Welcome to FC Town
Imagine a town somewhere in Europe. Quite centrally in this town, one finds a football stadium. Ask anybody in this town, and they will know where it is, and what it is. It is the home of FC Town - a club which has left a social-cultural watermark in the town's history for over 100 years. In Football Makes History, we proudly present a new toolkit with eight key practices of how FC Town (and therefore many of the thousands of clubs across the continent and beyond) engage with the city's inhabitants: and being sport-minded, we see this toolkit as a gameplan!
Discover the local realities through illustration
This toolkit is made available to all interested parties as originally illustrated posters. The aim is that these posters can be hung in football clubs' museums and/or heritage departments and further inspire clubs and their related museums and communities to recognize the added value of their heritage work, and to seek to develop it further.
Find out how FC Town supports history teaching, how it collaborates with museums, how it takes care of its archives and collections to make it accessible and how it enriched it with new voices from the town. And indeed, how it takes an active role in safeguarding the town's memory culture.
Football clubs, supporter groups, leagues and federations often do heritage work, but rarely do they acknowledge it as such. After all, football is about playing football.
But as many people have said before: It is much more than a game.
In search of the no one-size-fits-all all
In the Football Makes History project, Reinwardt Academy was in the lead of the practice-based research to better understand how this heritage work in and around football clubs takes place. This was done in a collaboration between the Cultural Heritage Research Group and the MA Applied Museum and Heritage Studies.
In particular, we wanted to know wherein resides the potential of football heritage work to act as a catalyst for enhancing education, fostering social cohesion and deploying the various added values of cultural engagement. To that end, supported by the Erasmus+ project “Football Makes History: Schools and Football Club Museums. Unlocking Local Heritage education”(2022-2025), as well as the SIA project “Creatief Talent Werkt” (2024), students, lecturers and researchers of Reinwardt Academy, conducted interviews with approximately 30 football heritage stakeholders in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in the context of a needs analysis, organised a hackathon and a professional placement together with the Eintracht Frankfurt Museum, organised two networking meetings with professionals and volunteers working with football heritage, went on several fact finding (club museum) visits, and developed a programme in the context of the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE) FARO Programme. Fare Network supported this process through several interviews with football clubs and communities in their network.
All findings and observations have been subjected to several rounds of co-creation with partners in the FMH network, including workshops during project events, as well as open inquiries through the platform's communication channels. The findings of these co-creation sessions are reflected in the game plan articles on the key practices. It is also important to note: the digital form chosen for the articles allowed ongoing editing and improvement of these articles. Put differently: We want your inputs!
Explore our 8 key practices
In our gameplan, we explore key practices based on actual experiences and results from the field. They are represented on the power through situations that may occur in the fictional FC Town. For each key practice we put forward central questions and identified two or more forms, and provided inspirational examples. We also noted challenges for implementation in each practice.
On education we wanted to know: How can football clubs bring their history and community into educational spaces placing it in broader contexts? On which themes can school educators work in a way that supports football clubs’ core values and educational ambitions while addressing curricular requirements in an accessible way? and we identified two forms in which this can take place:
On collecting we want to know: How can Football Clubs collaborate with the communities of fans surrounding them to improve the quality of their heritage work and service their past, current and future fans? and we identified two forms in which this can take place:
One essential precondition for both these forms is the club’s capacity to organise its collection.
On exhibitions we want to know: How are football-focussed exhibitions organised? What added value do they create for both football club and museums or other heritage institutions (such as city archives or libraries)? and we identified the following forms:
On outreach: we wanted to know: How can football clubs make heritage communication and interaction part of their online content and outreach work? What kind of actions can leverage the communities’ interest in learning about the club to foster a wider club culture and fanbase? How can this promote wider historical awareness? and we identified three forms:
On remembrance we wanted to know: How does this football remembrance connect with societal values, such as solidarity, democracy, justice, peace and so on. Which forms of Football Remembrance contribute to the community’s sense of these values? and we identified four forms:
On the marking of shared heritage, we wanted to know: What are the opportunities football clubs have, to ‘mark shared heritage’ with their own supporters, local communities and beyond? How can the unifying potential of this massively followed sport be a leverage for effective social change? Can football be a place for exchange across all sorts of divides? and we identified two forms:
On club museums and tours we wanted to know: what can football clubs do to ensure their museum is engaging a broader public and/or connecting to the supporters in ways which convey the town’s and club’s societal values? and we identified two forms:
On strategic partnerships we wanted to know: How can football clubs set up meaningful partnerships with the cultural (heritage) sector? What are the mutual benefits of such collaborations? and we identified three forms:
We hope that exploring these eight key practices with all their forms and examples will inspire you. If you are a football supporter, researcher, professional, we challenge you to take a look at the club you support, and find out if you recognise if this club is active in any of these spaces! If it is, we would love to add your examples to our growing articles! Please use the contact form to share with us your examples, and we will work to add them.
Get a copy for your school or football clubs today!
The poster is available here for free from this website in low resolution. Would you like to order a printed copy (A1 or A0) or simply receive the high-resolution digital copy, please use our contact form to send us your information and how many copies (if any) you would like. Of course, later on, we would like to know where you will put our inspirational poster!
A reflection on football and heritage
Many municipalities across Europe have one or more professional football clubs, which have often played a crucial role in connecting different population groups for more than 100 years: rich and poor, young and old, and both locals and newcomers.
Despite this history and social pivotal role, the heritage of these clubs is hardly included in formal heritage policy at national, provincial, and municipal level.
The clubs are important partners in various other government areas, such as health, youth, and safety. The football clubs themselves operate mainly as commercial parties, with very limited cultural activities.
In line with the Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, football supporters and their clubs can be considered heritage communities, but are rarely recognized as such by social and cultural parties, nor by policy makers within the clubs. Most work in the field of football heritage is carried out by volunteers, often outside the business structures of the club. This work varies from registering collections, setting up exhibitions, digitizing archives, to receiving students, reminiscing with the elderly, and organizing anniversaries. For this type of activities, there are various programs, frameworks, coaches, training courses, and internship programs available in the heritage sector. However, football clubs often do not know how to find these sources, and the heritage sector seems to have a blind spot for (professional) sports.
Herein lies an important challenge to better connect the world of heritage and football. In the coming years, our platform expects to continue to work on these aspects, and we are open for partners in the field of football, research, heritage and education!
Don’t be a stranger
We hope you will find these stories of educational practice inspiring. Are you planning to adapt one of these approaches to your own classroom – or by doing a project of your own? Let us know, and we will gladly welcome you to our informal, international network and related communication channels.
Reinwardt students hackathon at Eintracht Frankfurt Museum (photo: J. Even-Zohar).
Football club NAC Breda engages on the form ‘tour’ (photo: B. Verseput).
Football club l’Aquila reflects on the eight practices (photo: V. Mancini).
Football stakeholders network meeting February 2024 (photo: Reinwardt Academy).
FC Town early sketch (photo Els Thijsse).Reinwardt students hackathon at Eintracht Frankfurt Museum (photo: J. Even-Zohar).Football club NAC Breda engages on the form ‘tour’ (photo: B. Verseput).Football club l’Aquila reflects on the eight practices (photo: V. Mancini).Football stakeholders network meeting February 2024 (photo: Reinwardt Academy).FC Town early sketch (photo Els Thijsse).
