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

Here’s a city that can’t agree on a football club. Seville has two, and they’ve been at odds since a falling-out among directors in 1907 gave birth to Betis. Everyone repeats that Sevilla is the posh side and Betis the working-class one, but Adam Winkel suspects the clubs just like the story. Adam, a Spanish professor from North Carolina, found Betis the way outsiders usually find a team: through people. He spent a junior year abroad in the mid-90s, had friends from the province who followed Betis, and learned that knowing the weekend’s results gave him some...

New British prime minister Andy Burnham has said that his morals have been shaped by Everton FC, the Catholic Church, and the labour party. Perhaps in that order. And indeed,  Burnham’s politics were forged on the terraces, long before Downing Street. Journalist Adrian Goldberg, author of Where’s the Money Gone? The Battle for the Soul of English Football, traces the line from an Everton-supporting kid who lived through Thatcher-era identity cards and police hostility toward fans, to the political advisor who discovered fan ownership at Northampton Town, to the minister who broke ranks at a Hillsborough memorial servi...

West Ham are in the Championship, Millwall are back on the fixture list, and the Docker's Derby ended 2-2. Historian and lifelong Hammers fan Max Portman joins the show to ask whether relegation can be liberation, just as it was for 1860 Munich. He argues the club spent forty years chasing commercial success while the East End that produced it dispersed into Essex. What remains is the idea of a community strong enough to pull people back on Saturdays. That tension runs through everything we discuss: a relegation that feels oddly like relief now that David Sullivan is gone, a...

What happens when a club loses its right to compete — not through relegation on the pitch, but through a financial trapdoor built by the very man who was supposed to save it?

This summer, 1860 Munich missed a license deadline a few million Euros - and was dropped a division not for how they played, but for how they were run. Fans have long argued that 1860 needs to be liberated from investor Hasan Ismaik. They finally got their wish - via bankruptcy and forced relegation. While the Ismaik- controlled entity is dead, the club underneath isn't. It's, in fa...

... or: an Economist and a Tactics Nerd on what the last 6 weeks tell us about where the game is going. A spontaneous and incomplete post-final reaction.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

The recent CNN piece with me on why a draw "sometimes feels like a win"

Hörfehler Podcast, me on soccer in the U.S.

Florian Ederer, X

Dhruv Kapoor, X

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The traditional The Assistant Professor of Football season round-up is back. I asked guests from this past year, and some from previous years whose clubs had remarkable seasons of one sort or the other how their clubs have fared, what moment stands out, and what song best embodies their club's vibe this past season. They are:

Medea Voegeli, professional historian and historian of FC Thun, from episode 76. Thun are the utterly sensational champions of Switzerland this year — after just having been promoted — so Medea has a lot of good vibes to share.

Then Paul Reidy, our...

If you're old enough — what do you remember about the 1994 World Cup?

And if you're not, try to picture it. Soccer in the United States before MLS existed. Matches inside the Pontiac Silverdome, a domed football stadium in Michigan — humid, bizarre, and somehow full. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Record attendances that still haven't been broken. A tournament that, by most outside, European or Latin American accounts, had no business working as well as it did.

The standard story is that 1994 planted soccer in America. FIFA arrived, the world showed up, and a nation discovered the...

Phil Harrison, a former Visiting Professor on soccer in Albania before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and me are giving our take on the song contest in Vienna this past Saturday. A very helpful visual breakdown of all points - jury and public - is HERE.

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Please leave a quick voicemail with any feedback, corrections, suggestions - or just greetings - HERE. Or comment via Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. 

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Eurovision has many things that soccer does - underdogs, spectacular collapses, bloc loyalties, political scores settled through performance, and a continent watching the same spectacle at the same time. And this year, the Eurovision Song Contest, a live-for-TV music contest with continent-wide public voting, is happening in Vienna, this coming weekend. Why there? Austria won it last year.

Here is a primer of, a short debate about, and a quiz about the Song Contest. And an outlook on how this year will go down. Plus many short clips of musical Eurovision highlights that came up in our...

Eurovision has many things that soccer does - underdogs, spectacular collapses, bloc loyalties, political scores settled through performance, and a continent watching the same spectacle at the same time. And this year, the Eurovision Song Contest, a live-for-TV music contest with continent-wide public voting, is happening in Vienna, this coming weekend. Why there? Austria won it last year.

Here is a primer of, a short debate about, and a quiz about the Song Contest. And an outlook on how this year will go down. Plus many short clips of musical Eurovision highlights that came up in our...

Thun. Population 44,000. Located in the Swiss Bernese Oberland, where the river Aare meets a lake, with the Alps as a backdrop. Switzerland's biggest military town. Not exactly a place you’d expect to find yourself talking about Champions League football next season.

And yet. FC Thun — a club that just got promoted from the second division — is on the verge of becoming Swiss champions in their very first year back in the top flight. It is, on its face, one of the great Cinderella stories in European football right now. But as anyone who has spent time with a...

Today's assistant professor has spent his career studying the forces that threaten liberal democracy — the far right, populism, nationalist movements that have reshaped politics from Hungary to the United States. He's one of the most cited political scientists working on those questions, based at the University of Georgia, originally from the Netherlands, and the kind of scholar who combines rigorous theory with an unusually grounded sense of how politics actually lives in people's lives.

But today we're not talking about Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orbán. We're talking about soccer.

Cas Mudde has been a l...

Bodø/Glimt, the team from the town of Bodø north of the polar circle, counting around 45,000 inhabitants, made it to the round of 16 in the UEFA Champions League this season. After beating Atletico Madrid, Manchester City and Inter Milan, they got eliminated by Sporting, from Lisbon two weeks ago. All that comes on the heels of some previous runs in the Conference and Europa League. What’s even more remarkable however: this  isn’t  the Cindarella story with a rich sugardaddy in the background. It’s a longer story that speaks to regional tensions in modern Norway, a close knit commu...

The day after he arrived back from his clubs last Champions League game this year, a loss at Sporting in Lisbon, Freddy Toresen, the local football journalist from Bodø, gives us a long view of the club and its identity. This is just the first part of our conversation, a reaction to this year's Champions League fairytale that included wins over Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Atletico Madrid. Watch for the long rest of our conversation on how this fairytale came about on March 30th, as usual.

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What do Tottenham Hotspur, Ajax Amsterdam, Bayern Munich and Austria Vienna have in common? They all, for better, or for worse, have come to be seen as “Jew Clubs” throughout their history. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes the club embraced it, often it didn’t. "Jew Clubs" - not Jewish clubs, not founded as a Jewish sports society or anything like that. But clubs that have become a canvas for the performance of Jewishness, of antisemitism and also of philosemitism. What does that say about these clubs is one question. What does it say about Europe’s broader cultural and poli...

Every time one of the big clubs show up on this humble podcast, the audience is a little larger - and maybe I should do more on the likes of Bayern or Liverpool. But I always shirk back a bit. Too mainstream, I think. And if you like Liverpool, wouldn't you have found another, more professional media outlet already? If that is you, I think you need to buy this book. And, first, hear about it: Alan McDougall has written what the subtitle says is a peoples’ history of Liverpool F.C. I would say it’s a global peop...

The phrase "go west!" was not coined by the Village People or the Pet Shop Boys, but by Horace Greeley, a famous newspaper editor a long time ago. And seen from Europe, all of the United States is West. So that’s what Luca Puster tells his young European clients who just finish High School and are considering college: Go west young man, and grow up playing football. Or soccer. How do they find American colleges? What makes them come here, what is attractive about this step in their football and study careers? How do they find the game he...

This story is a journey to one of the original sins of commercialization in modern global football - the 2005 takeover of Austria Salzburg, a former Austrian champion, UEFA cup finalist and Champions League participant by a well known energy drink company that is now active in soccer around the globe, and its subsequent attempt to erase 72 years of footballing history.

But more importantly, it’s a journey to soccer’s original grace as well: community, persistence, humility, euphoria, belonging - the resurrection of Austria Salzburg in its original colors, purple and white, by fans and the return of t...

Welcome to the 3rd Advent/Christmas/Holiday episode this year. It’s a read of a children book again, and that book involves a time-traveling boy and his dog. They time travel, through goalposts, to the first organized football match under Football Association rules, in 1863, between Barnes and Richmond. The game was played at Barnes commons, in West London, across the river from Fulham’s FCs stadium, the Craven Cottage. And the boy and his dog (Kane is his name, no relation to Harry) mess up football history while there. Or, almost.

The book is by Adrian Lobl...

Thomas Melchior placed his first soccer bet in 2005. He was addicted to gambling for 13 years, and imprisoned for the crimes he committed in his addiction. Now, he stands in front of stadiums on gamedays around Europe to raise awareness for the problem that is gambling in football – and he’s using some controversial tactics. 

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

Thomas Melchior on Instagram

Fox Sports, "From prison to social media star: How one man is taking on sports betting at German soccer games" (September 2025)

Deutsche Welle, "Gambling in Germa...

In the US, the big soccer boom is always supposedly around the corner. The most recent example: right now, in the lead-up to next year's World Cup. But that waiting until the beautiful game is the "number 1 sport in the U.S."  clouds our view of the game’s history in this country. Today, it's that history, in its own right, that we focus on. Brian Bunk focusses on it, especially, in his new book Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States. Brian is a Historian at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, and has already wri...

This is PART 2 of a two-part episode. The 1st part aired two weeks ago, and is the most recent on on the Assistant Professor of Football. Please add a like, a comment, a star rating or spread the word by mouth!

I was a little starstruck when David Goldblatt showed up on my screen today. His books have done very well for very good reason. You may have read The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football or The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.

David is a sociologist...

I was a little starstruck when David Goldblatt showed up on my screen today. His books have done very well for very good reason. You may have read The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football or The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.

David is a sociologist, has a part time academic home in the US as well, at Pitzer college in LA, and this one, Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency, is a book for the moment. The thesis is simple: a lot of the spaces for...

It's a fall of unrest in East London again. Hammers United, the largest organized fan group at West Ham United, has so far refrained from calling on members of the board or the CEO to resign. Until now. They have launched the campaign "No More BS," targetted specifically at CEO Karen Brady, the B, and chairman David Sullivan, the S. Beyond leafleting, black balloons or protest marches before games, Hammers United are for the first time calling for a match boycott, at West Ham’s next home game, against Brentford on Monday 20th. British media has piled on, with an...

Before the Conference League anthem came on in Celje Slovenia, one warm August night this year, today’s guest had a lot of work behind him already while I was was on my way via train, uber and rental car from Bosnia. He is Rok Gregoric, press and pr wizard of NK Celje, a Slovenian club that was long a middling in the league of an already small country but has made it to the group phase of the conference league last year and again this year. A remarkable feat for a really pretty quiet city between the two ma...

This is Part 2 of an unusual episode, on the move through countries, memories, wounds, war, peace and the beautiful game.

Sturm Graz is and was a workers club when I came to the club in the 90s, one year before Ivica Osim arrived. We knew he was a mathematician, soccer player and coach, and he knew workers clubs, from Željezničar, in Grbavica, back home in Sarajevo, the city then under a yearlong siege in the Bosnian independence wars. But he added something else. To him, the game was discourse, it was beauty. He explained soccer to us...

Sturm Graz is and was a workers club when I came to the club in the 90s, one year before Ivica Osim arrived. We knew he was a mathematician, soccer player and coach, and he knew workers clubs, from Željezničar, in Grbavica, back home in Sarajevo, the city then under a yearlong siege in the Bosnian independence wars. But he added something else. To him, the game was discourse, it was beauty. He explained soccer to us in a way we’d never seen it. Professorial and sometimes grumpy, but always extremely humble. He made us see things in f...

Damiano Benzoni, Italian journalist and seasoned groundhopper, has written a wonderful book - an "emotive map of football in Berlin," a rich portrait of a city through the eyes of football. And when that city happens to be the German capital, torn by wars, shaped by the dvide between two Germanies and various migrant influences, the texture of such a book happens to be particularly interesting. The book, for now, is available only in Italien, so consider this an English language exclusive.

We also get an update on SC Freiburg's last season. And just to scare the...

Daniel and Romina are dear, longtime listeners of the podcast. Back in April, I sat down with them at their kitchen table in Stockholm to work out the story behind the many images that circulated online last season: a stunningly large mob of active supporters in fine voice home and away, tifo and all. This wasn't just one big game in a big stadium for the sake of a record. This was organic, homegrown, ultra-themed. At most European away games, the Bajen supporters outnumbered home fans. What gives, and why there, in Stockholm?

So what you are...

With Ana Ascencao e Silva, Eva Lotta Bohle, Andy Payne, Alex Kirby, Paul Reidy, Wayne Gamble, Christopher Hylland - on their club's or cause's season, what happened since we talked, and what the outlook is like at the moment. Plus, each guest picked one song - well, except Eva Lotta, who picked two.

Union St. Gill, Arminia Bielefeld, West Ham, Rayo Vallecano, Leeds United, Argentina

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Fort Wayne is a city of around 260,00 in the very east of the northern half of Indiana. Like many mid-sized midwestern cities, it has been shaped by the industrialization of the late 19th century,  immigration waves from Western, Central and Southeastern Europe until the 1920s and from the rest of the world today,  deindustrialization after World War 2, the decline of urban America as well as revitalization more recently. 

It also has a soccer club, founded by German immigrants for the “Promotion of Soccer Football and German Culture” in 1927. And unlike many other semi-professional or pre-professional teams, Fort Wayne S...

Gabriel Kuhn is an Austrian writer and researcher who works for the Central Organization of Swedish Workers - and sat for an in-person interview (he has been on before when we talked about his wonderful book Soccer vs the State in 2023.) In this episode, we time travel to "red Vienna"  in the 1920s, to talk about how antifascism, organized workers' sports, the professionalization of soccer and sobriety intersected then, and what promise they can hold for the present. Our baseline is the life of Viennese Social Democratic leader Julius Deutsch, an edited collection of whose writings Gabriel has published w...

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...