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  • Goal! A Cultural and Social History of Modern Football by Christian Koller and Fabian Brändle
  • Souvik Naha
Koller, Christian and Fabian Brändle. Goal! A Cultural and Social History of Modern Football. Trans. David S. Bachrach. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. Pp. 350. $29.95, pb.

This book by Koller and Brändle, a revised version of the original German edition (2002), is an excellent introduction to some of the most important themes in football history. Divided into nine chapters, it surveys modern football’s journey in England and German-speaking Europe—Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—with occasional references to other countries such as Brazil, Argentina, France, and Italy. The first two chapters trace the origin and spread of football. The first chapter describes football’s public-school connections and codification as a game for moral, masculine gentlemen in the nineteenth century. It probes the entangled histories of football’s promotion in Switzerland, Germany, and several colonial settlements by a disparate group of stakeholders. The second chapter is about the subsequent popularization of football in the twentieth century as an inalienable aspect of the leisure culture fostered by new relations of production in urban, industrial England.

In the third chapter, the authors tackle aspects of football’s commercialization, which began with professionalization of footballers and coaches in England and was subsequently embraced, unevenly, throughout central Europe as a means to prosper in competitive football. Much of the emphasis is on the German federation’s longstanding disapproval of professionals. The chapter on football and emotions analyzes how fans respond to artistic flourish and dogged tenacity, or to “heroes,” “villains,” “fools,” and “outsiders.” These are labels with which footballers have been branded during their careers, based on the public’s perception of their sporting conduct. This politics of nomenclature speaks more about the fans than the footballers, as the latter are shown here as actors who merely live out, often deservingly but sometimes not actually earning, the identity accorded to them. The next chapter, on football and the nation, sheds light on the self-production of both contested and populist national identity on the football pitch. It examines selected matches, between England and Scotland, Celtic and Rangers, Switzerland and Germany (1938), and Germany and Hungary (1954), each of which is presented compellingly.

The relationship between football and the working class, the topic of the next chapter, focuses on workers’ professional football rather than their involvement as spectators and fans. Particularly interesting is the section on how international sport competitions for workers, not exclusively football tournaments, manifested the complex ideological tension between socialist and bourgeois institutions across Europe in the interwar period. Correspondingly, the chapter on football and dictatorship illustrates how the communist one-party states and left-and right-wing dictatorships in Soviet Russia, East Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina have used football for ideological and propaganda purposes. Unlike the rest of the Eurocentric book, the international context of politicized football is the kernel of these chapters.

The next chapter discusses wartime sporting activities, pondering the use of football for lifting the morale of civilians and soldiers in Allied England, Axis Germany, and neutral [End Page 355] Switzerland. It explores the organization and ethical debates over propaganda matches; the benefit matches played by military teams; conscription of footballers as soldiers, some of whom died in service; and the continuation of domestic leagues, often under military surveillance. The last chapter explores the long history of gender relations in football. After giving a thorough overview of the underpinnings of masculinity in European football, the authors take up the formation of women’s football clubs and the medicosocial objections against women’s football. America finds a place alongside England and Germany in this chapter, since, unlike the latter, where female footballers and fans were positioned disadvantageously in an overwhelmingly male social field, in America football was always looked upon as a women’s sport.

The contents of this book certainly do not correspond to the title, which may make the reader expect a pervasive master narrative about the spread of football’s gospel across the globe for over a century...

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