Football And European Identity

Shifting European identities, cultural loyalties and divisions are often expressed more directly through attitudes to 'the people's game' game than in any other arena. This book examines European football journalism from throughout the last century to present a unique cross-cultural analysis of changing European national and regional identities. Building on detailed research into original language sources from across Western Europe, from the early 20th century to the present day, Football and European Identity traces this fascinating evolution. The resulting cross-cultural analysis of national identity in Europe provides the basis for a unique study of the interplay between football, society, politics and the print media, in three parts: Part 1: Old Europe national identity in the football writing of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain Part 2: Nations within a State examines the status of Corsican, Catalonian and Basque identities Part 3: New (Football) Worlds explores the response of Europe’s presses to the emergence of Africa, South East Asia and the USA as major forces in world football

Is it possible for football matches or players to help forge a collective European identity? Pyta and Haverman seek to answer this question through a detailed analysis of how football is remembered across the continent. European Football and Collective Memory is the first book to deal with collective memory of football on a continental scale.

Shifting European identities, cultural loyalties and divisions are often expressed more directly through attitudes to 'the people's game' game than in any other arena. This book examines European football journalism from throughout the last century to present a unique cross-cultural analysis of changing European national and regional identities. Building on detailed research into original language sources from across Western Europe, from the early 20th century to the present day, Football and European Identity traces this fascinating evolution. The resulting cross-cultural analysis of national identity in Europe provides the basis for a unique study of the interplay between football, society, politics and the print media, in three parts: Part 1: Old Europe national identity in the football writing of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain Part 2: Nations within a State examines the status of Corsican, Catalonian and Basque identities Part 3: New (Football) Worlds explores the response of Europe’s presses to the emergence of Africa, South East Asia and the USA as major forces in world football

Sport annually mobilizes millions of people across Europe: as practitioners in a wide variety of competitive, educational, or recreational contexts, and as spectators, who are physically present or following events through the mass media. This book presents original research into modern sport funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its aim is to examine the distinctive contribution made by this complex phenomenon to the construction of European identities. Attention is focused on sport's social significance, as a set of mass-mediated practices and spectacles giving rise to a network of images, symbols, and discourses. The book seeks to explore, and ultimately to explain, the processes of representation and mediation involved in the sporting construction, and subsequent renegotiation, of local, national, and, increasingly, global identities. It offers a survey of key developments in sporting Europe - from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and from the Atlantic to the Urals - presenting findings by acknowledged international experts and emerging scholars at the level of individuals, communities, regions, nation-states, and Europe as a whole, in both its geographical and political incarnations. Its focus on representation offers a broadly conceived, and consciously inclusive, approach to issues of 'Europeanness' in modern and contemporary sport.

An analysis of the way in which mass media in 12 European countries turn sport into politics, concentrating on the way the media contribute to the ongoing reconstitution of national identity. While the greater part of the volume focuses in detail on the press, there is also substantial commentary on television practice in several chapters, and two chapters address themselves exclusively to television. The volume is also concerned throughout with the political economy of the media world. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In recent years, scholars have understood the increasing use of the St George’s Cross by football fans to be evidence of a rise in a specifically ’English’ identity. This has emerged as part of a wider ’national’ response to broader political processes such as devolution and European integration which have fragmented identities within the UK. Using the controversial figurational sociological approach advocated by the twentieth-century theorist Norbert Elias, this book challenges such a view, drawing on ethnographic research amongst fans to explore the precise nature of the relationship between contemporary English national identity and football fan culture. Examining football fans’ expressions of Englishness in public houses and online spaces, the author discusses the effects of globalization, European integration and UK devolution on English society, revealing that the use of the St George’s Cross does not signal the emergence of a specifically ’English’ national consciousness, but in fact masks a more complex, multi-layered process of national identity construction. A detailed and grounded study of identity, nationalism and globalization amongst football fans, English National Identity and Football Fan Culture will appeal to scholars and students of politics, sociology and anthropology with interests in ethnography, the sociology of sport, fan cultures, globalization and contemporary national identities.

Over the past decade, European football has seen tremendous changes impacting upon its international framework as well as local traditions and national institutions. Processes of Europeanization in the fields of economy and politics provided the background for transformations of the production and consumption of football on a transnational scale. In the course of such rearrangements, football tournaments like the UEFA Championship or the European Champions League turned into mega-events and media spectacles attracting ever-growing audiences. The experience of participating in these events offers some of the very few occasions for the display and embodiment of identities within a European context. This volume takes the 2008 EUROs hosted by Austria and Switzerland as a case study to analyze the political and cultural significance of the tournament from a multidisciplinary angle. What are the special features and spatial arrangements of a UEFAesque Europe, in comparison to alternative possibilities of a Europe? Situating the sport tournament between interpretations of collective European ritual and European spectacle, the key research question will ask what kind of Europe was represented in the cultural, political and economic manifestations of the 2008 EUROs. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Sport is far more than a national and international entertainment: it is a source of political identity, morale, pride and superiority. Tribal Identities explores the influence of sport on the nations of Europe as a mechanism of national solidarity promoting a sense of identity, unity, status and esteem; as an instrument of confrontation between nations, stimulating aggression, stereotyping, and images of inferiority and superiority; and as a cultural bond linking nations across national boundaries, providing common enthusiasm, shared experiences, the transcendence of national allegiances, and opportunities for association, understanding and goodwill.