How are Football Games Remembered? Idioms of Memory in Modern Football

Abstract

A single football game, it can be argued, means almost nothing. As a spectator, we experience football games as meaningful events only because we are able to draw from past experiences with thousands of games and are skilled in interpreting each game in the light of past and future games. Taking this insight seriously, the question ‘How are football games remembered?’ moves right at the centre of the puzzle of what has made modern football such a fascinating experience for millions and millions of people. Arguing from the point of view of a historical sociologist, the following chapter takes this question as an opportunity to make characteristics of modern football explicit that are often taken for granted in the empirical literature. In the parlance of the phenomenological tradition, my goal is to make seemingly natural characteristics of modern football questionable, observable and intelligible. To achieve this goal, the chapter presents a historical-sociological research perspective that draws attention to the constitutive role of memory in modern competitive sport and, on this basis, identifies idioms of memory that determine the range of our imagination about competitive football today.

With many thanks to Nils Havemann and Wolfram Pyta for their invitation to the FREE conference ‘European Football and Collective Memory’ in Stuttgart, 2013, for which the first version of this chapter was written. The presentations and discussions at this conference also considerably helped to improve the final version of the chapter.