Defining moments in the history of soccer

As the most popular mass spectator sport across the world, soccer generates key moments of significance on and off the field, encapsulated in events that create metaphors and memories, with wider social, cultural, psychological, political, commercial and aesthetic implications. Since its codification as a modern game in the mid-nineteenth century, the history of soccer has been replete with events that have changed not only the sport’s organization but also its meanings and impacts. The passage from the local to the global or from the club to the international has often opened up transnational spaces that provide a context for studying the events that have ‘defined’ the sport. Such defining events can include performances on the field of play, decisions taken by various stakeholders associated with the game, organization of major tournaments, accidents and violence among players and fans, invention of supporter cultures, and so on. A study of these events provides an excellent opportunity to understand the evolution of the game from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. It also enriches the potential of writing connected histories in the domain of soccer. It helps us rethink peoples’ perception of soccer as a specific form of popular culture and public memory with deep psycho-social roots, connecting the past, the present and the future of the game’s evolution as part of everyday life. At the same time, explorations into the defining events in soccer can contribute to the debate on the interdependence of events and their narratives. An investigation into why some moments were more important than others to certain people could complicate our understanding of the historicity and interpretation of events as well.

Important events, moments and memories in the history of football have elicited a wide variety of writings – which range from autobiographical and biographical works to journalistic and scholarly pieces. Reminiscing memorable moments, recounting affective memories or signifying crucial events have been the hallmarks of these forms of writings. There are hundreds of collections and directories also on important moments in football history. Every international football event excites scholars to write about that mega event. In the last few decades, writings on sports mega events including football World Cups and the Euro Cups have flourished significantly. Drawing on this diverse array of written pieces along with an unlimited domain of audio-visual materials including radio commentaries, television footages, live and recorded videos, YouTube videos, films, documentaries, and a whole range of social media messages and clippings, one can discover an infinite quantity of events, moments, and memories about football from local village greens to global pitches. However, the focus in the genre of writings identified above has been mostly on national and international events although there have been occasional attempts at exploring and signifying locally important events and moments.¹

The present volume intends to identify and analyse some of the defining events in the history of global soccer. It aims to revisit the discourses of signification and memorialization of events that have influenced society, culture, politics, religion, and commerce in different contexts. While there is no disputing the immense impact of soccer on global societies, the jury is still out on whether the people’s game ‘belongs to history’, i.e. has had sufficient influence on historical processes such as the making of societies and political orders. The main problem has been the doubt in regard to the possibility of soccer having served as an important historical ‘plot’ in some parts of the world. A list of events hardly constitutes history; it has to have significant impact of the context in which the events unfolded. Thus, incidents on the soccer field, however much importance they might bear in specific popular imaginations, need to be reconciled with historical processes to have enough meanings of their own. As such, these events are treated as symbolic representations of group identity and collective memory.

While the history of soccer is too vast a canvas to focus on, this collection attempts to bring together scholars from various backgrounds to reflect upon the relationships between some of the key moments in the local, national and global histories of soccer and their historical contexts. The volume kicks off with Richard Giulianotti’s attempt to contextualize and conceptualize football events and memories in the age of globalization through a sociological lens.² He approaches this analysis with reference to globalization, interpretation and critique. He explores in broad terms the diverse array of events that require examination inside and outside the game, and considers memory in terms of personal and collective ways in which remembering operates within the game. In the end, he tries to theorize football events and memories through eclectic perspectives of relevant scholars and examine the interrelations of event and memory with reference to globalizing processes in a wide variety of ways and processes including knowledge production, commercialization, commodification, mediatization and postmodernisation.

The rest of the volume is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the representation and signification of moments and memories from the history of World Cups while the second offers insights on events and metaphors beyond the World Cup. The first part starts with Tiago J. Maranhão’s attempt to understand football’s role in the construction of Brazil’s national identity in the context of the 1938 World Cup. He argues that under Getúlio Vargas’ dictatorship sport and football in particular was considered to be an integral part of the state policy to promote Brazil’s racial quality and nationalism. Using contemporary newspapers, Maranhão shows how the World Cup became the stage to assert the essential elements of Brazilian race and nation in tune with the policy of the state.

The 1966 England World Cup is considered by many as one of the most intriguing events in the history of the Cup for several reasons. While the hosting and winning of the 1966 World Cup by England has been at the centre of academic discussion since long,³ the present volume has approached this European spectacle from the perspectives of two extra-European regions – Latin America and Africa. Going beyond the usual cultural, political and diplomatic legacies of the tournament, Alex G. Gillett and Kevin D. Tennent reconstruct the memories of the event in Latin America through reports in the English language press and the UK government sources. Examining the allegations against FIFA, the FA and even the UK government for manipulating the tournament to the advantage of England and other European teams, they highlight the negative perceptions about the host and the champion England in Latin America and the way England responded to its negative public relations. In the process, the essay offers a fresh perspective on the social and cultural significance of the 1966 FIFA World Cup in terms of long-term footballing and diplomatic relations between England and Latin America.

In the second contribution on the 1966 World Cup, Paul Darby draws our attention to the significance of the tournament in terms of the most serious off-the-field development associated with it – boycott of the Cup by African nations in protest against the FIFA’s unfair policy of distribution of places in World Cup finals.⁴ Re-assessing the footballing and political backdrop of the boycott, Darby brings forth the role of Ghana and the pan-African vision of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President, in shaping the process and impact of the boycott. By exploring the intended and unintended consequences of the boycott – both short term and long term, he argues that it contributed to an ‘unparalleled transformation in the global governance of football’ in terms of the representation of Third World nations in the World Cup, considered to be ‘the enduring legacy of this momentous event in football history’.

In the next essay, Juan Antonio Simón and Carlos García-Martí acquaint us with some unexplored socio-political ramifications of the 1982 World Cup for the host country Spain and the champions Italy. Taking the readers away from the most iconic moments produced by the tournament, the essay offers insights into the role of this football event in the reconstruction of political image and national identity for the two countries in a period of political crisis and social tension, albeit in contrasting ways. While in Spain the Cup remained a lost opportunity of image building in the political transition from dictatorship to democracy despite the successful hosting of the tournament, the political appropriation of World Cup victory became integrally connected with the rising tide of nationalism and the nation’s image building in Italy.

The next World Cup held in Mexico still remains one of the most iconic in the history of the game, memorialized in terms of two intriguingly magic moments produced by Argentine caption Diego Maradona against England – the controversial ‘Hand-of-God’ goal and the dribbling masterpiece score, unarguably considered to be the ‘Goal of the Century’. However, going beyond this celebrated narrative and conventional official histories of the Cup, Patrick Ridge draws attention to the tragedy of a great earthquake that ripped Mexico City apart in 1985 and the resultant protest against the inability of the ruling political party and the government to provide adequate relief to the victims. This tragedy underpinned the preparation, organization and celebration of the tournament in 1986. Through a discursive analysis of the famous Mexican chronicler Carlos Monsiváis’ ¡¡¡Goool!!! Somos el desmadre, Ridge brings out an altogether different narrative of protest and contestation as revealed in the fan behaviour in Monsi’s chronicle. In Monsi’s powerful satire on the dominance and weakness of the ruling political party and the government on the one hand and his picturesque descriptions and direct discourse of fan behaviour on the other, the author finds a story of subversive mass civil movements with a counter-hegemonic fervour in Mexican politics.

Wycliffe W. Njororai Simiyu meticulously narrates the story of African participation in World Cup football with a focus on the memorable and defining moments for the continent.⁵ Although he does not posit and address any broader political, social or economic questions, his is a holistic appraisal of what certain African nations have achieved in different editions of this global event. The perspective here is definitively cultural, or footballing to be more specific, with styles of play, match results, individual exploits, or sporting legacies as markers of Africa’s status in world football. The author signifies the ‘memorable’ and ‘defining’ moments on the field of play during a long stretch of period to understand what football success has meant to Africa, deliberately avoiding discussion on the larger debates of nation-building, Pan-Africanism, or development except contextual references to the same. At the same time, he identifies the crucial impact of some of these key ‘African’ moments on the global governance of the game. The vision of the author, needless to say, is futuristic enmeshed in optimism.

Every global sports event including international football fixture constitutes a crucial and defining moment in terms of security and safety of all its stakeholders. Football World Cups are no exceptions. Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen brings out the importance of the 2018 Russia World Cup in the context of securitization of sports mega events (SMEs) in the post-9/11 world.⁶ Revisiting the security-related episodes during the event primarily on the basis of media reports and discourses, he finds the event to be particularly well managed to prevent potential security threats and violence predicted beforehand. On the other hand, he identifies a transformed and somewhat reversed status of English ‘hooligans’ from being a group generating risk to one in risk in Russia. More importantly, Ludvigsen offers critical insights into the potential of studying future football events such as 2020 Euros, and 2022 and 2026 World Cups from the perspectives of security studies and SMEs in the light of the Russian experience.

The World Cup will be held for the first time in the Arab World and only second time in Asia in 2022 with Qatar winning the bid for hosting the Cup. Thomas Ross Griffin, using an exhaustive array of primary and secondary materials produced in the 2010s, attempts to understand the impact of this forthcoming event on the country in terms of both its national identity and social fabric. He employs quite a few theoretical perspectives and arguments offered by a host of relevant scholars from Cornelissen⁷ and Amara⁸ to Said⁹ and Bhabha¹⁰ to show how Qatar effectively intends to consider, utilize and strategise the hosting of the Cup as an opportunity to assert its unique national identity at the global stage of the twenty-first century. While the bidding process and the preparations for the organization of the event have created a somewhat negative image of Qatar in the perception of global public opinion, Griffin argues, that very process has already brought about major changes in Qatar’s society and culture in various ways such as the reform of migrant labour laws and the participation of women in sport. The World Cup seems to become a defining event not only in the history of Qatar but in the history of the game as the stretch of the game reaches ‘one of the last civilizational bridges left in global sport’.

The second part of the volume deals with significant events, processes and memories from the origins of the modern game in the nineteenth century to its becoming of markers and metaphors of diverse spheres of life through a variety of thematic and spatial representations. The section starts with Graham Curry’s essay on the origins of modern soccer as an outcome of multiple interdependencies. Appreciating the importance of two conflicting paradigms in tracing the origins of modern football, viz. the established explanation of the predominance of public school influence and the existence and impact of a more working-class subculture based around public houses, Curry highlights the significance of more locally based studies to explore otherwise forgotten or neglected events, trends, memories in the game’s early history in England and suggests that the introduction of the modern variety of the game was more multifaceted than it was believed to be – ‘a product of multiple interdependencies’.¹¹ Examining the most recent researches in this regard and focusing on multiple local studies, he reiterates the importance of the missing links in the early story of the game – the role of local sporting elites, mostly educated in local grammar schools and the mob elements or folk sources of the localities. However, despite recognizing the plethora of actors, events and moments in these early local histories of the game, Curry acknowledges in the end the crucial role of English public schools in providing and shaping the modern-day soccer.

As football spread across and became popular in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, attempts were made to organize inter-state/club tournaments besides occasional friendly sporting exchanges between European nations. Philippe Vonnard reconstructs the significance of these early attempts of making the game feasible at a ‘European scale’ between the 1920s and the 1970s. Contradicting the claims of some recent researches that Europeanization of soccer began primarily in the 1990s, he prefers to take a long-term perspective and refers to three key tournaments – Mitropa Cup (created in 1927), European Champion Clubs’ Cup (created in 1955) and UEFA Cup (created in 1971) – which he argues represented three different stages of the Europeanization of the game. The formation of UEFA constituted a defining event in the process while its role and decisions in organizing European tournaments at both club and national levels became significant moments in the history of the game in Europe.

As European Champion Clubs’ Cup became the most popular competition across Europe and came to be more popularly known as the European Cup, winning the trophy began to create moments, memories and legacies to be cherished by clubs, communities and nations afterwards. In this context, John Kelly and Joseph Bradley reconstruct the iconic significance of the first-ever Scottish as well as British club Celtic FC’s win of the European Cup in 1967. Describing the Celtic victory as one of the most defining moments in European soccer, they explore intersections of ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and the politics of ‘sectarianism’ in Scotland through the signification and memorialization of the win with special reference to what the event meant to marginalized and/or migrant groups, especially the Irish Catholic diaspora, in Scotland.

The international governance of football began in 1904 with the establishment of FIFA, which became the apex global body to control and manage the game. The election of João Havelange to FIFA is considered by many as a turning point in FIFA’s as also of the game’s history as it turned the institution into a truly global and immensely wealthy one. Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui, rereading FIFA’s official sources and narratives, private correspondences, and Havelange’s biographies, examines the significance of the event against the historical backdrop of the Cold War and the rise of the Third World in international relations. Even without overstating the social and political significance of the event, the author signifies the election of 1974 as setting in motion a process with a set of political and commercial networks that played a key role in the institution’s own historical transformation. While the legacy of the event created an effective continuum that sustained Havelange’s undisputed position in FIFA – both in the institution as also in its history till 2016, it is to be seen whether Gianni Infantino’s accession to power truly reconfigures and destabilizes the former’s position for the future football milieu.

Like important changes in the governance or organization of the game, major political events and developments often shape and transform the future of sport in a given historical context. A similar case was anticipated in the history of Northern Ireland with the signing of the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement in 1998 with the avowed objective of putting an end to the continuing ethnic violence in the country over the last 80 years. In such context, David Hassan and Kyle Ferguson examine ‘the still contested concept of a “Northern Irish” identity and critically review its real currency in a divided society’. In the process, they draw attention to the positive role of Irish Football Association’s (IFA’s) Football for All (FFA) initiative – a programme of direct action with the intent to deal with problems of ethnicity and sectarianism and the resultant emergence of the so-called Green and White Army (GAWA), the name of Northern Ireland’s enthusiastic band of football fans, and look forward to a better future ahead despite the risk involved in the politicization of football for the sake of unitary identity.

The state – be it colonial or postcolonial – has always been central to sport’s appropriation for political, cultural or nationalist purposes. The use of football as a metaphor for nation-state identity has been a common refrain in the history of Third World countries that attained freedom from colonial rule after the Second World War. Youcef Bouandela and Mahfoud Amara offer a case study of Algeria to explicate this process of appropriation. In the wider backdrop of Algeria’s attainment of independence from colonial rule through a war of liberation and the subsequent political transition shaped by military coup, dictatorship, civil war and emergency over decades, they offer an analysis of the changing perceptions of football in official and popular memories since Independence in 1962. By analysing the significances of six historical matches/moments – Algeria–Brazil in 1965; Algeria–France in 1975; Algeria–Germany in 1982; Algeria–Nigeria in 1990; Algeria–Egypt in 2009; and Algeria–South Korea in 2014, the essay reconstructs the memory of the newly forged nation-state and the multiple meanings these matches/moments represented in Algeria’s politics, foreign relations, society and culture.

The last two essays of the volume bring back the continuing debates on the position and participation of women in the football world and the consequent gender disparities in that context in terms of events, moments, and memories from the women’s game. Rens Peeters, Agnes Elling and Jacco van Sterkenburg focus on the 2017 Women’s European Champions Football (WEURO) held in the Netherlands and won by the Dutch women’s national team as a defining event and explore its impact on, and meanings for women’s football and sports media complex in the country. Taking both sport and media as gendered spaces, they analyse the narratives of two women pioneers in elite women’s football with focus on their experience of and negotiation with the impact of the event, and bring out the hegemonic discourses as well as alternative spaces of meaning in the transition of women’s football from marginalization to professionalization.

Despite the occasional moment of women’s prominence in the football world, the predominant memories, defining events or the heroic figures associated with such memories or events are still most likely, men. Kath Woodward, befittingly in the last piece of the volume, questions the gendered nature of moments, metaphors and memories in football in view of this appalling absence of women in the narratives of football communities. She interrogates the very processes through which key memories and defining moments are made and remade with particular reference to women’s longstanding exclusion from, and invisibility in sport and sports media, and ‘explores opportunities for change in light of the development of the women’s game’. With a potential change in vision, she focuses on women’s increasing involvement in sport-related employment including journalism and commentary, the growth of the Super League and the increased visibility of women’s football as possible harbingers of that change from gender discrimination to gender equality, and hopes for the coming and maturation of ‘Women’s Time’ when new narratives will be put into discourses and stories of soccer across the world.

The essays in the volume have tried to project soccer as a lens to reflect upon the broader forces at work in politics, society, economy and culture. The representation of the game in terms of certain events, moments or memories often makes it a metaphor of life in myriad forms and meanings. These events, moments and memories become defining by commenting upon forces and choices such as nationalism, identity, resistance, security, gender, globalization and so on. The volume has made an attempt to set a trend of exploring and interpreting the defining events, significant moments, and critical memories in the world of soccer through a didactic exercise of eclectic global exploration. It is expected to inspire future forays into such events, moments, and memories either with particular focus on international, national or local histories of the game or with an attempt to connect the local, the national and the global in the game’s history.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We have preferred not to mention any particular references here as the titles and details of such works abound in the internet with relevant keyword searches.

2. Giulianotti’s piece may be considered as a sequel to his classic Football.

3. For a recent reflection on this, see Hughson, England and the 1966 World Cup.

4. Darby’s earlier work is also noteworthy in this regard. See Darby, Africa, Football and FIFA.

5. Simiyu’s reference to Badaracco’s notion of Defining Moments originally used to explain managerial leadership seems quite intriguing, and may open up nuanced understanding of defining moments in sport if researched more analytically in future. Badaracco, Defining Moments.

6. This essay is a sequel to Ludvigsen’s earlier writing on the subject, ‘Sport mega-events and security’.

7. Cornelissen, ‘“It’s Africa’s Turn!”’.

8. Amara, Sport, Politics and Society in the Arab World.

9. Said, Orientalism.

10. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.

11. Also, see Curry’s recent work The Early Development of Football in this regard.