Football culture

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Posters for the football film Union for Life (2014)

As a football culture , the artistic exploration of topics around the football called. Cultural phenomena that are shaped by cultural studies and that are related to football and fans, be it rituals, fan chants, pop songs, football photography, football films or football literature are also included. Football culture can be assigned to pop culture .

Emergence

For a long time, representatives of an elitist high culture ridiculed football as a primitive pastime for the uneducated, or it was also criticized “from below” for political reasons. B. as bread and games , that is, as a banal pastime that distracts the underprivileged from political engagement. The (often left-wing) political writers of the 1920s, not a few of whom were engaged in sport and who often incorporated subjects from sport into their works, preferred boxing and cycling , such as Brecht or Walter Mehring .

The real emergence of football culture began in the 1980s when, on the one hand, cultural workers, leftists and, as a result, journalists began to discover football as a phenomenon beyond flat ideologies, beyond banal sports reporting in all its everyday diversity and, as in music , independent soccer fanzines emerged. Football culture and the like helped achieve the breakthrough in Germany. a. the writer Ror Wolf with his football texts, authors from the New Frankfurt School , pop theorists from the Spex magazine and the journalist Helmut Böttiger . The final breakthrough into the mainstream meant the novel Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby .

backgrounds

In Europe

In Germany, research into football culture began relatively late. The regional historian Gehrmann was the first to deal with the cultural significance of football in 1988 as part of his habilitation in the context of the history of the Ruhr area . The first to treat football fans as a cultural phenomenon in their own right was (probably) the American historian Charles P. Korr (1978) with his analysis of football culture at West Ham United . As a result, cultural historians and cultural sociologists got involved in the analysis of individual clubs and special cultural phenomena such as football fans abroad. The peculiarities of football fans, who on the one hand pay homage to the most international sport interspersed with a large number of players of foreign origin and on the other hand glorify racism characterize the more recent analyzes. The peculiarities of a local culture in a global sport have also stimulated analysis.

In Germany

The emergence of pop and football culture as an intellectual phenomenon is repeatedly associated with the decline of the political. Since left and right could no longer explain the world, they tried, as Roland Barthes and others had already demonstrated, to draw explanations for the world from small things, the everyday, the banal. Typical for this is the analysis by Klaus Theweleit (2004): “Where is the connection between 50% voter turnout and 100% football chatter? (...) with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the old Eastern Bloc societies, many people here were deprived of an intellectual field of activity or even theoretical playing field (...) which, for whatever strange reasons, is being replaced by an enormous amount of public football . (...) He obviously stuffs certain holes. The unmistakable intellectualization of football support would speak for this thesis. While three decades ago people were very familiar with the various Chinese paths leading to the revolution, today they are well-versed in commenting on the shifts in the mixed soccer situation. Zidane would then be something like the updated Lenin, especially a more harmless one. The discussion about pressing and postponing would be the discussion of the “right moment” of the right political action. (While you let the politicians do their botch, which nothing can be changed.) "

meaning

Authors such as Christoph Biermann and Dirk Schümer have been promoting the intellectual preoccupation with football for some time in quality newspapers such as Süddeutsche and FAZ . Leading theorists such as Klaus Theweleit deal with the phenomenon, and in the wake of the success of the magazines Der tödliche Pass and 11 Freunde , other football magazines “with a claim” have been founded. In film, literature, and even in the theater, it is now common practice to seriously deal with football - as well as in academia. It is controversial, especially in the fan scene, to what extent this cultural turnaround in preoccupation with football does not also lead to a gentrification of sport, a development that goes hand in hand with higher ticket prices in the stadiums aimed at other target groups, the fans from low-income backgrounds ousted from the stadiums.

This is related to the increasing political conflict within the football stadiums and the fan culture. On the one hand, this has led to a positive change in Germany's image towards a friendly face with a colorful, flag-waving nationalism, to mass enthusiasm at public viewing, but also to individual racist forms, e.g. B. in the Borussia Front .

The German Academy for Football Culture , based in Nuremberg , has been in existence since 2004 as a forum for dealing with questions relating to the connection between football and culture .

literature

  • Dieter Bott, Marvin Chlada , Gerd Dembowski : Ball & Pear. To the criticism of the prevailing football culture . VSA, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 978-3879757114 .
  • Helmut Böttiger: No man, no shot, no goal. CH Beck, Munich 1993.
  • Dirk Schümer: God is round. The culture of football. Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1996.
  • Klaus Theweleit: Gateway to the World. Soccer as a reality model. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Siegfried Gehrmann: Football, clubs, politics: on the sports history of the area 1900 - 1940. Essen: Hobbing, 1988, ISBN 3-920460-36-7 .
  2. ^ Charles P. Korr: West Ham United Football Club and the Beginnings of Professional Football in East London, 1895-1914. Journal of Contemporary History 13 (1978), 2, Special Issue: Workers' Culture, pp. 211-232 (English).
  3. ^ Bill Murray: The old firm: sectarianism, sport and society in Scotland. Glasgow: John Donald Publishers Ltd, 1984 (English).
  4. ^ Richard Giulianotti: Scotland's tartan army in Italy: the case for the carnivalesque. The Sociological Review 39 (1991), 3, pp. 503-527 (English).
  5. ^ Back, Les, Tim Crabbe and John Solomos: Beyond the racist / hooligan couplet: race, social theory and football culture. The British journal of sociology 50 (1999), 3, pp. 419-442; Podaliri, Carlo, and Carlo Balestri: The Ultràs, racism and football culture in Italy. Fanatics (1998): pp. 88-100 (English).
  6. ^ Finn, Gerry PT and Richard Giulianotti: Football culture: Local contests, global visions. London. Psychology Press, 2000.
  7. ^ Arnd Krüger : Sport and identity in Germany since reunification. In: Philip Dine, Seán Crosson (Ed.): Sport, representation and evolving identities in Europe. Peter Lang, London 2010, ISBN 978-3-922654-45-2 , pp. 289-316 (English).
  8. ↑ Britta Ufer: Emotions and experiences during public viewing. As well as diss. Uni. Göttingen 2010 ( online ).
  9. ↑ German Academy for Football Culture. German Academy for Football Culture , 2019, accessed on October 30, 2019 .