The intercultural transfer of football: the contexts of Germany and Argentina

Abstract

Historians of sport have paid little attention to the ways in which modern sports such as football were transferred from its place of origin to receiving cultures around the globe. While it is recognized that this ball game emerged in nineteenth-century English public schools, little is known about the transformations this game underwent in becoming modern-day German football and modern-day Argentine football. Applying the model of intercultural transfer, my contribution will investigate the process of the transfer of this ball game from English public schools to German and Argentine high schools. The emergence of football and its transfer across the world was carried out by teachers and students and it was part of educational reform since this game offered an alternative to the traditional ways of imposing discipline. Discipline did not come from an outside force such as the teacher but from the rules of the game. This game, further, encouraged team work in order to achieve victory and offered sons of middle-class families an introduction into the mechanisms of the capitalist market. The introduction of soccer into urbanizing cultures was also part of social hygiene debates and many of the protagonists of this game were also involved in social reform debates about improving the quality of living in modern cities.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was inspired by Roberta Wollons, edited volume (2000). The attempt of the contributors to Wollons’ volume to follow the transfer of the kindergarten idea between various cultures around the world caused me to create from fall 2011 to fall 2012 a sequence of three doctoral-level courses on the intercultural transfer of football with students from the doctoral programme in transatlantic history at the University of Texas at Arlington. I would like to thank the students – Brandon Blakeslee, Kristen Burton, Jay Goldin, Nicole Leopoldie, Isabelle Rispler, Rufki Salihi and Matthew Speight – involved in the three classes that were focused on this topic and who wrote such excellent research papers on the introduction of football into various regions and countries.

Notes

1. The terms ‘transnational’ and ‘international’ should not be confused since the first term points to connections of phenomena independent of the nation state while the second is based upon the existence of the nation state, which is seen as an organizing principle of human relations and history. See Clavin (2005).

2. See also the contributions to the ‘Forum European Sport and the Challenges of Its Recent Historiography’ in number 2 and 3 of volume 38 (2011) of the Journal of Sport History.

3. Among his many publications are: Bericht über die Gesundheitsverhältnisse der Stadt Braunschweig in den Jahren 1864 bis 1873 und die Cholera daselbst in den Jahren 1850 und 1855, Braunschweig: Waisenhaus-Buchdruckerei 1877; ‘Das Wasser als Nahrungsmittel und eine Vorrichtung, schlechtes Wasser zu verbessern’, in: Monatsblatt für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 1 (1878), pp. 30–35; ‘Zur Beseitigung der Abfallstoffe’, in: Monatsblatt für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 1 (1878), pp. 113–118; For a complete list see: Blasius, ‘Friedrich Reck’, pp. 130–131.