A valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the relationship between sport and place

Alan Bairner
Loughborough University

The Political Football Stadium is the latest volume in a series of works on Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 consists of two chapters, one written by the editors and titled “Mysterious Places, Political Spheres” and one by Özgehan Senyuva and Ramón Llopis-Goig which is a cross-country description of stadium attendance across Europe. Part II comprises three historical case studies. The cases are drawn from fascist Italy, Stuttgart and Turin. Part III contains four contemporary case studies ranging from Barcelona, Sarajevo, Sweden, and Paris and London. The four chapters in Part IV address protest cultures in Cairo and Istanbul, Poland, Turkey, and Iran. The single chapter which constitutes Part V considers what the football stadium will look like in 2050.

The editors write that the primary focus of the collection is on the stadium as a space – it ‘is not about the segmentation or socio-economic characteristics of football crowds, nor is it about traditional behaviour patterns of football supporters…’ (p. 9). However, some of the chapters in Part IV discuss Turkish, Egyptian and Polish fans who perform their politics not only in the stadium but also further afield. With that in mind, I intend to focus in this review on those chapters in which the stadium or stadiums are absolutely central to the narrative.  For example, one of the editors, Katarzyna Herd,  writes  about what is arguably the most important part of any stadium, namely the playing surface, and documents debates in Sweden between the purists and those who argue, for utilitarian and economic reasons, that football does not have to be played on grass, One is reminded that recently deceased Terry Venables of Tottenham Hotspur, FC Barcelona and England fame many years ago co-authored a work of fiction which predicted the end of grass pitches (Williams and Venables, 1972), It is gratifying to know that, half a century later, the debate continues and there are still plenty of fans who believe that tradition matters. I should also add that I share Herd’s feelings about AIK’s former Ràsunda stadium not least because of a morning spent with the late Lennart Johansson in his office not long after he had been beaten in the race for the FIFA presidency by Sepp Blatter and the rest, as they say, was history tainted by corruption.

It is a sure sign that a book is thought-provoking when it leaves the reader wanting more and prompts thoughts about what new chapters would be worthy of inclusion in a second volume on the same theme.

The historical chapters are well researched and informative. The most interesting and thought-provoking chapters, however, are those that focus on politics conducted either by fans or by the state within the confines of the football stadium itself.  To this end, Caroline Azad explains and analyses the behaviour of Iranian female supporters of FC Persepolis, while Başak Alpan and Bora Tanil examine the Turkish government’s use of the Passolig ID card which is presented here as an attempt by the state to discipline football spectators and depoliticise the country’s stadiums.

Azad relates the story of female Iranian football fan Sahar Khodayari, who died on 8 September 2019 having set herself on fire a week earlier when she was facing up to three years in prison for trying to enter a football stadium disguised as a boy. Azad writes, ‘this drama revealed the main political dimension surrounding the football stadium in Iran: along with the mandatory wearing of the Islamic headscarf (hijab), gender segregation in public space is the symbol of a control by a strong and powerful State’ (p. 263). She goes on, ‘as any observer who has lived in the Islamic Republic can testify, granting oneself freedom in a place that tends to restrain is a daily challenge’ (p. 265). However, for many Iranian women, the restriction of their freedom is a challenge to which they are courageous enough to respond. For example, ‘since the enclosure of the football stadium is used by women to express themselves and to contest the power in place, cross-dressing seems first and foremost a true act of resistance’ (p.265). As Azad concludes, ‘This “active” use of public space – by cross-dressed football supporters or women in general – espouses rights-based claims and would contribute to the women’s fight for gender equality’ (p. 276).

As Alpan and Tanil note, the introduction of the Passolig in Turkey was to some extent an example of a relatively widespread desire ‘to attract “the right people”’ to football stadiums (p. 253). However, it was much more than that. They write that ‘“the political” should not be understood here as a natural extension of conventional party politics or decision-making and policy processes, but as a wider process where identities are negotiated and where “power” is something that permeates every particle of that society’ (p.256).

It is a sure sign that a book is thought-provoking when it leaves the reader wanting more and prompts thoughts about what new chapters would be worthy of inclusion in a second volume on the same theme. Of course if the contents were to be broadened to include other types of sports stadiums, Dublin’s Croke Park, home to the Gaelic Athletic Association and arguably one of the world’s most political and politicized sporting venues would be an obvious candidate. Staying with football, however, one thinks immediately of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, Chile (known since 2008 as the Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos after a celebrated sports journalist). Following the overthrow of the democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, on 11 September 1973 (an earlier 9/11 but with the United States as key protagonists on that occasion), the stadium was used as a detention centre for around 7000 prisoners, many of whom were tortured while others were shot by the troops of Augusto Pinochet.

In Ireland, Derry City’s Brandywell would be a good case study with its proximity to the Irish nationalist Bogside district of the city being a major factor in the club eventually gaining entry to the League of Ireland in 1985 having withdrawn from the Northern Ireland based Irish League in 1972. Some of Belfast’s football grounds also have stories to tell, including Cliftonville FC’s Solitude and Linfield FC’s Windsor Park, home to the Northern Ireland national team, not forgetting Celtic Park, sometime home to Belfast Celtic FC and long since replaced by a shopping centre.

As things stand, the present collection contains a wealth of interesting material and will be a valuable resource not only for football enthusiasts and researchers but also for human geographers and sociologists with an interest in the relationship between sport and place. The editors and the contributors are to be commended.

Copyright © Alan Bairner 2024

Reference

Williams, G. and Venables, T (1972). They used to play on grass, London: Hodder and Stoughton