The crusade against ‘Foreigners’: the Romanian national football team through the eyes of a modernist writer

Abstract

Established in 1922, the Romanian national football team was composed throughout the interwar period mainly of representatives of ethnic minorities, primarily Hungarians and Germans coming from Transylvanian clubs. The team’s status as a national symbol prompted an ardent debate around the squad’s Romanianization, which I followed in the discourse of one of the most modernist interwar Romanian writers, the novelist and philosopher Camil Petrescu (1894–1957), present in the country’s literary canon as founder of the modern novel. Petrescu’s interwar press articles target the Romanianization of the Romanian national football team by removing the representatives of ethnic minorities. Despite the political framework characterized by nationalism, Romanianization and centralization, football’s Romanianization eventually failed in the interwar period.