The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.

This is the second part of a two-part episode - the first part is here, episode 54, from March 31.

We will start at FC St. Pauli, now in the German Bundesliga, at the club’s museum which has very active researchers, and we’ll end at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the bigger question of what right remembering looks like in professional soccer - and what it can look like. We will take that journey with no less than 3 guests: Celina Albertz, a researcher and also in the curating team of the FC St. Pauli Museum; Sönke G...

This is the first part of a two-part episode.

We will start at FC St. Pauli, now in the German Bundesliga, at the club’s museum which has very active researchers, and we’ll end at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the bigger question of what right remembering looks like in professional soccer - and what it can look like. We will take that journey with no less than 3 guests: Celina Albertz, a researcher and also in the curating team of the FC St. Pauli Museum; Sönke Goldbeck, Board chair and director of the museum, and F...

If you are in England on the nice Spring weekend of March 22nd, I hope you didn’t book the trip to see a Premier League game. Because there are none. It’s a dreaded national team break again. But on the other hand, that weekend may also be one of the best to soak in English football culture, because it’s the Annual “Non-League Day," an annual, grassroots-led spotlight on non-professional football in England, a chance for those clubs to "promote the importance of affordable volunteer-led community football,"  for fans who don’t follow the big clubs across the country...

Note: This is an unusual episode, in reaction to the events unfolding Thursday and Friday, with little time to edit or the usual setup. All sounds fine and is audible, but not as nice as usual. My apologies!

Back last Summer, many Premier League clubs announced they would change, or do away with, "concession tickets" for seniors and youth, as well as a price hike on season tickets. Resistance formed at many clubs, but at West Ham, it seemed particularly organized, creative and social media savvy. In August, I talked with Alex, a chief initiator of the...

There is a lot to say about Argentina and football that we are not saying today. There is a lot about Argentina and football that we are saying today. We’re even saying things about saying things about football in Argentina: Christopher Hylland joins me, an English author and educator with a Latin American past and a Norwegian present. His football-centric travel report Tears at La Bombonera is out since 2021, and he has just published a second one, a unique journey to the land where linguistics and football meet. The book is called Dame Bola: A Journey Through the La...

The EU, Europe's great post-war peace project, can feel beleaguered today. Global and continental uncertainties collide, and things are complicated in Brussels, Belgium, the heart of the European Union. Two clubs from that capital survived in the Europa League, though none bear Brussels’ city name: RSC Anderlecht, with the beautiful color of purple, and Royal Union St Gilloise, a recent regular guest in European club competitions. And in a multinational, multilingual European Union, in Brussels, Belgium, a multilingual, multiethnic country (French, Dutch and German are Belgium’s official languages), it’s Royal Union that fittingly has a multinational, multilinguistic fanclu...

Norway is regularly listed among the "happiest countries in the world." It is one of the wealthiest too, and its not a country with revolutionary fervor. It’s not France. It’s not even Germany. Yet the Video Assistant Referee, known widely as VAR, has raised Norwegians' hackles. Organized fans have mobilized enough, and in enough forms, that the country's two professional leagues recently cast a majority vote to scrap VAR  - a testimony not only to true concern about the impact of VAR on games, a concern that I share, but also to the significant improvement in the quant...

Thank you for making 50 Episodes of The Assistant professor of Football possible! Whether you celebrate anything this season or not, I hope these days are refreshing for you, hold people and emotions if you want that, and space to breathe in if you prefer that. 

Last year at this time, I read Michael Foreman’s classic picture book War Game as a Holiday special. This December special is me. That is: an audio interview with me that I gave to a fairly well known German soccer culture podcast, Brennpunkt Orange. Its host, Danny, asked good questions about my...

SC Freiburg, a former yoyo club from a pretty progressive town on the very southwestern edge of Germany is now firmly established in the Bundesliga. The club is 120 years old this year, and just a few days ago published its first investigation into its own history during Nazi rule in Germany. It’s one of the German clubs that paid attention early on to football for women, is a pioneer in the establishment of youth academies in Germany, and also notable for the long tenure of some of its recent coaches. It’s the kind of club that likes its...

I've said something like this before: I believe the means of global soccer production should be controlled by fans, players and the community the club is in, collectively or cooperatively, and not by firms and companies based half a world away from the clubs in question. So, this podcast is not a natural avenue for an American multi-club owner of European clubs to share his story.
In an exception to that pattern, here is a conversation with Matt Rizzetta, an owner of - precisely - a company (named North Sixth Group, in New York) that controls clubs half...

Martin Luther (not the King) nailed 95 protest theses against the Christian church of his day to a church door in Germany on October 31st 1517. And Protestants , properly understood, have been protesting ever since. As we near "Reformation Day" again, David Kilpatrick, a Professor of English and Sports Managment, channels that spirit of protest to the world of soccer. His playful, bold and short book "95 Theses on the Reformation of Football: Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Glocal Football Governance" stands in a strong tradition of critical and intelligent football literature on this podcast. A listener himself, David and...

Today, we are taking a Fall break trip to Vallecas, a working class neighborhood in the Spanish capital Madrid. La Liga - the Spanish first league - holds global appeal chiefly due to its two dominators and their massive global following. However, there are wonderful and many layered stories of politics, local pride, past glories and regional conflict below that shiny surface. Rayo Vallecano, the Lightining Bolt of Vallecas, represent a particularly interesting one. Currently a very good 8th in La Liga, the club normally yo-yos between 1st and 2nd and sometimes the 3rd league, but has been the...

The McDonald’s on Elland Road in Leeds, near the stadium of Leeds United, is, apparently, the only McDonald’s there is that has removed any element with the color red. Because Red, that is Manchester United, the rose of Lancaster in the badge of Manchester City. And roses, as well as soccer shirts, in Yorkshire are white… except until this Summer, when two red bulls, the logo of an Austrian energy drink, gallopped onto that white jersey, as the new main sponsor. 

I have a personal past here: I was in Austria when the same energy drink b...

In a bit of a parallel episode to Episode 24 ("The Footballer who Defied the Nazis? The Myth of Matthias Sindelar"), this is the story of Hakoach Vienna. A child of central European Jewish emancipation movements and of the "muscular religion" fashionable at the time, the Jewish club became Austria's first professional champion in 1925, subsequently lost its important players to North American clubs, was home to Bela Guttman in Austria, and was shut down 3 days after the Anschluss of Austria to Germany. It lives on in at least 3 clubs, on 3 continents, one of them a re-formed Hakoah, in Vienna itself. 

To critique the state of our world, our communities, to critique what is wrong with soccer in late stage capitalism is one thing. It actually isn’t a hard thing. But to dream, think and even plan for a better world, and a better football, that is something different entirely. Alina Schwermer, a young and extremely talented German journalist, has done just that, on 450 pages, in her book Futopia: Ideas for a Better Footballing World. It’s a book about football, and about utopias. About the game and how we can reimagine it, but also about a different, more vibr...

Gent in Belgium. Rasgrad in Bulgaria. Mostar in Bosnia. Borås in Sweden. Tiraspol in, well, Moldova. Or Differdange in Luxemburg

If you know where these places are, have some sense of what it looks like there, what the vibe is, perhaps it is because of the early UEFA club competitions' qualifying rounds. It is for me. If it isn't for you yet, it's time it was. I know I’ve often said in the past this podcast is intended to look beyond the big leagues, beyond stars and their goals, but never have we cast the ned...

If you follow a club that plays in the English Premier League, you may have gotten wind of it: over the Summer, quite a few clubs increased their season ticket prices, and phased out - or partially phased out - discounted tickets for kids and seniors, so called concession tickets. And for once, English fans seem to get organized and cooperative in resistance. Wolverhampton, Tottenham and West Ham in particular are the hotspots right now, but there are others, and they are talking. If the fans do this right, you will witness some public action at the start of...

The end of Season 2 of The Assistant Professor of Football is nigh, and we check in with guests from the last year to hear how their club, cause or research have been doing. Here are, in order: 

Peter K Wagner on Sturm Graz’s sensational champions league and cup winning season

Fabio Schaupp, also from Graz, on the promotion of Graz’s other team, GAK, to the Austrian Bundesliga, so regular Graz derbies from now own.

Fredrik Rakar, chairman of Degerfors IF in Sweden, on a dramatic relegation and a new  beginning in the se...

Goshen, Indiana is home to a private college without an American Football team - and, most recently, a semi-professional soccer club that serves as an - albeit unusual - case study for how grassroots soccer in the U.S. can thrive and build a community.
The overarching theme of The Assistant Professor is that football is not merely about goals and stars. It is, done properly, a participatory culture, an identity-forging community and even a political space. And to experience any of these aspects, it takes an active role of and for fans. That is possible, most easily...

Today's episode is a mix between soccer detective story and true crime podcasting. British investigative journalist Paul Brown is our Visiting Professor for the day. He and his colleague Philippe Auclair have piled up pathbreaking research on the backstory, money trail and flat out baffling activities of a group called 777 partners. Their activities in the insurance and airplanes business would be a story well worth telling in and of itself, but they feature here today because they own stakes in prominent football clubs in Brazil, Belgium, France Italy and Germany (Hertha Berlin, from 3 episodes ago!) and, last but not...

We begin with the Eurovision Songcontest and end with Sturm Graz's cup win, but consider, most of all, FC St. Gallen. Saint who? True, if I would ask you who invented club football in Europe in continental Europe, would you guess that the answer is the same as to the Ricola cough drop question? The Swiss did! Well, technically English students living in Switzerland, but nevermind - the year was 1879 and the place was right near St. Gallen, Saint Gallen, and the continent’s oldest soccer club was founded. Not some club who is big and famous today, and no...

The excesses of global soccer capitalism are well documented on this podcast. Perhaps no footballing country is more affected than England, the birthplace of the modern game and home to arguably the wealthiest clubs and league. To take it up one notch, six of its big clubs attempted to join the breakaway Super League while, around the same time, historic club Bury FC collapse and fell under administration. The fan protests surrounding both, the striking inequality growing in English football, and the fast growth of ever more dubious club owners spurred a “fan-led review” commissioned by the British government and...

Kay Bernstein was elected the president of Hertha BSC, then in the 1st Bundesliga, in June 2022. He died at his home near Berlin on January 16th of this year, with Hertha being in the 2nd Bundesliga. What sounds like a short and - on the pitch - unsuccessful presidency is in fact the most significant shift and opening up of possibilities in club leadership in German and, possibly, European club leadership over the last years.

In his memory, are dedicating an hour today to his club, to his life and to his impact. Bernstein grew up in...

"The era is brought to life by the accounts of Albanians who lived through it, which capture the importance of football to a populace starved of any other source of communal enjoyment. The otherworldliness and innate cruelty of the Stalinist regime provide a terrifying backdrop to their tales," reads the blurb for Phil Harrison's book The Hermit Kingdom: Football Stories from Stalinist Albania.  Albania, on the far eastern edge of Europe, followed a rather unique path through the Cold War - and has a unique soccer culture to match that period. Caught between Russia, China and neighboring Yugoslavia, in a...

... of all people! Raphael is a German political scientist, whose book "Peace to the Terraces, War to the Federations and Leagues" is a pathbreaking materialist critique of "modern soccer" - the game as purely an entertainment market commodity. The book is only published in German so far, and we were in the process of rolling out his thoughts with the ongoing conflict between German fans and the German Bundesliga as a case in point (you know, the one with tennis balls and remote-controlled cars thrown on the pitch in recent weeks...). About halfway through, the bomb dropped: sooner than...

Indie, Hip Hop, Punk, Reggae, Ska and Choruses- from Leeds to Istanbul, from Vienna to Mexico City, from Darmstadt to Buenos Aires. Your second soccer playlist is here - with some background info, and plenty of quirky football lyrics.

PLAYLIST FOR THIS EPISODE - links to videos:

Puma Hardchorus - England, France, Germany and Italy

Alberto Colucci - Die Sonne Scheint (SV Darmstadt 98)

Manu Chao (with Diego Maradona) - La Vida Tombola

Sultans of Ping - I'm in Love with a Football Hooligan

Luke Haines - Leeds...

If you are thinking of dreaming of going to England, seeing a Premier League game, dive into the atmosphere that you see on TV, or even have concrete travel plans already to finally see one game of the club you otherwise follow on TV, then this episode is for you. If you are listening from England, and have followed your club for years and decades, it's for you as well.

Felipe Tobar, originally from Brazil, is a scholar at Clemson University in South Carolina and has written about soccer tourism to England, Premier League related club museums...

I thought today’s episode needed a long rationalization.  But as I was writing it, I thought f*** it, I don’t need to be doing  verbal gymnastics. I know human beings, there, and our guest does too. So we’ll just let these stories speak. About soccer, about trauma, about peace and coexistence, and about youth cultures both left and right of center in what is a diverse and divided country. This was a hard episode for me to prepare and process. But I am deeply grateful it came together. 

From Israeli ultras killed or kidnapped, to the Ar...

Just a few weeks ago, Poland elected a new parliament. The result was a change in power, from the national conservative camp to the centrist, pro-European one. And the campaign, yet again, highlighted, to use an overused term, the culture wars over defining the future of one of the European Union’s largest but also newest member states. Historically occupied by its neighbors over and over again, risen from the Eastern bloc, riven between a historically national Catholic identity and the fast pace of capitalism and Westernization, between skepticism toward those changes but also a deep antagonism towards Russia, Po...

A mini audiobook - for the time to think in the evenings after the presents have all been unwrapped, or for a listen with the children:

As the story goes, on Christmas 1914, during world war 1, in the trenches of Belgium, German and English soldiers laid down their weapons, shook hands, and played a game of football in the no man’s land between the lines. Historians are unsure if an actual match was played, you can find more on that debate in the shownotes. But for today, that is neither here nor there. At the very least, on...

An arranged marriage of a Greek and a Celt began the settlement of Massalia, today: Marseille. Europe’s bellwether of multiculturalism, 2nd city of France, one of Europe’s biggest ports, migrant destination for centuries, cauldron of socioeconomic conflict, cradle of French rap music - and home of Olympique, still France’s only Champions League winner ever. A few days after that win, the club went under in a bribery scandal and forced relegation. 

A few more headlines on Olympique Marseille, or OM? Voila: Coaches change pretty much every year. A lion in the changing room. Fans light p...

FC St. Pauli is a 2nd Bundesliga team from Hamburg. That’s one thing. It is also "Germany’s original cult club," an "antifascist pioneer," the "club of punk and techno, or a "swashbuckling left wing club." The history behind these labels begin in the late 1980s, when punks occupied houses around St. Pauli’s stadium and antiracists found out that football grounds didn't just belong to Neonazis. It continues today, in a club that has  spoken out against the overcommercialization of football,  or as an ally to refugees, and in a fan culture that defines and defends its antifasc...

On Thursday, November 2nd, the second largest city of Austria, Graz, will see  its second soccer derby in the last 16 years, in the Austrian cup tournament. Sturm Graz, currently leaders of the Austrian Bundesliga and Europa League starters, face GAK (Graz Athletic Sports Club), the city's oldest club, its first one to win a national title, and currently on the verge of returning to the 1st tier. 

This episode hits close to home: 20 years ago, in elementary school, I attended my first Sturm Graz game. Sturm was fighting relegation that season. My dad, a life long fan, to...

Matthias Sindelar was, and is, the most famous Austrian footballer between World Wars 1 and 2. Known for his elegant style of play during a period when Austrian soccer was admired as an innovative model, he defined Austria’s national team, known as the "miracle team," and his club, Austria Vienna. Austria joined Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. And when it arose as an independent nation again, Sindelar's legacy was more than that of a footballer: he became  a myth - the elegant Austrian who defied the Nazis. This version of Sindelar has reached a wide international audience, from Italian graphic novels and...

Soccer jerseys, kits, football shirts - whatever the name, there is no shortage of  opinions about them. Pretty or ugly, traditional or not, brands, costs, sponsors; whether to own only those we have connections to, or buy them for style, or collect them...
We’ll cut through all that today, with the help of Alex Ireland, author of the very recently published book Pretty Poly: The History of the Football Shirt. This episode is a short material history of the beautiful game - through the lens of various fabrics, in various colors, we’ll trace football from the begin...

When I was High School, Sturm Graz, one of the two teams of my hometown in Austria and the club I was born into, had its most successful phase. We made it to the CL group phase twice - and eventually went bankrupt from it. One of the protagonists was a young, serious-looking player from our own youth system who was known to be not your stereotypical soccer player. We were aware that he had a love for languages and philosophy. During the same period, in 2003, also in Graz, the first Homeless World Cup took place, on the city’s...

FC Bayern is the club of Franz Beckenbauer, Harry Kane, and countless fans across the world. However, Bayern is also the club of Kurt Landauer. A Jew from a businesspeople’s family, he served for Germany in World War I and got to know football from English and Swiss students. As a club president, he led his FC Bayern to its first championship 1932, a year before the Nazi rise to power. As a Jew, Landauer promptly landed in a concentration camp only to flee to exile in Switzerland. And just two years after World War II, he returned to Mu...

Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, Dynamo Berlin, a club closely associated with the Communist East German Republic’s secret police, won the country’s title ten consecutive times. The hatred of the team across the country united its fans, but also provided the perhaps most prominent kind of complaint and grumbling that the GDR’s citizens had against the regime that ruled them. In 1989, that regime crumbled and fell. And so did Dynamo. Alan McDougall is a historian at the University of Guelph in Canada. He has written The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East...

Today's Season 1 wrap-up is a tour of Europe in 1 hour.  Some listeners contacted me with the same great idea: check in with a lot of the visiting professors from season 1 again, and have them tell us briefly how they are now, and how things went. So I called all those with whom I talked a while ago about a club, a country, an ongoing situation, to look back at the season that was, the stories, the joys and the problems of soccer that were. Somewhere toward the end I’ll also say who the top 3 downloaded episodes of the sea...

Probably no other English club below the professional leagues has gathered more media attention than Dulwich Hamlet, located South of the river in London and around in that neighborhood since 1893. Any quick search on the club will turn up grand phrases like “a different vision for football” or “the small club with the big vision.” And that vision - inclusive, humanitarian, egalitarian - draws around 3000 spectators (critics would say 3000 hipsters) who often wouldn’t feel comfortable at other soccer grounds to the Hamlet’s South London home for most games. But despite such record numbers for the lower leagues, the club jus...