The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany by Alan McDougall (review)

In The People’s Game, Alan McDougall analyzes football in order to explore relations between state and society in socialist East Germany. Rejecting a dichotomized state-versus-society model, McDougall makes three principal arguments about how the study of football illuminates everyday life in East Germany. First, football constituted a site of Eigen-Sinn (self-assertion) for East German citizens, enabling them to cultivate identities—individual, local, regional, national, and international—which both contradicted and sometimes existed alongside the identities laid out for them by the state. Second, football showcased the state’s limits and dysfunctionality, especially as it often failed to direct football towards desired political ends. Third, football functioned as a “liminal activity” (30), creating a “contested space” (54) where the interests of citizens and the state sometimes came together, sometimes diverged, and often involved substantial “give and take” (151).

McDougall shows how football in East Germany was at once unsuccessful internationally for both the national team and club teams, yet vibrant and dynamic regionally and locally, featuring heated competitions and loyal and engaged fans. Semiprofessional and recreational footballers alike had no choice but to reckon with the state, depending on it for access to athletic facilities and opportunities. Likewise, the state, in its efforts to co-opt football towards socialist goals, had to adapt to the genuine and long-standing popularity of football at the grassroots. Yet, to McDougall, football “retained an ungovernable core” (11) that rendered it a site for autonomy, particularly in encouraging nonsocialist values such as local patriotism and individualism.

The People’s Game is impressive both in chronological scope, covering the entire history of East Germany, and in topical coverage, featuring substantive, multilayered discussions of players, fans, and recreational football. The book is densely researched, using state and party files from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and from regional archives in Dresden, Brandenburg, Erfurt, and Halle; fan surveillance records in the Stasi archives; files of the East German Football Association (DFV); periodicals including the football publication Die Neue Fussball-Woche; and fourteen oral-history interviews, primarily with fans and recreational players.

Readers see state efforts to monitor and shape football most clearly in the section on national and club football players, which closely examines both the challenges that shaped their experiences, such as Stasi surveillance and pressures to maintain a certain “socialist” moral profile, and the opportunities afforded them through participation, including material perks and individual recognition. Yet, the state’s influence had limits. As highly fraught transfer politics reveal, players, clubs, and officials often successfully resisted state efforts to manage football and footballers. Moreover, the national team fostered an East German identity that existed alongside, rather than replacing, a broader German identity. Many football fans, who watched both West German and East German club football on television, developed dual loyalties. Fans simultaneously rejoiced in Jürgen Sparwasser’s decisive goal in the 1974 World Cup match against West Germany, while also celebrating the overall victory of the West German team and admiring its captain Franz Beckenbauer.

McDougall provides further evidence of divergence from proscribed doctrine/ nonconformity by explaining in detail how fans often failed to embrace the dictates of proper socialist spectatorship. Some, clearly rejecting communist behavioral norms, became hooligans. Common fan activities such as writing fan letters primarily “conveyed the normal pleasures of watching football” (191) rather than referencing socialist ideals or the state. Independent fan clubs also emerged, despite state efforts to co-opt them by offering subsidized tickets and train trips to away matches to officially registered clubs. Many fans also watched televised football in the privacy of their own homes, where they could drink alcohol and cheer for their teams without state monitoring. Scores of fans also wrote petitions to the government complaining about matters as varied as the design of trophies to bad referees. Particularly striking was fan anger about perceived referee bias towards the Stasi football team...