The Football Scholars Forum opened its 2015-16 season on Wednesday, October 14, with a discussion of Christoph Wagner’s DeMontfort University PhD thesis entitled “Crossing The Line: The English Press and Anglo-German Football, 1954-1996.”
Based on extensive archival research, “Crossing the Line” analyzes representations of Germany and Germans in English newspapers’ football coverage of key international matches between the two western European nations. Within a shifting post-war historical context, the study notes a persistent undercurrent of hostility in Anglo-German cultural relations, football included.
However, two distinct phases were described. In the first, extending from the 1950s to the rise of Thatcher, dailies generally adopted a restrained tone and their coverage was notable for the “relative absence of anti-German sentiment.” A major transformation occurred in the second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-1990s, as English press coverage turned more negative, chauvinistic, and increasingly xenophobic.
The FSF discussion with the author touched on many different aspects of Wagner’s study, from the militarization of language in the football press and the forging of national stereotypes to narratives of English decline, methodology and sources.
A recording of the session is available here.
For more information about the Football Scholars Forum visit the online think tank’s website.
Tag: Football Scholars Forum
With the 2014 World Cup in the history books, the Football Scholars Forum, an online think tank based at Michigan State University, announced the start of its 2014-15 season.
On September 25, 3pm Eastern Time (-5 GMT), historian Roger Kittleson (@rogerkittleson) joins the group to discuss his new book The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil. To participate in the 90-minute Skype session please send Alex Galarza (galarza.alex AT gmail.com) your Skype name to be added to the call.
On October 30 (time TBD), FSF welcomes the “Indiana Jones of soccer journalism,” in the words of Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl: James Montague (@JamesPiotr). The session will be devoted to his recent book: Thirty-One-Nil: On the Road With Football’s Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey.
The third event of the (northern) fall will consist of a vibrant roundtable on the state of women’s football internationally. It will take place during the week of December 9-11 (day/time TBA), just after the Decenber 6 draw for the 2015 Women’s World Cup. Jean Williams (@JeanMWilliams), Martha Saavedra (@tricontinental), Gwendolyn Oxenham, and Brenda Elsey (@politicultura) are among the confirmed participants who will pre-circulate blog posts on the FSF website to stimulate discussion and debate.
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Hofstra Soccer Conference Round-up
For as long as I can remember, soccer in the United States has been referred to as the “sport of the future.” Last week’s “Soccer as a Beautiful Game” international conference at Hofstra University buried this notion once and for all. Hofstra history professors Stan Pugliese and Brenda Elsey did a marvelous job organizing the global conclave.
I arrived at the largest fútbological congress ever held in the U.S. just in time to hear David Goldblatt’s keynote address. Expecting a brilliant presentation based on his new book on Brazilian futebol, Goldblatt surprised many of us by delivering a democratic populist manifesto for the transformation of the world’s game. Goldblatt’s passionate speech for reform appealed to the suffrage of ordinary fans. (Click here and here to read more about this talk.)
Energized by Goldblatt’s provocative address, I had to choose which of several enticing but concurrent panels to attend. As a historian, I decided to privilege sessions with historians, Global South topics, and presentations by Football Scholars Forum members. Much like football radio broadcasts of the pre-satellite TV era, many of us kept track of the action unfolding in other panels via the active Twitter back channel (#HUsoccer @HofstraSocConf).
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The Soccer Conclave
There may not be any white smoke coming out of the soccer conclave this week at Hofstra University in New York, but little else will be missing from an unprecedented fútbological event featuring presentations by more than 100 scholars, journalists, authors, coaches, and the King of Soccer himself: Pelé.
Historians Brenda Elsey and Stanislao Pugliese are the presiding cardinals of Soccer as the Beautiful Game: Football’s Artistry, Identity and Politics , an international conference hosted by the Hofstra Cultural Center and the Hofstra Department of History. The gathering begins on Thursday, April 10, with concurrent panels, an opening ceremony, and two keynote addresses by David Goldblatt (“Brazil: The Curious Rise of the Futebol Nation”) and Jennifer Doyle (“Imagining a World Without a World Cup: An Abolitionist Perspective).
Friday’s menu serves up a plethora of panels on a dizzying range of topics and a ceremony honoring Pelé with the conferral of an honorary degree. Saturday’s focus is on journalists, coaches, philanthropy round-tables, followed by a concluding plenary session, and . . . a pickup game on the New York Cosmos home ground! (Note to self: remember to pack turf shoes.)
I’ll be presenting a paper comparing World Cup 2010 in South Africa to World Cup 2014 in Brazil (click here to listen to an earlier version of this talk) and also participating in the Football Scholars Forum on academic vs. journalistic writing about soccer (click here to watch my pre-conference video blog and here to read the other five posts by my fabulous co-panelists).
This is my video blog contribution to the Football Scholars Forum roundtable taking place on Saturday, April 12, 2014, at the global fútbological conclave known as the Soccer as the Beautiful Game conference at Hofstra University in New York.
These pre-conference blog posts are intended to launch the discussion about points of overlap and tension in the soccer writing of journalists and academics. Roundtable participants will share their insights on sources and methodologies, topics, audience, market logic vs. academic logic, and the role of digital tools in writing and dissemination.
The rest of the roundtable team is composed of Simon Kuper (Financial Times), Brenda Elsey (historian, Hofstra U.) Alex Galarza (Michigan State U.), John Foot (U. Bristol), and Grant Wahl (Sports Illustrated). To read their posts visit: http://footballscholars.org
The Football Scholars Forum 2013-14 season resumes on February 12 with a discussion of Lindsay Krasnoff’s The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010.
The book “traces the Fifth Republic’s quest to create elite athletes, a compelling tale that serves as a prism through which to investigate the larger history of France, the evolution of society, the impacts of the media revolution, and the government’s mission of public health. It provides perspective on how France coped with and adapted to the post-1945 world and underscores just how much things have changed—yet still remained the same.”
An active member of the Football Scholars Forum (FSF), Krasnoff is an historian of France and Modern Europe, with expertise in sports, media, and foreign policy. You can listen here to Lindsay discussing her book on the New Books in Sports podcast.
To participate in the online 90-minute session, which begins at 8pm Eastern Time, please email me (alegi.peter AT gmail.com) your Skype name (if I don’t already have it) so you can be added to the conference call.
FSF has two more public events scheduled in the lead up to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In March (25/26, time TBD), the fútbol think tank is trying something new. Instead of members reading a common book, each participant will read a different fútbol book (or lengthy article) and give a 5-7 minute report about it to the rest of the group. The idea is to produce a sort of “state of the field” snapshot from various world regions and academic disciplines.
Then in April, I’ll be joining several FSF soccerati in attendance at the “Soccer as the Beautiful Game: Football’s Artistry, Identity & Politics” conference at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY). In addition to scholarly papers and presentations, the conference features a special FSF-sponsored roundtable on “Academics, Journalists, and the Changing Trends in Fútbol Writing.” I’ll be doing a post about the Hofstra roundtable in the coming weeks.
Jonathan Wilson, journalist, author, and founding editor of The Blizzard, is the featured guest at the Football Scholars Forum on Thursday, December 5. Starting at 4pm Eastern (9pm GMT), the online football think tank will discuss the craft of independent fútbol writing in a digital age.
Born in a pub after a Sunderland 4-0 demolition of Bolton in 2010, The Blizzard is a football quarterly that, Wilson says, is “neither magazine nor book, but somewhere in between.” It combines short- and long-form writing and is available in both analog and digital formats. The experience of independent English-language publications like The Blizzard and the recently defunct U.S.-based XI Quarterly, or Howler for that matter, suggests that journalists and scholars share many similar challenges and opportunities in publishing rigorously entertaining, meaningful football writing aimed at readers worldwide. [Click here to read my 2012 blog post on football at the intersection of academic research and popular journalism.]
Issue Nine of The Blizzard is being served up for Thursday’s session [download it here]. Its tasty menu includes: David Conn on the rise of Manchester, and Manchester City; Simon Kuper’s dissection of Barcelona tactics; Philippe Auclair interview with Michael Garcia, Fifa’s Ethics Committee chairman [sic!]; Gwendolyn Oxenham’s search for a pickup game in Teheran; and Igor Rabiner speaking with Lev Yashin’s widow.
To participate in the 90-minute session that takes place simultaneously at Michigan State University and online via Skype, please contact me asap (alegi.peter AT gmail.com) with your Skype name. Folks can also email or tweet me (@futbolprof) questions before the session.