours of people of interest to the agency in question’ (Lyon 2002, p. 2). This inevitably brings a hierarchical dimension to the relation between the watched and the watcher. This is what we call infantilisation of the football spectators, where they are accepted as subjects devoid of self-control. In this respect, the stadium functions as an ‘eternal adolescence simulator’. Football’s power to allow grown-up men to have reckless fun, to get as moody as possible when the team loses, and to suddenly search for the culprit in case of defeat turns men into teenagers, who do not take the responsibility for what they have done but direct their anger and disappointment at their parents instead (Bora 2013, p. 507). This tendency was bolstered by Passolig, which intrinsically departs from the presumption that spectators need to be controlled. From the start, the football bureaucracy and police perceived the spectators in the stadium as kids in their adolescence, instead of accepting them as equal participants or stakeholders in football.

Commodification Commodification of football has followed similar patterns around the world (Besnier et al. 2018; Kennedy and Kennedy 2013). These patterns include exorbitant player salaries, the proliferation of merchandising, the reorganisation of stadiums as centres of consumption and the transformation of football clubs into publicly traded corporations (Nuhrat 2018, p. 393). The case of football commodification in Turkey shows that, contrary to the cliché, sport does not (only) mirror society but forms social processes and identities (Besnier and Brownell 2012; DaMatta 2009; Nuhrat 2018). One of the most significant novelties introduced by Passolig, as advertised on its website, is the opportunity ‘to benefit from pre-match stadium activities and have a chance to win free tickets and promotions’ and ‘to easily access licenced products of your favourite team at home and abroad’ (Passolig Website 2020). This was the main source of contention when some 42 Turkish football fan clubs published a joint declaration

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protesting against Passolig. The clubs argued that ‘this practice (…) involves the idea of transforming the fan into “spectator” or “customer”, which has started with the transformation of football into an object of the market and a commodity, is wanted to be imposed once again with the e-ticket’ (cited in Erturan-Öğüt 2019, p. 2). Indeed, focus-group interviews amongst Turkish football fans also confirm that the Passolig system, which has been passed by the government’s market-friendly legislation, created a new ecosystem to adapt more neoliberal principles to the football market (Erturan-Öğüt 2019). In Erturan-Öğüt’s study, most of the participants saw themselves as ‘being forced to become an Aktif Bank customer’ (Erturan-Öğüt 2019, p. 11). The below quotations from focus-group interviews also point to this unease, Berna: Melis:

‘It is fine, but we don’t need a bank to buy tickets!’ ‘Having one more credit card is not good for me. Being a customer of another bank does not make me feel good.’

Conclusion We are going through strange times, where the notion of “security” is now a part of our daily parlance. Individuals, now even more shattered by the COVID-19 pandemic, willingly delegate some or most of their personal sense of “security” to other individuals or institutions. This chapter argues that the introduction of the Passolig Card in Turkey, with the apparent aim of turning stadiums into sites of security, contributes to the already existing industrialisation of football in Turkey and is a political decision. As we pointed out, “the political” should not be understood here as a natural extension of conventional party politics or decision-­ making and policy processes, but as a wider process where identities are negotiated and where “power” is something that permeates every particle of the society. By drawing upon the analysis of Foucault and the Paris School we depicted the Passolig experience in Turkey as a process that takes football supporters as consumers and bodies to be controlled. This

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is achieved through three strategies pursued by Passolig, gentrification, infantilisation and commodification. However, we are not yet left without any optimism. The industrialisation of football is not an automatic and inevitable process, and it creates its own tools of resistance for supporters. Similarly, the world we live in and the overarching resonance of the political in every particle of our lives also create room for counter-strategies for coming to terms with experiences such as Passolig. Passolig’s focus on sorting out “undesirable fans” and making stadiums into sites of security challenges how the football spectators perceive the game and the experience of watching football, and will create its own strategies of negotiation and resistance on the part of Turkish supporters, as it already did in various controversial decisions regarding the Passolig system.

Notes 1. MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi-Nationalist Action Party) was then an opposition party. 2. Hrant Dink was a well-known journalist, a prominent member of the Armenian minority and advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. He was assassinated in January 2007. 3. Fenerbahçe’s match-fixing case was claimed by many commentators to be done with the aim of purging the club president, Aziz Yıldırım by the Gülen Movement, the movement which was accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through an infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary, forming what is known as the “parallel state”, and to organise the failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016. 4. At a football game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest 97 fans lost their lives at Hillsborough Stadium at Sheffield due to a crowding in the pens and crush (Gibson 2009). 5. John McManus (2018) in his book, Welcome to Hell: In Search of the Real Turkish Football was the first one who succinctly used the term “gentrification” in relation to Turkish football.

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13 The Football Stadium as a Space for Protest: The Case of Iranian Female Supporters of FC Persepolis Caroline Azad

Introduction On 8 September 2019, the suicide of Iranian football fan Sahar Khodayari sparked a huge wave of outrage and anger around the world. The 29-year-­ old had set herself on fire a week earlier as she was facing up to three years in prison for trying to enter a football stadium disguised as a boy. This drama revealed the main political dimension surrounding the football stadium in Iran: along with the mandatory wearing of the Islamic headscarf (hijab), gender segregation in public space is the symbol of a control by a strong and powerful State. But these ideological principles are above all guarantors of the Islamic regime. The slightest concession to women on these issues would reflect a loss of authority by the ruling authorities. Since this tragedy, other events have rekindled this latent and deep conflict between a growing part of the Iranian population and the dominant ideological class. Firstly, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and C. Azad (*) Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_13

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the containment measures decreed throughout the world from the beginning of 2020. In Iran, the freezing of all activities related to women’s sport and football for nearly a year, as well as the corruption cases within the Iranian Football Federation, led to a massive, intensive and unprecedented mobilization of the Iranian women’s sports community on the digital space. Intrinsically linked to the history of women’s football in Iran, the issue of women’s presence in stadiums remains one of the main symbols of discrimination against women at large in the Islamic Republic. Moreover, these claims go beyond Iran’s borders since the pressure exerted constantly by the International Football Federation on the Iranian state forces the latter to act against its political strategy. As a major expression of frustration and popular demands, the stadium has been at the centre of a political controversy in Iran for the past four decades. Should women be allowed to enter the stadiums to watch men’s sports competitions? To this seemingly simple question, the Iranian authorities have never been able to give a clear answer. While no law formally prohibits women from entering stadiums as spectators, only a religious order (fatwa) promulgated in 1995 by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is still authoritative today. In this context, cross-dressing (which is understood as being dressed up like a boy) has been used since 1998 by some Iranian women to challenge authority and denounce a situation considered discriminatory. Taking as an example the experience and involvement of some female supporters of the most popular football club in Iran and Asia (FC Persepolis), our analysis aims to show an alternative conception of contestation. On the basis of the specific conditions and constraints imposed on them, they seem to be actively challenging the ruling authorities by negotiating their presence and imposing new norms and mentalities. In order to claim their rights in an area from which they are a priori excluded, these women are developing strategies to push boundaries. And to circumvent the prohibitions by negotiating other possibilities for action. Like in other countries around the world, football is a major political issue in Iran. Considered the most popular sport in the country since the late 1960s, modern football provides a mirror of the political and social power struggles at work in the Islamic Republic. In that sense, football also reflects the particular status of Iranian women, whose role, image

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and body constitute the basis of the political and religious structure set up since 1979. In this regard, the mandatory wearing of the Islamic headscarf (hijab) is at the same time the symbol of a control by a strong and powerful State, and the guarantor of the Islamic regime. As the place where frustrations and popular claims are expressed, the stadium enclosure has been at the centre of a major political controversy in Iran for four decades.

 ross-Dressing for a Match: Between C Resistance and Helplessness As any observer who has lived in the Islamic Republic can testify, granting oneself freedom in a place that tends to restrain it is a daily challenge. Indeed, having to permanently juggle with censorship inevitably equals to taking risks. However, as contradictory as this may seem, constraints are being less perceived as obstacles than means since they can be overcome. Moreover, the transgressive approach that goes together with any kind of freedom demonstrates a desire for individual emancipation (Nahavandi 2016). We will see that the process used by the Iranian female Persepolis supporters provides evidence of a form of resistance, but also of a certain helplessness. The staging of cross-dressing makes it possible to raise consciousness. But it is not being able to change the behaviour of power holders, at least in the short and medium term. Some consider that any reform in this regard would probably mean a loss of authority for the power (Fozooni 2008). Nevertheless, since the enclosure of the football stadium is used by women to express themselves and to contest the power in place, cross-dressing seems first and foremost to illustrate a true act of resistance (Vinthagen et al. 2018).

Zeinab, Zahra and the Others Zeinab is 23 years old. She lives in Ahvaz, an oil region in the southwest of Iran. Ever since she was a little girl, Zeinab has shared one passion with her father and brothers: the FC Persepolis. The football club, which was

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founded in 1963, is not only the great national champion (Tehran Times 2020) but is also considered by the Asian Football Confederation to be the most popular club in Asia. As a true reference in football, Persepolis has welcomed the main Iranian football stars and has trained several players of the national team (called Team Melli). The popularity of the club has lived through generations of men and women, such as Zeinab, who claims her passion for the football club on her favourite social network. In terms of interacting with the world, expressing oneself and enhancing self-staging, Iran does not differ from the rest of the world. If Telegram and Twitter can be accessed only via computerized filtering systems in the Islamic Republic, Instagram has the advantage of not being censored. Zeinab’s account is entirely dedicated to her passion for the Persepolis football club and has currently about 135,000 subscribers. The young woman publishes photos of the football matches she attends (about ten in eight years) to ‘encourage other women to imitate her’. This is what she speaks about in the report that was devoted to her in February 2019 in the French weekly Paris Match. She does not omit anything of her ‘transformation into a boy’ with the aim of entering the stadium, watching her favourite team play and living her enthusiasm as a supporter to the fullest. The ritual is always the same: when she decides to attend a competition of her football club in Tehran, she goes to one of her makeup artist friends who lives in the capital city. The result is stunningly realistic: wig, makeup, coloured contact lenses, the fake facial hair is carefully applied onto the face and the eyebrows. On her social network, which is public and accessible to all, Zeinab regularly shows the success of the ploy she uses to circumvent a ban she considers to be ‘unfair’ towards women living in Iran. She also relates her failures when she is denied entry to the stadium. The young woman’s recklessness has also caused her a lot of suffering. She mentions she has been arrested four times and that one night at a police station she was taken to in order to be interrogated a policeman punched her in the neck and the back (Delassus 2019). Two months after this report was published, the story of Zeinab was known all around the world. Forough Alaei, the female photographer who accompanied her from Ahvaz to the Azadi stadium in Tehran (the largest one in Iran with its 100,000 seats) received the prestigious World Press Photo Award 2019 in the sports category for her series of photos entitled ‘Crying for Freedom’.

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It is difficult to estimate the number of female football affiliates or supporters in Iran. But the case of Zeinab is far from being unique. Zahra and her friends also show some pictures of their cross-dressing on their Twitter account. Being assiduous supporters of the Persepolis, these girls cross-dressed into boys and took pictures of themselves in the stadium. Their cheerful appearance and the comments under their photos give evidence of the satisfaction provided by an act considered ‘victorious’. Another photo, also circulating on a public Twitter account, is a close-up photo showing two young girls inside an empty stadium. The girls wearing the compulsory hijab are showing themselves holding a photo in a large format on which they can be recognized, covered up and disguised as boys. They are sitting in the terraces of a stadium in the middle of a predominantly male crowd and they are dressed in red (the colour of the Persepolis club). The poster reads a phrase that can be translated as follows: ‘Borrowing an identity while waiting to be able to show our real faces’. This staging is explicit and the risk-taking is real because the message is being spread urbi et orbi. This approach illustrates the clear and assumed protest of a situation deemed absurd and discriminating. Moreover, this staging could especially be interpreted as a real act of resistance since it is about declaring loud and clear, with an uncovered face, that a ban has been transgressed. It is also about publicly expressing their disagreement in a country where the place of expression is limited and controlled with sophisticated means.

Cross-Dressing as an Act of Resistance? Defining the concept of resistance is however not easy as it is plural and constantly evolving. The definition given to the notion of power makes it possible to interpret different activities as forms of resistance. If power is primarily a matter of subordination and hierarchy, resistance is the kind of actions which undermine, dissolve, challenge or question such subordination, and ultimately produce non-subordinate relations (Lilja and Vinthagen 2014). According to these authors, which were inspired among others by the pioneering works of Michel Foucault (theory of power) and James Scott (intended resistance), matters of resistance vary according to

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several elements such as the identity of the resister, the origin of the resistance, its organization and what it is directed against. The context (historical, social, cultural, economic, linguistic) is therefore essential to grasp the foundations and circumstances in which the action is initiated. How people understand the world (which for instance translates into their practices and values) greatly influences their possibilities and the limits of their actions (Sorensen and Vinthagen 2012). In this case the approach of the Iranian female supporters can be interpreted as a form of protest given the explicit nature of the messages that support their action. Here gender discrimination is clearly being challenged. However, if these female field players are aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it, the word ‘resistance’ (moghâvemat, in Persian) is not formally used. Is it therefore possible to consider their protest as an act of resistance? Based on the typology suggested by Lilja and Vinthagen, disguising as men to attend a men’s football competition from the terraces indeed resembles an act of resistance. Who is taking action? An exclusively female population. Where? In the Islamic Republic of Iran, within a public space of undeniable political nature (the football stadium). With what means? By disguising as men, the aesthetic aspect and the temporary construction of an alternative identity are analysed as elements of resistance by both authors. How is the approach organized? According to Vinthagen and Lilja, it is not necessary for an action to be formally and explicitly organized to be considered as ‘resilient’. What is the action directed against? Opposing traditional norms or gender stereotypes through provocative behaviours that experiment with new styles, such as clothing, is also in line with a resilient approach.

F ootball and the Stadium as Mirrors of Female Protest In the years that followed the Iranian revolution, the claims of civil society started to emerge in various ways. And it is by the end of the war against Iraq in 1988 that Iranian women began to massively challenge the legitimacy of patriarchal traditions by constituting pressure groups, creating

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partnerships, protesting or negotiating. Nevertheless women’s resistance towards the imposition of Islamic rules is still generally conveyed, in particular by Western media, through the prism of the ‘rebel woman’ who removes her headscarf, drinks alcohol or asserts her secularism. This interpretation suggests a certain representation of women’s emancipation according to codes and values that are allegedly universal. By ignoring or underestimating the contextual realities, this approach implies the inability of ‘other’ women to produce new discourses and new commitments aiming at reconsidering the discrimination and domination that they endure (Yavari-D’hellencourt 1998). As a place where norms are being transgressed and hierarchies reversed, the football stadium is first and foremost a place that is traditionally associated with masculinity, modernity and global culture (Toffoletti 2014). By claiming ownership of the stadium, the Iranian female supporters confirm their demands in support of better status and rights within the society. Therefore, their approach represents a risk to the power: the slightest reform or concession in their favour would attest to a significant loss of authority (Fozooni 2008).

 988–1998: The Development of Female Sports 1 Through the Lens of Political Openness From the start football’s Western origins and the passions it aroused were viewed with mistrust by the traditional religious elites. But even during the long eight-year war against Iraq, the young people from the country’s large cities and rural areas kept expressing their desire to practise this sport. In a context where most leisure activities had become inaccessible or totally prohibited, attending football matches was one of the few recreational sources for a youth that was lacking perspective. Nevertheless the increasing popularity of football among this social base—which was important to the young Islamic regime—forced the authorities of the time to react: as mosques were being massively deserted in favour of football fields, the State started holding provincial championships in the early 1980s. The State also realized that football could effectively convey new ideological values. But the violence, the trafficking of all kinds and the public disorder caused by football matches provoked an important debate

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within the ruling elites who were overtaken by the events. The enthusiasm triggered by football was associated with a ‘colonialist conspiracy’ and the role of the match was referred to as ‘destructive to the Third-­ World countries’ (Chehabi 2006). As of 1981, women were banned from stadiums on the grounds that the insults and behaviours generated during these events could turn out to be dangerous for their physical and moral integrity. But in spite of these attempts aiming at diminishing the practice of football and the passion for this sport, the regime could not risk dividing the working classes which represented the main guarantor of its legitimacy and its longevity. Two years after the war, in 1990, Iran won the Asian Football Championships, marking the start of a prosperous decade for this sport and the enthusiasm it aroused. And in particular among women. In fact although Iran became a leading nation again on the regional sports scene, thanks to the Asian Cup, the country had already been hosting a series of women’s sports initiatives such as The National Women’s Sports Administration (NWSA) and the Islamic Federation of Women Sport (IFWS), which was shut down in 2010 due to budget cuts. The integration of these structures into the Iranian institutional landscape coincided with the recognition of new disciplines in women’s sports and the granting of professional accreditations to female sports journalists. It was at that time that football was recognized as a discipline that could be practised by women, though only indoor. Futsal was then integrated as a new competitive discipline, which allowed Iranian women to develop their skills (they won the Asian Championship in 2018 for the second time in a row). As Jenny Steel points out, the development of football reveals the method used to modify the main norms and achieve the expected changes by making them effectively compatible with the Islamic laws. In view of the sexual segregation in the public space and the religious influence in sport, in particular through strict dress codes, Iran became a textbook case. ‘Supporters of the government’s policy of segregation between the sexes might cite the development of football for women as an example of how segregation may be said to result in more freedom for the women of Iran than that which is available to them in most other Muslim countries’ (Steel and Richter-Devroe 2003).

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Today most disciplines in women’s sports are integrated into the national federations. In November 2017 female weightlifting, unlike swimming, was recognized as a national sports discipline. However, the political support in favour of the re-emergence of women on the sports scene seems to be first and foremost a two-level soft power strategy (Boniface 2014). First on the regional scene where the Islamic Republic tried to justify its ideological movement through sport. When the war ended in 1988 Iran tried to build a less severe image by organizing and hosting women’s sports competitions. Secondly at the national level, when the regime began to standardize the official ideology with public policies in favour of women’s emancipation through sport. As maintained by the former member of the Iranian parliament behind the institutional development of women’s sports, Faezeh Rafsanjani, the Iranian revolution ‘allowed for women from a traditional background to take part in sports’. Unlike previously with the last Shah (1941–1979), when, according to her, due to the banning of the veil during that period ‘they were forced to choose between the sport and the veil’ (Ghazi 1999). As women’s sports became an established fact, the attendance of women at men’s competitions was being discussed again in government. In July 1994, on the occasion of an Asian Cup match held in Tehran between India and Bahrain, the idea of allowing a limited number of women to attend the match triggered a fierce debate, especially in the local press. The editorial writers of the most conservative daily newspapers disapproved: the improper language in the stadiums and the players’ outfit were considered to be inappropriate for Iranian women. Nevertheless 500 women were allowed to take a seat in the terraces. This polemic lasted until the following year. In the summer of 1995, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei put an end to the discussion by issuing a fatwa that was published in some newspapers as Pahlavan: ‘An unrelated woman may not look at the naked body of an unrelated man, even if the intent is not deriving lust’. Even if the controversy was momentarily closed, the religious elites progressively conceded that football was indisputably the most popular sport in Iran (Chehabi 2006). This new trend away from a religious vision of the world and favourable to change was consolidated during the 1996 parliamentary elections when the reformists made a major breakthrough in the Iranian political

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landscape. Although it could not easily be backed up by figures, it is well known that the massive commitment of women (and young people) enhanced President Mohammad Khatami’s victory the following year (Yavari-D’hellencourt 1998). He was a reformist cleric who was elected with a majority for his progressive views and speeches in favour of individual freedom. This unprecedented wave of optimism led to a budding civil society and opened a new chapter in women’s fight for equality (Hoodfar and Sadr 2012). But it is only after the qualification of Iran for the football World Cup in 1998, the first one in 20 years, that the demands of Iranian women would reinforce and defy the major ideological norms.

 998–2018: The Stadium as a Symbol of Assertion 1 of Identity During this period of opening, football fever acquired political relevance in Iran (Chehabi 2006). The country’s participation in the football World Cup became an affair of state and the defeat of the Islamic Republic against Qatar (0–2) in November 1997 was intensely debated in Parliament. The coach at the time Mayeli-Kohan, who was identified with the conservative faction, was replaced with the Brazilian head coach of Iran’s Olympic football team, Valdeir Vieira. On the occasion of a final match against Australia, he managed to get Iran qualified in extremis for the most-watched sports event in the world. Beyond the passion for sport, this qualification meant for many Iranians the return of their country within the international community. Only a few months after the election of President Mohammad Khatami, this ‘victory’ triggered scenes of jubilation throughout the country, the most important ones since the revolution 20 years earlier. Millions of people invaded the streets, and the Islamic rules were regularly infringed. Many women removed their veils, and the sobriety that was in place at the time in the public sphere was replaced by music, dance and songs (Longman 1998). When the Melli team players came back from Melbourne in December, they were greeted by 100,000 people in the famous Azadi Stadium. About 5000 women ignored the warnings against their attendance in the

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stadium and literally rushed into the stadium enclosure. According to a report carried out in Tehran by the New York Times in April 1998, some of the women disguised as men to try to get a seat in the terraces. The reporter for the American daily newspaper also wrote: ‘The revival of national pride was seen by many as a political statement of the power of the young and of women and a sobering reality check for conservatives who were powerless to stop this spontaneous outpouring. To some analysts, women in particular seemed to be saying that they wanted a greater place in society by claiming a place in the soccer stadium’ (Longman 1998). This event provided further evidence for the significance of the football stadium’s social and political dimension. As Christian Bromberger put it (1995), the stadium ‘is one of those rare spaces where collective emotions are unleashed (…) where socially taboo values are allowed to be expressed’. Following these events, the insistence of sportswomen to have their own league and to be allowed in stadiums resurfaced in Parliament and in the women’s press. In August 1998 an amateur football match bringing together about 40 female players was officially organized in Tehran for the first time since the Iranian revolution. In total about 16,000 women participated in the various sports activities available such as karate, judo, gymnastics or motor racing (Ghazi 1999). The new female national football team, which is made up of the best futsal players, played their first open-air match six years later. In his documentary Football undercover, the Iranian director Ayat Najafi tells the story behind the scenes of the match with the Kreuzberg club BSV AL-Dersimpor. This Berlin football team was the first exclusively female foreign club to play a match in Iran. However difficult it was to organize this friendly match— due indubitably to its political aspects—it is interesting to hear the testimonies, the passion and the determination of the players to succeed in this sport that at the time was slow to gain, within the Iranian population, legitimacy and visibility of its ‘feminine dimension’. In 2006, during a power struggle with the international community on resuming the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic, the new conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (elected the previous year) revived the ‘stadium polemic’ by proposing to grant a part of the terraces exclusively to women. He addressed a message towards his

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political opponents: ‘The presence of women and families in public spaces promotes chastity’ (The Guardian 2006). But despite this statement, the status quo prevailed. And if measures are made more flexible for the men’s volleyball, basketball or gymnastics competitions, football remains a particularly sensitive topic. Football is both a mirror distorting the power relations within a national community and a powerful identity marker (De Waele and Louault 2016). As seen in the case of the Persepolis female supporters, the sense of belonging to a football community is ostensibly shown and accepted. But these women’s struggles, which are punctuated with victories against a rigorous clerical opposition, have also shaped, if not consolidated, a ‘collective identity’ against discrimination (Fozooni 2008). In this context, sports seem to be used as a means for subordinate groups like women to resist supremacy. And in order to be consistent with this approach of non-compliance, women ‘need to come to some common understanding of their experiences’ (Pelak 2002). According to Cynthia Pelak, who studied the emergence of a female collective identity in ice hockey in the United States in the 1990s, three factors helped to forge their collective identity: boundaries, consciousness and negotiations. ‘Boundaries are defined as the social, psychological, and physical structures that highlight differences between subordinates and dominants; consciousness refers to the interpretative frameworks used by a challenging group to define and realize its interests; and negotiations are the symbolic and everyday actions that subordinate groups take up to resist and restructure existing systems of domination’ (Pelak 2002). These contradictions around the societal phenomenon that is football (and which has been federating Iranian women since the end of the 1990s) have been shown in the film Offside directed by Jafar Panahi. This fictional documentary was released in 2005 and gives a special interpretation of the commitment of the Iranian female supporter. It was filmed under the real conditions of the match between Iran and Bahrain, at the end of which Iran was qualified for the World Cup in 2006. The film tells the story of the misfortunes of a group of young girls disguised as boys and who are trying to attend this match at the Azadi Stadium. Through the political act of rebellion that is cross-dressing, the film reveals the social and cultural tensions of a society that is trying to reclaim an

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identity congested by the values inherited from the revolution. The female supporter is depicted and valued as a young girl committed to the action and the power of negotiation. As shown in Philippe Ragel’s analysis (2011), it is interesting to note the director’s position towards the new modalities of engagement initiated by the Iranian woman in the sports arena as well as the new forms of solidarity between genders. This alternative conception of the female supporter’s commitment suggests going beyond the Manichean interpretation of women in Islam, who are depicted as helpless victims of a patriarchal system or outrageous rebels against the regime. Indeed, from specific constraints (e.g. the compulsory wearing of the veil) and particular conditions (a lower social status), women compromise and find other ways to circumvent the discrimination they suffer from. Over 15 years after it was released, the matter of the film is still topical, one significant difference being that today Iranian women accessing football stadiums is a topic going well beyond Iranian borders. A few months before the beginning of the 2018 football World Cup, Gianni Infantino, the President of FIFA, publicly stated that he was opposed to this ban: ‘I was promised that women in Iran will have access to football stadiums soon (…) President Rohani told me that in countries such as Iran, these things take a bit of time’ (Reuters 2018). A few months later, the match that team Melli was playing against the Spanish Roja in Moscow was broadcast live at Azadi stadium. For the first time in more than two decades, men and women sat together. After the Spanish victory, the defender Sergio Ramos paid tribute on his Twitter account to the Iranian women: ‘They are tonight’s real winners’. When team Melli got back to Tehran on 16 October and played a friendly match against Bolivia, some 500 carefully selected women were attending the match. Only the members of the women’s national football teams, the coaches and the families of the players were allowed to sit in the terraces. If this event was not a major breakthrough in favour of Iranian women, it was a huge success in terms of communication and image for the Islamic Republic. Not only did the information go around the world, the international press as a whole ran, although wrongly, the event under the headline ‘A historic first’ since the revolution.

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Under pressure from the Asian Football Confederation and despite the vehement criticism of the ultra-conservatives, the experience was repeated a month later during the final of the Asian Champions League. While the match between the Japanese team of Kashima Antlers and Persepolis FC was being broadcast in some schools for the first time, a thousand women had been allowed to attend the match from a terrace that was reserved for them in the Azadi stadium enclosure. Zeinab and her friends were sitting among them (Delassus 2019). The political dilemma represented by the presence of women in stadiums recalls two fundamental principles of the Islamic regime driven by its ideological imperatives: gender segregation in public spaces and control over the visibility of woman’s body. In this sense, ‘Iranian women’s increased public presence—even though partially enabled by state policy—has posed a challenge to state authority’ (Shahrokni 2020, p.  4). This ‘active use’ of public space—by cross-dressed football supporters or women in general—espouses rights-based claims and would contribute to the women’s fight for gender equality. The determination, the courage and the creativity of women to circumvent—or negotiate—their presence in a space that is formally forbidden to them tell us how people defy the official authority by directly executing their claims. These actions help us to recognize and understand the way in which women are involved in transforming norms and mentalities within authoritarian context by managing, resisting and subverting domination under conditions of surveillance (Bayat 2013).

Conclusion Considered the country’s most popular sport since the late 1960s, modern football reflects the political and social power struggles at work in the Islamic Republic. As Christian Bromberger understood it, the football stadium is a powerful barometer of the social tensions and contradictions experienced by Iranian society today. In this sense, it reflects the special status of Iranian women, whose role, image and body form the basis of the political and religious structure that has been in place since 1979.

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The international repercussions of Sahar Khodayari’s death showed the Islamic Republic’s inability to resolve a dilemma that is both ideological and existential. How can a state ideology be adapted to societal changes without threatening its political existence? Faced with pressure from Iranian and international public opinion, as well as from FIFA, the authorities had no choice but to lift ban on women for the first qualifying match for the 2022 World Cup, which took place in the Iranian capital on 10 October 2019. As a result, 3556 women were allowed to attend the game between the Iranian and Cambodian national teams. Media coverage was worldwide, and the event was once again—and wrongly again— described as ‘historic’. On rare occasions since then, a small number of handpicked women (national team players and some relatives) have been able to attend men’s national team matches. While access remains still prohibited to the Iranian female population at large, some progress testifies to a gradual change. Since the historic qualification of the women’s national team for the 2022 AFC’s Women’s Asian Cup, the presence of Iranian women in the stadiums has been publicly claimed without restraints. The multiple statements made on this matter by the head coach—and key figure— Maryam Irandoost; as well as the testimony of some players of the women’s national team showing them attending a provincial football match disguised as a boy alongside their father are some examples among many others. These feeble concessions by the Iranian state do not seem to indicate a radical change neither in its policy nor in its ideology. This apparent flexibility rather illustrates how the system tends to keep control and protect itself by circumventing pressure and avoiding sanctions from an institution that the country needs to ensure and strengthen its presence and visibility on the international sports scene. Based on the experience of some football fans, we have tried to give a different and contextualized interpretation of the protest through the use of cross-dressing. As the main advocates of their rights, these women participate in an active process of resistance and suggest alternative conceptions to the notion of commitment by using the many constraints imposed on them as a means of transgression in order to obtain compromises rather than major upheavals.

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Part V Outlook

14 The Post-Pandemic Football Stadium In 2050 Jean-Michel Roux, Natalia R. de Melo, Cristiane R. de S. Duarte, and Elson M. Pereira

There is no place on earth where man is happier than in a football stadium. Albert Camus

Preliminary Thoughts Since the seminal works of Plato (around 360 BC/1979), Saint Augustine (413–426/1994) or Thomas More (1516/1966), imagining the city as an ideal society and situating it in a far-away future or fictional world has always been a means of engaging with a project. The narratives of these great thinkers gave birth to a literary genre, utopia, and its opposite, dystopia. It’s an action-oriented posture that seeks to outline the highest

J.-M. Roux (*) Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France e-mail: [email protected] N. R. de Melo Université d’Orléans, Orléans, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_14

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ambitions for the society with the aim to achieve the best possible materialisation of the described project. By definition, a utopia is a vision that offers a well-argued critique of a societal state deemed inacceptable, sometimes sanctioned by a destructive apocalypse, before answering point by point to the initial critique. In doing so, it formulates a response by means of a new organisation, be it architectural, spatial, political and so on, and new narratives. If some utopias have no ambition to be realised, others serve as model or blueprint for experimentation, to the point that each city already contains its part of realised utopia. Some authors have even established a link between utopian reflexion and the birth of urbanism as a discipline of its own at the eve of the twentieth century (Hall 1988/2002). To quote but one example, the description in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard of a utopian city, in which man lived in harmony with nature (To-morrow. A Peaceful Path to Real Reform), was accompanied by the creation of a Garden City movement which became the Town and Country Planning Association. As early as 1903, this utopia was implemented in Letchworth by Raymond Unwin and influenced a larger number of urbanistic projects around the world over the entire twentieth century. Sports and leisure are recurrent and emblematic elements of modern utopian projects, in the garden cities as in the Cité industrielle project of French architect Tony Garnier in 1917. Imagining that the health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic is an apocalypse, meaning both a catastrophe and revelation, which will lead to a change of our society, and which will give birth either to a reform preparing a better world or an aggravation of already existing dysfunctions, is nothing less than utopian tradition. And this chapter follows this tradition, in proposing, first, a dystopian vision written in April 2000, during full lockdown and before the restart of football matches behind closed doors, followed by a utopian vision written in June 2020. C. R. de. S. Duarte Universidade Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil E. M. Pereira Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil

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Context Both football stadiums and the game itself have undergone crises in regular intervals over recent decades, with a non-negligible impact on our cities. Thirty years before the coronavirus that has turned our lives, our cities and our stadiums upside down, the Hillsborough tragedy 1 already changed the face of football, first in England, then all over the world. And yet, by the time Hillsborough happened, governing bodies and public authorities should have been prepared by a series of disasters, fires or violent clashes between hooligans.2 It took the conclusions of Lord Justice Taylor on the Hillsborough incident to see a profound movement towards stadium renovation (Taylor 1990). Die-hard supporters and hooligans were hastily scapegoated and publicly identified as main culprits, even though the Taylor Report also pointed to the obsolescence of the stadium infrastructure and the indecency of the amenities offered. For instance, the lack of a sufficient number of public toilets could only lead to behaviour that would have been unimaginable elsewhere. And it took another 30 years before the authorities recognised that the management of the Hillsborough event by the police forces had been wanting, to say the least. Within a few years, stadiums in Western Europe were sweepingly renovated or newly built in consideration of the new security standards, often at a distance from city centres (Landauer 2009). As a result, the quality of the buildings was greatly enhanced, with an entirely new attention for user experience in terms of view, seating comfort, catering and connectivity, but in return suffering a certain loss of atmosphere (Gaffney 2008). Even before the 2020 pandemic, the stadium managers of the post-­ Taylor era already held die-hard supporters, increasingly referred to as ‘Ultras’, in horror, mainly for their tendency to seek physical contact with each other in order to produce mass movements. Terraces had been closed down, all-seating imposed almost everywhere, security controls reinforced all along the itinerary of supporters from their home to their allocated seat. Paradoxically, supporters had to pay for attending a spectacle the lucrative commercialisation of which (television rights and VIP boxes) they were significantly enhancing in the first place with their chants and tifos, those audio-visual choreographies, in which they already

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invested considerable amount of money, energy and time beforehand. Visiting supporters had become the nightmare of police forces (and were treated as such). Stadium bans were regularly pronounced as sanctions for divers and repeated incidents, and some had already started to think that the absence of the public was a lesser evil. Despite decades of commodification, the football business turned out to be a colossus with feet of clay, when the pandemic hit in the 2019–2020 season. Already before, the stadiums in many countries were often less full than the official figures claimed. Player salaries had become clearly disproportional, a number of top clubs had landed in the hands of Russian oligarchs, Asian tycoons or American pension funds, and clubs and leagues had become fully dependent of the ‘television rights’ windfall. In the year ‘zero’ of the era of the coronavirus, a new economy of football emerged.

Ground Zero Dystopia Thirty years later, in 2050, the new football economy—not much different from the economy of other major global collective sports like basketball, rugby, American football, baseball, ice hockey and cricket—is organised in three distinct worlds with low permeability between each other: closed leagues, ‘national championships’ and semi-clandestine amateur competitions.

The Closed Leagues of Europe and South America Very quickly, the richest professional football clubs of Europe—very much the ‘usual suspects’ that had already for years threatened to launch a ‘SuperLeague’—seceded from their national leagues and federations and reconstituted as franchises. They created a competition on invitation, a closed league, eliminating the sporting and financial uncertainty of relegation. UEFA and FIFA failed in preventing them from doing so, thus losing their monopoly on organising international competitions. To the

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great regret of Switzerland and the countries concerned by this so-called League of Stars, the management consortium of the project is now based in a Caribbean tax haven. A similar league exists in South America, composed by the franchises of a handful of metropolises or mega-cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis (Brazil), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile) and Montevideo (Uruguay). The match behind closed doors has become the rule. Their league’s economy depends entirely on streaming rights sold to worldwide platforms as well as merchandise of all sorts. As a result, stadiums have become obsolete, and the franchises have abandoned them for so-called studio-stadiums. This new kind of premises are entirely closed and covered. They do not have any grandstands, but only large corporate boxes rented to sponsors and partners. These boxes are separate from one another and include, according to the level of service chosen, private lounges, exterior balconies for live viewing, bars, restaurants, accommodation, video gaming rooms, cinemas, spas, prayer rooms or night clubs. Exemptions from the legal restrictions that prohibit ‘the gathering of more than 1000 persons in public spaces and public-access establishment’ allow the clubs to consider the box as spectator unit, authorising the ‘studio-stadiums’ to go well beyond 10,000 ‘VIP guests’ at certain occasions. On the opposite side of the corporate boxes, a large canvas allows to project pictures of football crowds. During the first years of the ‘studio-­ stadiums’, broadcasters mainly drew on existing archives from previous big matches, but with changing jersey colours, emblems and names of the franchises, they had no choice but to produce computer-animated, synthetic images of supporters. These were accompanied by background noises recalling the electric ambiances previously created by Ultra groups and covering the voices of players and coaches. An increasing number of young football fans have no souvenir of having seen their team in a real stadium and mock their parents’ nostalgia for the atmosphere of a bygone era (Rodrigues 2018; Roux 2014). How can you regret something you have never known?

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National Championships The former national championships still exist, but they’re only a shadow of their former selves. In France, only one division remains. In Brazil, regional championships in the different states have survived, despite the loss of the great teams of the franchises. The major part of lower-league or small-town clubs has simply disappeared. Officially, the remaining competitions are still championships based on a system of relegation and promotion with regional amateur leagues, but the play-offs generally leave little hope for the teams from below. These championships struggle to strike a balance. They are broadcast on public television or small cable networks, but that does not allow them to realise enough revenues to retain the best players, all of whom hope to be drafted by a franchise of the closed league, without any indemnity for the club of origin. The latter are sustained by some rare local sponsors, with a handful of national corporate partners for the more prominent clubs. Stadium capacity is limited by the law, which considers that each grandstand is a public-access establishment on its own, allowing for a maximum of 1000 spectators each. The popular ends have safe standing, but the public is under strict control with each person required to respect a minimum distance of 1.5 m with their neighbours. White lines on the ground indicate the space allotted to each single fan. Mask-­ wearing is suspended and even prohibited in order to ensure the smooth functioning of facial recognition systems. The latter allow to identify in real time any ‘illegal physical proximity’ and to send an SMS alert at the first observable misbehaviour. A second one, and the stadium pass, which is mandatory for attending each match, is disactivated for a period defined by the local police authorities.3 The main stand, reserved to sponsors, officials and media, benefits from an exemption. The seats are at a distance of 50 cm, which is made possible by the requirement to wear a face mask (although it is obvious that this obligation is hardly respected). The former stadiums of the ‘League of Stars’ franchises have all been ‘rendered’ to the local authorities, charged with managing these sporting wastelands or proceeding with their demolition. In Paris, the Stade de France was the object of a resounding legal battle between the French state and the major companies of the construction industry, shareholders

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of the consortium that had just renewed their 25-year facility management contract in exchange for a guaranteed number of concerts and international football and rugby fixtures per year. Unfortunately for them, all international matches are now played behind closed doors, in the studio-stadiums run by the franchises. In Brazil, certain stadiums only survived, thanks to their role as field hospitals during the waves of the pandemic. They are now managed by the public health service, the army or private clinics. Their huge inner space turn these ‘hospital-stadiums’ into centres for gathering and triage of the ill during peaks of the pandemic. The championships are suspended for long weeks, while the region’s most affected patients can be hospitalised in the emergency blocks established below the grandstands. Other patients are quarantined in tent camps just below. Certain centrally located stadiums were bought, together with their club, by major private health firms, who preserved only one grandstand, replacing the others with hospital facilities (operating rooms and chambers), but also luxury condominiums to create extra revenues.

Amateur Championships Some supporters have simply turned away from the closed leagues and the remaining national championships. They follow the semi-clandestine amateur championships that flourish in the empty spaces of the cities. Called clandés in France, clandestinos in Italy, Spain or Brazil,4 or ‘flashmob football’ in most non-Latin countries, they do not belong to any official league or federation and like mushrooms, they disappear as quickly as they emerge. Five-a-side or seven-a-side games—without refereeing—are set up by teams via crypted messaging, which fixes the time and hours for the matches. They are often played on beaches or on greens of public parks—a return to the roots, to a certain extent—but also supermarket parking lots or even motorway stations for interurban challenges. Pitch dimensions are not standardised, but simply imposed by the space chosen to host the match. Bare grounds, tarmac or concrete are more frequently used than grass surfaces. The championship fixtures are held without respecting a regular calendar and in arbitrary order. The championship is over when all teams have

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played each other once. Not all matches are finished, as police raids for offences against the sanitary measures and assembly restrictions occur frequently (except for the teams composed by police officers themselves!). It is not rare to see professional players of the national championships join the team of their former neighbourhood incognito. In Brazil, they are nicknamed ‘grains of rice’ (‘pó de arroz’) in remembrance of the first Afro-Brazilian players allowed into Rio’s all-white teams. Money has quickly started to circulate among some of these championships, triggering the emergence of a new form of ‘shamateurism’. This is understandable, as the big matches or neighbourhood derbies attract significant crowds. Betting has become omnipresent, often controlled by organisations that previously already managed the jogo do bicho.5 Certain companies, the fashion business as well as the big football franchises start to be interested in the phenomenon. There is no way of telling where the current three-tier football economy is heading. It definitely appears to be quite fragile, though.

Utopia’s Playing Field As we are never safe from a good surprise, a different future is possible. According to Jared Diamond, societies confronted with environmental, climatic, economic or political perils may either collapse or else decide to survive by making two crucial choices: on the one hand, they project themselves into the future, planning their needs and anticipating the problems before they reach unmanageable proportions; and on the other hand, they reconsider the essential values on which they are grounded (in matters of health, education, culture, housing, environment) in order to take courageous and life-saving decisions (Diamond 2005). The vast majority of post-COVID nations chose the second option.

False Start At first, everything went wrong. The Tokyo Olympics of 2021 were a complete disaster. A significant number of competitions were rendered meaningless by the almost systematic exclusion of audiences and the

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absence of numerous delegations, unable to attend because of the pandemic’s persistence and their economies in free fall. Performances lost credibility, as certain countries concealed systematic doping behind preventive or curative treatments against the coronavirus. The podiums were mono-national in 25% of the cases, and 90% of the medals were shared by less than ten nations, with 70% going to China and the USA. The exorbitant organisational expenses—despite low-cost provisions— resulted in a serious conflict between Japan and the IOC. Even worse, the Japanese took to the streets during massive and unprecedented demonstrations. This peaceful and respectful movement took the name of Wasaga protest (‘umbrella protest’). During the Olympics it was outflanked by violent groups clashing with police forces. The main beneficiary was the extreme right-wing party which made it to the corridors of power at the subsequent parliamentary elections. The United States accused the movement of being instrumentalised by ‘hostile regional powers’ and launched, together with the Japanese army, intimidating military manoeuvres on land and sea.6 The FIFA World Cup 2022, which was supposed to be hosted by Qatar, was cancelled in the wake of the accumulation of scandals and trials, in both Switzerland and the United States, with regard to corruption in the attribution of the tournament and broadcasting rights. An alternative competition was set up in improvisation, where each confederation organised qualifiers within their geographic zone in order to designate the eight teams for the quarter finals (two from Europe, South America and Africa each, plus one from Northern and Central America and the Asia-Pacific respectively). The finals took place in a small handful of cities equipped with stadiums that needed no renovation. The model was repeated and improved for all following world cups.

Social Movements More importantly, everywhere in the world, citizen movements were constituted to claim back the game and fight for a real paradigm change. Across the UK, #(football)groundswell and #Standtheground demanded the return to the roots of popular football. Elsewhere in Europe,

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#bandiera ultrà brought together radical football supporters, while #sayebwiklo, an Ultra movement from Africa, fought against the repression of supporters and matches behind closed doors (‘wiklo’ in the local vernacular). Similarly, #LeStadeEstàNous! in France, #OEstádioéNosso! in Brazil, as well as #StadionAgora in Germany called for the participation of football fans in all national and international football governing bodies. They were supported by Sports Academics United, a growing and influential group of intellectuals putting their expertise to the service of the above-­ mentioned social movements. The sports movement itself started to be shaken up. In the middle of the 2020s, the USA saw the emergence of Sports Veterans and Families against Doping (SVFvsD). Former athletes and their families condemned the dramatic consequences of doping on the bodies of sportspeople. Starting from the disadvantaged campuses of Louisiana, the movement went viral and planetary. After multiplying over several years, the demonstrations hit a peak on a 6 April, the United Nations’ ‘International Day of Sport for Development and Peace’, when thousands of former athletes and their families converged to Switzerland, throwing one after the other their medals, trophies and jerseys into the gardens of international sports governing bodies who had barricaded themselves in haste. These pictures recalled those of 23 April 1971, when the veterans of the Vietnam War threw their medals on the steps of the Capitol. More efficiently still, the fight was carried before the courts of several countries. Class action lawsuits allowed to convict, for the crime of ‘poisoning’, a large number of clubs, federations, leagues or state agencies charged with setting up systems of organised doping. Stars were taken off certain jerseys. Rankings had to be revised or left empty. Clubs, franchises, even entire universities, went bankrupt, being incapable of paying indemnities and compensations that were due to the victims. The United States banned American athletes from participating in competitions including clubs or countries that did not comply with the legal sanctions, a measure which in turn accelerated the end of a good number of competitions. All these civil society organisations gathered at the first World Forum of Sports (WFS) held in Athens, at the immense wasteland left over from the 2004 Olympics. The Forum demanded a Right to the Stadium,

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similar to the Right to the City, which implied capped ticket prices indexed on each country’s minimum wage. It also required a collegial management of all sports governing bodies and the development of an inclusive sport-for-all policy, without discrimination of age, gender, sexual orientation, physical capacities or revenue, applied to both participants and spectators. At the second WFS, held in Paris, in the abandoned Stade de France, the delegates presented the ‘New Taylor Report’, drafted in 20 different languages and which became the base of many new laws and regulations in a majority of countries.

UNESCO Collaborative Cities and Stadia Network There was also a more classical top-down process within the vast sports reform movement. UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) set up its own collaborative cities and stadia network. It was open to consortia established around a major city, equipped with well-known stadiums and clubs, and bringing together an international network of lesser-known towns and territories. One of the first laureates was Hamburg, including both the ‘HSV’ and FC Sankt Pauli, with their Volksparkstadion and Millerntor-Stadion respectively. In collaboration with the GIZ,7 the city developed economic, cultural and sport community infrastructure in Africa (Togo, Cameroon and Namibia) within the framework of a joint memorial work on the legacy of colonisation. Glasgow, where Celtic and Rangers, under the banner of The Old Firm, was also awarded the UNESCO label for its project of creation of non-­ confessional public parks, sports fields and schools in Belfast and Londonderry, systematically located on the border between former protestant (Unionist) and catholic (Republican) precincts. This initiative was replicated on a large scale when The Old Firm was mandated by the United Nations to apply its know-how to the Israeli-Palestinian border. The concrete wall and its security zone were converted into the world’s longest linear sports park, the so-called Green Line Park, officially named Patrick Geddes Line, in honour of the great Scottish urbanist and environmentalist.8 The concrete blocks served as the foundations for the dozens

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of football pitches and basketball playgrounds, bridges and olive gardens that today are the pride of the region. All those initiatives, both bottom-up and top-down, changed the way in which governments looked at sport. It was no longer considered a commodity like any other but a common good, if not a public good, just like culture, housing or health. The lessons taught by COVID-19 were momentous. State authorities understood that pandemics are not best fought against by putting the responsibility on individual citizens and searching for vaccines a posteriori, but in implementing genuine public health policies aiming at the improvement of living conditions and nutrition in order to fight chronic diseases, the strengthening of public (or at least accessible) health care, as well as the creation of physical exercise infrastructure open to all. Of course, infectious diseases continued to circulate, but they did no longer fall on fertile ground among weakened, vulnerable populations. In France, the ideas of Edouard Herriot, mayor of Lyons and promotor, as early as 1913, of sport as ‘hygiene in action’, and Léo Lagrange, the first assistant secretary-general for Sports, Leisure and Physical Education in 1936, were rediscovered. One of the latter’s best-known declarations became a prophesy: ‘Our ambition is less to create champions and lead 22 actors into a stadium filled with 40,000 or 100,000 spectators, but rather to motivate the youth of our country to exercise regularly on a track, on a playground, or in a swimming pool’ (Pizzorni Itie 1993).

Stadiums and Life in the Neighbourhood Stadium planification became the norm: location, transport connection, accessibility for all became subject to public debate and decision in all participating countries. There were still big clubs and stadiums, but almost everywhere the law conditioned their operating licence to the signature of a contract or charter giving evidence to a commitment to put the infrastructure to social use outside match-days. Progressively, stadium locations got closer to residential neighbourhoods, in order to facilitate access by soft means of traffic. They also changed in terms of mission. Their vast parking lots were reduced in size, rebuilt in superstructure and

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mutualised with the adjacent communities and companies. The space thus gained was converted into parks and community equipment. Stadiums took root in the city again. They accompanied the citizens from cradle to grave. People had fond memories of their city’s stadium, not only for having attended matches there, but for having played there in the children’s playground, passed exams in the boxes or grandstands, having been taken care of in the medical dispensary, having been married in the club’s chapel or prayer room. Many chose to be inhumated in the columbaria below the grandstands or have their ashes scattered over the pitch. (The latter practice was little recommended by the horticulturalists and limited to a very small number of particularly deserving citizens or supporters). The stadiums also fed solar energy into the local electricity grids, collected rainwater for the water service providers and offered compost from lawn mowing and restauration to all kinds of gardeners. Some high-tech stadiums were technological jewels, aiming at ‘optimising customer experience’. Smartphones, tablets and watches were connected to the pitch and video services. It was possible to rewatch each action by means of augmented reality helmets or glasses. One could select an actor of the match and experience the decisive action in their place. Striker, midfielder and goalkeeper were the most-preferred options, together with referee, the latter enabling to better understand certain decisions and hear any explication given by the referee to the players. Simulation games on the tablets, for kids between 7 and 77 years old, also allowed to have a better understanding of refereeing. Reaching a top score in the game gave access to attending a match on a seat gliding on a rail along the side-line, in pace with the linesman. Other stadiums opted for the Genuine Atmosphere quality label, offering the opportunity ‘to live the traditional supporter experience’. The use of connected devices was made impossible by a jamming system activated 15 minutes before kick-off and switched off 15 minutes after the final whistle. Commercial advertising was also muted during the same timeframe, allowing for spontaneous and authentic supporter chants. There was no giant screen with slow-motion replays, and no way to obtain the scores from the other matches or to judge the validity of certain refereeing decisions. It was fun to watch certain desperate spectators trying to find a network connection in the exterior corridors. Others introduced

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old battery-driven transistor radios into the stands. Some stadiums went so far as to reinstall old-fashioned hand-operated scoreboards. Line-ups, league tables, statistics were only available in print programmes and fanzines. And, of course, all grandstands had extensive standing terraces.

The Stadium’s Afterlife Stadiums were no longer demolished at the end of their life cycle. They were converted into parks, progressively reconquered by a large diversity of vegetal and animal species, under the surveillance of landscapers following the classical example of Glasgow’s Cathkin Park. In Brazil, the Arena Pantanal, built in Cuiabá for the purpose of the 2014 World Cup, had a sad destiny at first. Far too expensive to maintain for the State of Mato Grosso, it was shut down, abandoned and looted for any material of value. An architectural ruin, it ended up as an open landfill site. But its recovery within the framework of the federal Minha Case, Minha Vida 2 programme was just as spectacular. The Arena Pantanal became the heart of a new ‘city in the city’, the Jardim Verdão. To start with, the hollow space below the two smaller grandstands served as final storage for the debris from the demolition of the surrounding favelas. The displaced inhabitants had the choice between remaining in their renovated neighbourhood or moving to Jardim Verdão. Within the abandoned stadium, the waste and garbage were recovered with topsoil in order to create vegetal terraces for the greenhouses of what is now well known as the Verdão flower market. At the same time, the gas produced by the methanation of the waste provided energy and water heating for both the surrounding private homes and the market itself. Some artists and even a Samba school, appreciating the high ceilings, found a new home in workshops established below the main grandstands. Within the stadium, the former pitch became a central place with lush vegetation irrigated by the rainwater that came down from the elegant apartment block placed like a huge amphitheatre across the grandstands, with numerous small squares linked by pathways and stairs. Ownership of the apartments was split between usufruct and bare ownership. The latter was held to a foundation composed by five actors, each holding

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20% of the shares and a blocking minority on land sales: the State of Mato Grosso, the City of Cuiabá, the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol, the consortium of the local universities (Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso et Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso) and the inhabitants’ association. As for the usufruct, it was held on the basis of a perpetual lease, by the resident family. At the end of the lease, the apartment returned to the foundation and the children were on the priority list for a new lease. There was no speculation on the property’s value. All profits from the flower market, stadium tourism and workshop rent were invested into the maintenance of the Jardim Verdão and into the educational foundation providing student scholarships for the inhabitants. In other stadiums in South America, the same kind of operation had been carried out in a more informal and socially less ambitious manner. Inhabitants had created popular joint ownerships in the form of gated communities (called condominio fechado in Brazil, barrio cerrado in Argentina), following the model of the popular appropriation of the former factories on Avenida Brazil, like a reminder of what happened in medieval Europe when Roman amphitheatres and circuses were transformed into fortified enclosures. Apocalyptic, dystopian and utopian narratives inform us first and foremost about the fears and the hopes of the world in which they are invented.

Notes 1. The Hillsborough disaster occurred at an FA cup semi-final fixture in Sheffield on 15 April 1989. Ninety-seven people died. 2. To name but some examples: 66 dead and 200 injured at a crush in an Ibrox Park staircase in Glasgow (1971); 56 dead in the burning of the old wooden grandstand of Bradford (1985); 39 dead in the violent clashes at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels (1985). 3. Representative Ultra associations have been demanding for years that such restrictions of civil liberties be pronounced by a judge, with possibility of appeal.

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4. According to French historians, the first clandé is said to have taken place on 9 May 2020, during lockdown, at the Léo Lagrange stadium in Bron, next to Lyons, before approximately 100 spectators. On 16 May, 150 people gathered in the Soufflot stadium in Amiens, before the police evacuated the place. One week later, there were 400 spectators in Strasbourg, raising media interest. 5. The jogo do bicho (‘game of the animal’) is an illegal gambling activity in Brazil. This very popular game is a kind of lottery organised by clandestine organisations led by so-called contraventores (‘offenders’) or banqueiros (‘bankers’). 6. The Paris Olympics were the last of the modern era (1906–2024). The French State had insisted on maintaining this opportunity to give evidence of its resilience capabilities, but the discourse could not hide its shortcomings and the country’s finances suffered from the costs over several years. 7. The GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) is the German international cooperation and development agency. 8. Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a Scottish biologist and sociologist, known also as a pioneer in numerous other fields like education, economics, urbanism, geography, museography and most notably ecology. He is the author of the general plan for the city of Tel Aviv (in 1925), which is today listed among the UNESCO world heritage sites.

Bibliography Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Penguin Books. Gaffney, Christopher. 2008. Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio De Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hall, Peter. 1988/2002. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, London: Wiley-Blackwell (first published in 1988). Landauer, Paul. 2009. L’architecte, la ville et la sécurité, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. More, Thomas. 1966. L’Utopie, Éditions sociales-Messidor, (written in 1516).

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Pizzorni Itie, Florence (ed.). 1993. Les yeux du stade. Colombes, Temple du Sport, Thonon-les-Bains: Editions de l’Alabaron et Musée Municipal d’Art et d’Histoire de Colombes. Plato. 1979. The Republic, trans. Raymond Larson, Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson (written around 360BC). Rodrigues, de Melo Natália. 2018. O Grande Palco Futbolístico. Análise da ambiência do estádio Maracanã pós reforma para a copa de 2014, Doctoral thesis in architectural science submitted to the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Roux, Jean-Michel. 2014. “L’ambiances des stades”, Urbanisme, n°393, special issue ‘Grands stades en quête d’urbanité’, pp. 60–62. Saint Augustine. 1994. La cité de Dieu (three volumes), edited by Louis Moreau et Jean-Claude Eslin, Paris: Point, (written between 413-426) Taylor, Peter. 1990. The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. Inquiry by the RT Hon. Lord Justice Taylor, Final Report, Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Command of Her Majesty, Londres, HMSO, Home Office.

Index1

A

C

Attendance, 16, 25–42, 57, 120, 192, 231, 271, 272

Cairo, 18, 201–217 Commercialisation, 17, 27, 47–65, 78, 80, 119, 205, 225, 285 Commodification, 68, 79, 113, 114, 120, 124, 125, 174–176, 182, 185–187, 191, 193, 205, 242, 255–256, 286 Community/communities, 8, 10, 18, 48, 73, 79, 112, 172–182, 205, 206, 214, 216, 226, 230, 232, 233, 264, 272–274, 293, 295, 297 COVID-19, 172, 256, 263, 284, 294 Crowd control, 13, 18, 19, 112 Cuiabá, 296, 297

B

Bale, John, 8, 15, 26, 77, 108–112, 153, 166, 175, 184, 251 Barcelona, 17, 107–125, 145 Belgrade, 136, 142 Berlin, 72, 93, 223, 273 Bologna, 48–50 Brand/branding, 17, 73, 75, 77–79, 107–125 Bromberger, Christian, 14, 16, 144, 273, 276

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Alpan et al. (eds.), The Political Football Stadium, Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9

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302 Index D

Dictatorship, 17, 107, 108, 110, 115, 117, 120, 243 E

Elias, Norbert, 6, 13, 157, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 228 Emotion/emotional, 4–7, 9, 16, 17, 19, 26, 41, 77, 79, 83–97, 155, 163–166, 176, 183, 192, 204, 212, 213, 224, 237, 273 Entertainment, 63, 64, 80, 145, 174–176, 193, 225 Environment, 6, 11, 27, 53, 68, 79, 156, 165, 183, 184, 210, 224, 232, 254, 290 F

Fascism/fascist, 10, 11, 17, 47–55, 59–65, 117, 135, 210, 215, 224, 229, 243 FIFA, 76, 111, 120, 120n2, 205, 275, 277, 286 Florence, 48, 50, 252 Foucault, Michel, 12, 19, 112, 226, 242, 248–251, 256, 267 FREE project, 16, 28 G

Gdańsk, 233, 234 Gender, 31n2, 147, 263, 268, 275, 276, 293 Gentrification, 27, 191, 242, 253–254, 257, 257n5

Giulianotti, Richard, 9, 26, 133, 141, 156, 167, 174, 175, 185, 191, 209, 211 Glasgow, 293, 296, 297n2 Globalisation, 108, 112–114, 116, 145, 176, 201, 247 Governance/governing bodies, 31, 36–38, 40, 42, 90, 113, 158, 285, 292, 293 H

Hamburg, 293 Helsingborg, 152, 157, 158 Heritage, 75, 79, 156, 158, 183, 184, 298n8 Hooligans/hooliganism, 13, 14, 132, 159, 189, 190, 226, 228, 229, 252, 285 Hospitality, 175, 186, 193 I

Identity/identities, 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 56, 79, 107–125, 131–147, 156, 172–182, 186–192, 202, 203, 205, 209, 210, 212, 217, 224, 225, 230–236, 242, 243, 247, 248, 252, 255, 256, 267, 268, 272–276 Ideology/ideological, 11, 18, 48, 52, 67, 68, 70–73, 111, 152, 154, 158, 163, 167, 205, 207–211, 214, 216, 223–237, 243, 245, 247, 263, 269, 271, 272, 276, 277 Imagined communities, 7 Instrumentalisation, 10, 17, 74, 80, 83, 85, 88, 96

 Index 

Irony/ironical, 16, 78, 158 Istanbul, 13, 201–217, 246

303

Nostalgia/nostalgic, 154–156, 184, 287 Nuremberg, 70, 72

L

Laclau, Ernesto, 12, 216 Lefebvre, Henri, 5, 144 London, 18, 171, 172, 188, 189

O

M

P

Madrid, 116, 118 Malmö, 157 Masculinity, 205, 216, 237, 269 Mega-event, 69, 72, 74, 145, 185 Memory, 4–5, 79, 80, 90, 95, 109, 144, 147, 155, 166, 180, 182–192, 234, 295 Metaphor, 7, 8, 16, 132–133, 155 Milan, 10, 14, 48, 52, 61, 139, 244 Modernisation, 4, 9, 51, 54, 74, 76, 164, 224 Mouffe, Chantal, 247 Munich, 77, 93, 223 Myth, 4–5, 112

Paris, 18, 95, 136, 139, 171, 173, 179, 180, 191, 288, 293 Police/policing, 15, 93, 118, 123, 181, 205–207, 211–216, 226, 227, 235, 246, 252, 255, 257n3, 266, 285, 286, 288, 290, 291, 298n4 Power, 5, 10–12, 15, 19, 68, 70, 85, 95, 96, 111, 116, 118, 119, 135, 145, 202, 205, 208, 209, 217, 223, 243, 246–250, 255, 256, 264, 265, 267, 269, 271, 273–276, 291 Poznań, 233, 236 Protest, 12, 13, 16, 18, 61, 76, 89, 91, 118, 123, 152, 157, 165, 179, 191, 202, 206, 207, 210–214, 216, 217, 231, 241, 246, 263–277

N

Naming, 52, 53, 64, 75–78, 78n4, 80, 125, 209, 216 Narrative, 17, 107, 108, 110, 112, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, 151–154, 157, 160, 162–166, 234, 283, 284, 297 Nationalism/nationalist, 13, 68, 72, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 147, 177–179, 188, 189, 191, 201, 204, 208, 236, 243, 245

Olympic/Olympics, 47, 65, 72, 142, 182, 272, 291, 292

R

Religion/religious, 5, 11, 26, 26n1, 53, 68, 109, 115, 137, 191, 232, 234, 264, 265, 269–271, 276 Resistance, 17–19, 68, 107, 108, 110, 116–119, 135, 146, 155, 174, 177, 202, 204, 212–215, 223–237, 257, 265–269, 277

304 Index

Rio de Janeiro, 287 Ritual, 6, 7, 18, 26, 27, 68, 110, 117, 119, 156, 216, 266 Rome, 48, 52, 139

Tuan, Yi-Fu, 109, 144 Turin, 30, 47, 48, 51–62, 60n26, 61n29, 65 U

S

Sarajevo, 131–147 Security, 13, 19, 80, 175, 181, 207, 212, 229, 244, 249–251, 253–257, 285, 293 Social space, 5, 18, 145, 171–194 Stockholm, 4, 154 Stuttgart, 67–80, 84–90, 92–94, 96 Surveillance, 13, 19, 112, 242, 248–252, 254, 255, 276, 296 Symbol/symbolism/symbolic, 5, 7, 10, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 80, 83, 85, 89, 90, 96, 111, 115, 117, 132, 136, 138, 146, 172, 174, 176, 178–180, 188, 189, 191, 204, 209, 214, 217, 224–226, 232–235, 244, 249, 263–265, 272–276

UEFA, 4, 146, 151, 158, 161, 163, 168n4, 253, 286 Ultras, 14, 19, 203–208, 211, 224, 225, 227, 233–237, 285, 287, 292, 297n3 Urban landscape, 8, 10, 68, 111 Urban planning/urbanism, 19, 51–53, 61, 284, 298n8 Urban space, 4, 6, 20, 73, 144, 211 V

Values, 10, 11, 17, 117, 147, 158, 162, 176, 180, 209, 210, 230, 233–235, 243, 268, 269, 273, 275, 290, 296, 297 Violence/violent, 13, 18, 87, 96, 138, 172, 174, 177, 179–181, 186, 191, 192, 206, 212, 213, 226, 227, 229, 235, 241, 242, 252, 269, 291, 297n2

T

Tehran, 266, 271, 273, 275 Topophilia/topophile, 77, 109, 144 Totalitarianism/totalitarian, 10, 17, 48, 55, 62–65, 68, 70–73, 71n1, 80 Tradition/traditional, 9–11, 18, 27, 35, 64, 75n3, 78, 93, 97n6, 109, 113, 118, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 152–154, 156, 158, 165, 166, 172, 183, 187, 188, 204, 233, 234, 242, 249, 250, 268, 269, 271, 284, 295

W

Warsaw, 117, 233 World Cup, 10, 28, 49, 50, 55, 65, 73, 74, 76, 77, 116n1, 120n2, 172, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182–192, 223, 243, 244, 272, 274, 275, 277, 291, 296 Z

Zagreb, 86, 133, 136