Was Real Madrid paralysed during the Spanish Civil War? Was Santiago Bernabéu an ally of the former dictator Francisco Franco? Was Real Madrid the regime’s club? Has FC St. Pauli always been a symbol of resistance against fascism?
Football in Europe is, without a doubt, more than just a game; it’s a cultural force and a collective identity. Stadiums, once primarily for local fans, are now major tourist attractions. However, a deeper, less visible battle is happening: how clubs present or suppress their difficult pasts.
A new documentary
Football fans and scholars can now watch The Match That Not Every Club Wants to Play on the Football Studies YouTube Channel. It is a documentary that explores how European football clubs promote or suppress their difficult heritages at their stadium tours and museums and why and how political, commercial, and tourism interests influence them to shape the stories they choose to tell or hide on their football grounds. In a world where football is often reduced to entertainment, the documentary reminds us that football holds a mirror to society, reflecting deeper truths about culture, politics, and collective memory.
From a Doctoral Dissertation to a Research Documentary
The film, whose production took three years, is an intentional product of the doctoral dissertation “Exploring the Interpretation of Difficult Heritage at Football Grounds in Spain, Portugal, and Germany Football”, written from 2021 to 2023 at Clemson University (USA). The aim of the film was to innovate in the academic environment, challenging traditional modes of scholarly communication, and engage in new ways to open academia to wider audiences. In current times, where technology and social media directly influence our knowledge about the world, academic filmmaking seems the most appropriate vehicle to showcase the dissertation findings. As this documentary shows, this method is particularly effective when addressing topics with broad popular appeal, such as football, which can serve as a powerful vehicle for bridging the gap between academic circles and the public and facilitate conversations around societal issues deemed difficult, controversial and/or dissonant.
Real Madrid v. St. Pauli
The documentary entailed the development of case studies examining the experiences of two European football clubs that differed significantly in terms of sporting success, global popularity, and tourism structure and growth. Equally remarkable, these football clubs have been immersed into societies with distinct social, cultural, political, and temporal contexts and evolutionary stages regarding revisiting the past and dealing with difficult heritages. Showcasing months of fieldwork and interviews with historians, political scientists, renowned sports journalists, museum directors, and local fans, the film takes viewers to Spain and Germany, focusing on iconic clubs like Real Madrid and FC St. Pauli.
Dealing with the Past
The first part examines Real Madrid and its Tour Bernabéu, revealing the club’s deliberate suppression of most of its experiences and key figures during the Spanish Civil War, a period still considered sensitive within Spanish society. For instance, the Tour Bernabéu chooses to remain silent about Colonel Ortega Gutierrez, the club’s only communist president in its history. Viewers can learn why Real Madrid adopts such an approach towards this specific past. The second part of the documentary takes the audience to FC St. Pauli, renowned worldwide as an anti-fascist club, showcasing the fans’ bottom-up political organisation to confront the club’s difficult heritage linked to the Nazi regime, which mirrors German society post-reunification’s consensus that confrontations with the past are essential in any democratic political milieu.
The documentary findings have shown how these two famous European football grounds reflect deeply socially ingrained cultural values, political ideologies, group identities, legacies of dominance and opposition, conformity and resistance, oblivion and remembrance, and victimisation and responsibility. In addition, the distinct approaches to dealing with difficult heritage among these two clubs, beyond evidencing disputes around heritage ownership, interpretation, and meanings, show how heritage and tourism are never neutral and can simultaneously promote historical accuracy and awareness and spaces of remembrance and dialogue but also reveal selective and inaccurate versions of specific pasts, promote uncritical views, and intentional oblivion.
As one of its most powerful conclusions, the film considers the existence of a direct relationship between the social, cultural, political, and temporal structure changes experienced by societies in dealing with difficult heritage and how these European football clubs interpret their experiences under authoritarian regimes at their stadium tours and museums.
An Educational Tool for Research and Critical Discussion
Football embraces a diverse history and heritage, providing invaluable insights for understanding the society in which we live. Football-based heritage, in this perspective, either through its objects, rituals, traditions, and sites, becomes a window to observe how football clubs interact with and are affected by societal transformations, distinct political regimes, and cultural norms, including their different ways of dealing with difficult pasts. The process of representing the past at football stadium tours and museums is often a result of intentionality, in which clubs select or omit, remember and forget, motivated by contemporary interests rather than by the realities of the past.
Academic courses on the history of football, political science, sport management, and heritage and tourism management can incorporate this documentary to illustrate real-world examples of how political regimes influence football clubs and, most importantly, how football clubs reacted to authoritarian regimes after they were over and why and how clubs decide to engage or not with past experiences under dictatorships. In addition, museum studies students and professionals will find valuable insights into how football clubs design their exhibitions to emphasise specific stories while downplaying others due to political, commercial and tourism interests.
Investigations of morality
The documentary also serves as a valuable starting point for conversations on the relativisation of morality and responsibility towards the past, often present in societies still divided over which groups should be viewed as perpetrators or victims. Furthermore, it makes space to understand how temporal and moral distancing from difficult pasts added to current commercial, political and tourism interests make football clubs avoid re-evaluating and reinterpret their difficult heritages, focusing only on uncritical, celebratory and nostalgic elements of their pasts.
Finally, as a pedagogical tool, it invites professors to use it to instill in students the duty “to make visible what has been invisible” in the histories of their favourite football clubs and to challenge any “apolitical” and exclusively sporting self-portrayed identities and brand images designed by football clubs.
About the film
“The Match That Not Every Club Wants to Play” is available on the “Football Studies” YouTube channel. The documentary, running 36 minutes long, is available in four languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German), making it accessible to a broad international audience.Felipe Bertazzo Tobar (Ph.D., Clemson University) is an Assistant Professor in the Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management Department at Clemson University (USA). His research interests gravitate around football in relationship with fandom, management, tourism, heritage, events, and politics. His research has appeared in the Journal of Sport & Tourism, The International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, The International Journal of Sport and Society, Sport and Society, and Soccer and Society. His first documentary reflects his commitment to using innovative methods to disseminate scholarly work and make academic research more accessible to the public.
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