Paul Dietschy

Making football global? FIFA, Europe, and the non-European football world, 1912–74

The FA©dA©ration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) played a major role in the transformation of association football into a global game. Between 1912 and 1974, before the era of rapid economic sports globalization, FIFA officials attempted to extend the boundaries of the football empire by creating the World Cup and trying to convert new parts of the world to the peoples game. It was not an easy task since they met with resistance, obstruction, and contestation. They had to revise their Eurocentric way of thinking and be willing to negotiate. Far from being a mere imperialist process, the path to world football consisted of a series of exacting exchanges and mutual misunderstandings, especially with the South American associations. It is not clear that FIFA officials always understood the demands of the developing football world but they were often able to negotiate and adapt their discourses towards non-European national associations and continental confederations. By doing so, they helped to create, if not an equal football world, at least an international world space.

French Sport: Caught between Universalism and Exceptionalism

This article argues that the question of national perspectives is a fundamental problem in the writing of European sports history. It does so by demonstrating that France has an equal pedigree, in terms of diffusion and exceptionalism, as Britain, and pleads for a less skewed approach to the history of the subject in general. The article shows, first, that France contributed significantly to the internationalization of sport in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with French networks facilitating the spread of sports across the globe. It considers the impact of French universalism on the institutional structures of world sport and assesses the importance of sport to governmental diplomacy. Second, it proposes that France occupies a special place in the history of European sport, halfway between that of the British on the one hand and other continental sporting cultures on the other. It discusses the role of central and regional administrations in the creation of a sports space that is distinctly marked by a lack of football hegemony. French sport, the article concludes, is characterized by a peculiar mix of anglomanie, invented traditions, internationalism, state interventionism and eclecticism.

Did a ‘Europe of Football’ Exist in the 1930s?

ABSTRACT Just as the construction of Europe in the 1950s cannot be understood without reference to ‘Europeanist’ experiments in the inter-war years, the roots of a ‘Europe of football’ must be sought in the European football played in the 1920s and 1930s. Although UEFA did not yet exist, FIFA was initially a European organisation. Admittedly, FIFA voted in 1928 for the principle of organising a World Cup, and not a European Cup. A year earlier, the federations along the Danube had founded the earliest European footballing space with the creation of the Mitropa Cup and the International Cup. The Mitropa Cup, in particular, by the 1930s already had characteristics constituting the basis of a European football community, on the one hand, by trying to organise competitions from which football clubs make profit; on the other, by capitalising on the nationalistic feelings of spectators, thus running counter to the ambition of bringing the peoples of Europe together through football. Moreover, when a team representing Europe was brought together to face England in October 1938, it seemed to show off the continents divisions. However, over and above the result (a 3–0 win for England), the initial foundations of a footballing Europe had been laid.

Introduction: the origins and birth of ‘l'Europe du football’

Much more than European Community institutions or the euro, football is one of the things that most brings Europeans together today – and most divides them. First, by its geographical dimensions: the 54 associations that currently make up the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) far exceed the wishes of General de Gaulle, who called for the creation of a Europe from ‘the Atlantic to the Urals’. ‘L’Europe du football’, to use a French expression, which was to be embodied by UEFA, stretches all the way indeed to the Middle East since Israel and Turkey are members, and to Central Asia with Kazakhstan. This Europe of football is also visible in an annual football calendar with its European highlights, days and months; in particular its two high points, the annual final of the Champions League and the four-yearly European Championship of Nations, the ‘Euros’. Lastly, the Europe of football interpreted as a market is a partially transnational space where fans and players of the big professional clubs move around and meet each other. Histories of football traditionally situate the birth of European football in 1954–1955 when Gabriel Hanot and his colleagues at the French daily sports paper L’Equipe, ‘familiar with the Mitropa Cup and the Copa Latina’, proposed the idea of a European Champion Clubs Cup to see if the British claims that Wolverhampton Wanderers were ‘European champions’ after their victory over the Hungarian club, Honved, were true. This account of the invention of Europe football is, in general terms, correct. Like the football World Cup, the European Cup owes a lot to the French universalist outlook and also to the know-how of the French press in terms of commercialising sport and national identities. The aim of this special issue of Sport in History, which brings together contributions from a conference organised in Besançon in September 2012 as part of the European research programme FREE (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe), is not to go over this famous moment of the creation of the European competitions again, but to think about its genesis. Indeed, the idea of a European championship or European Cup was raised not only in the 1950s. It was mentioned as early as 1905,

Du sportsman à l'histrion : les cultures sportives de trois leaders africains (Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nelson Mandela et Joseph-Désiré Mobutu)

La culture sportive de plusieurs grands leaders de l’Afrique des independances a ete formee pendant l’ere coloniale. Si le football a pu servir aux missionnaires pour attirer et retenir a l’ecole les enfants turbulents comme Joseph-Desire Mobutu, l’apprentissage d’un large echantillon de sports a fait d’un Nnamdi Azikiwe ou, dans une moindre mesure, d’un Nelson Mandela de eritables sportsmen empreints de la culture sportive anglo-saxonne. Toutefois, quand le sport a nourri et servi a la lutte pour l’independance et la liberte, ses aleurs ont ite ete battues en breche. La sportivite prechee en politique par Azikiwe a ite tourne cours, alors que Mobutu a mis au service de son impitoyable dictature les aleurs du sport.

Football imagery and colonial legacy: Zaire’s disastrous campaign during the 1974 World Cup

After winning the African Cup of Nations in 1968, Zaire’s national football team, the ‘Leopards’, became the first African team from south of the Sahara to qualify for the finals of the 1974 World Cup. Three crushing defeats, however, tarnished the image of the national squad. This article analyses the iconographic representation of African players in two periodicals, the French weekly magazine France Football (Paris) and the Zairian newspaper Salongo (Kinshasa). Before the World Cup, France Football mainly selected photographs of the football players acting as Mobutu’s ambassadors, which served as illustrations for articles evaluating the Leopards’ chances. In contrast, their ‘performance’ in Germany was depicted through images which emphasized the spectacular gestures of some of their players, and their supposed ‘instinctiveness’ and lack of technical mastery. Salongo did not print any genuine photographs from the World Cup games and chose to comment on the national defeats with irony and even humour, turning Zaire’s Yugoslavian coach Blagoje Vidinic into a scapegoat through the use of threatening captions and suggestive images.

1918-1920, des tranchées aux stades. Quelques éclairages sur la sortie de guerre des sportifs français et des fédérations de football européennes

Depuis le debut du mois d’aout 1914, les periodiques et les federations dedies au sport, ont contribue a alimenter une culture de guerre animee par l’esprit de croisade. Au printemps 1918, l’exemple du quotidien L’Auto et de son directeur Henri Desgrange montre que la haine de l’ennemi s’accompagne d’une volonte de le punir. C’est ce qu’expriment les dirigeants du sport francais ainsi que ceux des federations de football alliees qui plaident des novembre 1918 pour l’exclusion des representants des puissances centrales des relations sportives internationales. Toutefois, la sortie de guerre s’exprime aussi a l’echelle hexagonale par une democratisation et une standardisation des pratiques sportives dont temoigne le succes du ballon rond.

Une passion urbaine : football et identités dans la première moitié du vingtième siècle. : L'exemple de Turin et de l'Italie

Des la premiere moitie du XXe siecle, le football est devenu le sport roi en Italie. Ce succes est notamment du a la superposition d’identites que le calcio a pu produire ou endosser. En effet, pour les pionniers du ballon rond, le football etait pare du prestige de l’Angleterre et, plus generalement, de la modernite incarnee par les pratiques sportives. Puis, a l’issue de la Grande Guerre, le football cristallisa les sentiments d’appartenance identitaire campaniliste ou regionaliste, exprimes par les violences des supporters. Le regime fasciste tenta d’orienter a son profit ces modes d’identification, en limitant l’expression des regionalismes, et, surtout, en instrumentalisant les succes de l’equipe nationale italienne, la squadra azzurra.