Abstract
‘Creating a United Europe of Football’. These words were pronounced by the Swiss football leader, Ernst Thommen, at the beginning of the June 1954 congress in Basel among 27 European football national associations from all parts of the continent. The goal of this book is to understand how the creation of UEFA happened, what the impact on European football was, as well as the European integration process more generally. This introduction lays out the purpose of studying European football and integration, the aims, arguments and structure of the book, and an overview of the sources used.
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Notes
- 1.
For a critical discussion about the literature around the Champions League, see Niemann and Brand (2020).
- 2.
The concept of European identity is subject to much debate (see Duchesne 2010), not addressed in detail within the present study.
- 3.
This book focuses on men’s football. For some developments about European women football, see for e.g.: Breuil (2010) and Williams (2013).
- 4.
For more on the different representations of Europe held by its citizens, see Gaxie et al. (2010) and Olivier and Magnette (2007).
- 5.
We define the ruling elite in terms of the position each person holds within an organisation (Genieys 2007). Hence, the ruling elite includes all members of the executive committees of the organisations considered in this book.
- 6.
For a review of the literature, see Vonnard et al. (2016, pp. 231–243).
- 7.
Christiane Eisenberg, Pierre Lanfranchi, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, with help from two other historians, Paul Dietschy and Heidrun Homburg.
- 8.
Several books on the history of football have been written, for instance, by David Goldblatt. Although they are valuable in that they provide chronological outlines of football’s development, they are based mostly on the press and secondary, English-language sources and are therefore largely descriptive. In contrast, Dietschy drew mostly on primary sources, especially FIFA’s archives, and was therefore able to put forward more solid arguments and provide a more analytical and scientifically robust reading of events.
- 9.
On this aspect, I was notably inspired by the study of Gaiduk about the US-USSR relations within the United Nations (2012).
- 10.
For a state of art about Cold War studies, see Romero (2014). About International relations studies, see the interesting overview written by Pierre Grosser (2014). More specifically about sport, see the following three recent publications: Vonnard et al. (2017), Edelman and Young (2019), and Dietschy (2020a, b).
- 11.
Essentially, the correspondence of Rodolphe Seeldrayers and Jules Rimet, which is an extremely rich source of information. Rimet’s file alone contains around 1500 letters (estimation made in association with Grégory Quin).
- 12.
These countries were selected due to different criteria: importance within the FIFA (notably their financial support), geography activities of their leaders and, sometimes, discussion around their case. The countries are (in alphabetical order): Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Egypt, France, Germany (West), Ghana, Israël, Italy, Hungary, Netherland, Rumania, Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uruguay and Yugoslavia.
- 13.
Mostly the FIFA-South American confederation file, which contains letters and minutes of the South American confederation’s general assemblies. The files for the African and Asian confederations for the years until the early 1960s contain very few documents.
- 14.
I had several discussions with André Vieli, who joined UEFA’s communications department in 1982. In addition to the numerous articles he published in UEFA’s official magazine, UEFA Direct, Vieli also wrote UEFA’s 60th anniversary book. As a result, he has unparalleled knowledge of the organisation’s history and its archives. I also had two meetings with Gerhard Aigner, who joined UEFA’s secretariat in 1969 and was its general secretary from 1989 to 2002. In addition, a three-month research placement within UEFA, in the spring of 2012, allowed me to talk to many members of staff and thereby gain a better understanding of how the organisation functions and of recent developments.
- 15.
Thanks to many years of invaluable discussions with my friends and colleagues Yannick Deschamps, Sylvain Dufraisse and Nicola Sbetti, I also had access to documents in Italian and Russian.
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Vonnard, P. (2020). Introduction. In: Creating a United Europe of Football . Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42343-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42343-8_1
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