Football games are interesting events. These events require organisation and planning and involve many people – players, spectators, organisers etc. For all involved, these events leave behind traces:
Material objects could be matchday booklets, shirts, and a wide range of merchandise produced specifically to mark an event. They could also be items relating more to a wide range of personal experiences for fans; public transport tickets, notebooks or pens.
The world of football fandom, moreover, contributes to the further ‘sanctification’ of objects relating to football players, or to specific matches. That one bloodied sock of the keeper who saved that one penalty…
Such objects cannot be separated from the values, emotions and stories which people relate to them. One person’s trash is another person’s ‘holy grail’. Collecting is an act of value attribution, and value attribution is culturally nested act – in time, place and actor.
To what extent are Football clubs collectors? Most would have their trophies collected in one place. Some would have something between an archive and a storage facility for all sorts of paper-based items. But more and more football clubs are taking their agency in collecting more seriously; in which one needs to think: what do we want to collect? why? for who? And how should this happen? Who should be involved? and so on.
One particular dimension here is the role that (obsessive, sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive) football fandom plays in the act of collecting. Think of the children collecting autographs, or the adults elbow-wrestling to obtain a jersey after a match, to get a copy of this or that rare item.
Yet, the Football Club and the Football Community can also be seen as one and the same effort to collect and preserve objects and stories, to present and discuss their values, or even to celebrate or mourn related change of time. In other words: Collecting Together is more than the sum of its parts. It generates social value.
A day in the life of FC Town
Today we are in the meeting room of FC Town. The club, together with a supporters group and some enthusiastic volunteers, organised a special series of afternoon meetings to gather various stories related to some objects it had in storage. For the club, this is part of a new effort to sort out the (honestly somewhat messy) storage room and also set the course for its forthcoming anniversary exhibition coming soon in the local city museum. In this particular meeting, several objects related to the controversial championship of sixty years ago were discussed. One volunteer even tracked down several newspaper clippings from that year. The group shared various stories of their own related to those events, or what they had later heard about them. The figure of the player with the raised arm brought one participant to tears as he shared the story of his family living through that difficult period.
Forms
At Football Makes History, we recognise Collecting Together as one of the Key Practices for engaged heritage work. With regard to this practice, 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?
In our initial investigation into this question, we recognise two forms. One is about how collecting enables storytelling and the other is about the power of such collections to serve novel social practices and programmes.
One essential precondition for both these forms is the club’s capacity to organise its collection.
In this open article, we discuss several examples of Collecting Together by football clubs. We hope these may inspire other football club communities to reflect upon their practices and/or to try out new actions; and we are open to add your reflections and/or suggestions to this article as well!
Form 1: Collections for storytelling
Football clubs may consider collecting and archiving as an important instrument to enable storytelling, supporting and sustaining fan engagement. For example, making sure that ‘that one shirt of that one player’ is in the clubs collection, helps the club to showcase the related feelings of victory or achievement.
Ajax (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for example has set up its very own heritage department. Over the last couple of years, it has worked to create a systematic approach on how to make its collection available to the supporters and public. For this, it collaborated with specialists in the field, including hosting traineeships for students of Reinwardt Academy – tasking them with the set-up of a professional collection registration plan. One particular effort has led to the hosting of an online archive. Moreover, in partnership with crowdsourcing platform Vele Handen, the Ajax Heritage department was also able to mobilise 289 individuals to volunteer their time to index and annotate Ajax’s photography collection of over 88.000 images!
Eintracht Frankfurt (Germany) also directly involved its supporters, volunteers, as well as heritage/archiving professionals in the set-up of its collection work. In an article from 2021, the club’s museum director Matthias Thoma reflected:
The Eintracht Frankfurt fans also played a crucial role in the club archive’s founding at the end of the 1990s. This provides the basis needed for research and remembrance. At first, the archive collected photos and club newspapers, and later also records, correspondences, flags, trophies, and all other kinds of club memorabilia. In 2004, the archive and the supporting fan and sponsor division of the museum instigated the campaign “A Champion Cup for Frankfurt.” Fans and club members were requested to donate at least 50 euros for the purchase of a replica of the champion cup from 1959. The large number of donors made it possible to return the champion cup and to hand it over in a symbolic way to the former players, commemorating the 45th anniversary of the victory. Over the following years, certain other symbolic callbacks of important objects took place, including replicas of the DFB Cup and the UEFA Cup, which were financed by donations. In 2010, the archive set up a systematic catalog with the help of the Archives School Marburg. The written collection was divided into seven inventories: (1) Club administration and committees; (2) press articles; (3) material-related collection; (4) personal collection; (5) printed collection, such as club newspapers; (6) posters; and (7) maps and plans (Thoma 2013). In 2018, the archive started to digitalize the inventories. By spring 2019, numbers 1 and 5 in the list above had been digitized.
Does your club have an online archive? Have fans and other volunteers been involved in creating the collection? What do you think should be the next step for the club to make its collection better available?
Form 2: Collecting with social value
Football clubs can also harness the social value of collecting by setting up activities which benefit from the collection as well as from the very form of collecting together.
An important programme in this context is Football Memories. Originally initiated in Scotland, the caring approach whereby elderly supporters come together around objects from the club’s collection not only to reminisce and share stories but to support their neural memory functions, keeps taking the European football landscape by storm.
In The Netherlands, the methodology has been validated as an effective social intervention, and integrated into the overall work of the National Alzheimer Foundation. Each club adopts the approach, and some give it their own twist. N.E.C. (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), for example, collaborates with local heritage centre Huis van de Nijmeegse Geschiedenis to also invite an Artist in Residence to capture and collect the stories and affections shared by the participants. In many cases, the objects brought into these sessions stem from the club’s collection.
Assembling a collection does not only need to happen within the walls of the club or the club’s museum but can also have a social purpose whereby the act of collecting does result in a formed and kept collection. Fortuna Sittard (The Netherlands) in 2024 put up an initiative to collect old sportswear to distribute it to children in need.
Sometimes objects from the collection directly lead to the collection of stories. When the old stadium flood light lamp bulbs of Feyenoord (Rotterdam, The Netherlands) were retired, the club auctioned them among the fans, and the supporters magazine went on to interview some of the lucky fans. What did acquiring a lamp bulb mean for them? This inspired the Feyenoord Museum to consider new designs whereby visitors could interact with some of these lamp bulbs, establishing a connection between what the lamp bulb might have witnessed, and what visitors to the stadium can recall.
Efforts to collect can also be seen arising from other museums, whereby there is a direct relation to clubs. In Wales, the forthcoming establishment of a Football Museum Wales, is actively seeking to build a collection with and for fans of various Welsh clubs.
Does your football club use its collection in social context? What does it do? If not, are there objects or collections you think could be further used in a social project? What do you think is needed to create this?
Engaged Heritage Work on Collecting Together
Collecting for a community purpose is, however, not free from challenges. At times, objects’ market value can skyrocket, making it more appealing for people to keep it in trade, than to deposit it in a club’s archival collection. Moreover, there are many instances whereby supporters do not trust the club’s management or organisation to properly take care of the objects. In order to collect together, and also facilitate forms of community value attribution to objects, clubs need to develop heritage strategies and invest in their capacities to do so. Non-club actors, such as the Alzheimer’s Foundation, help clubs by delivering a ready-made programme. Often the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) offices of clubs are able to then adopt this programme, but rarely can they rely on a systematically available collection.
What makes Collecting Together a key practice?
Let’s go back to FC Town, and its afternoon session. Bringing together people and objects is a very important action as the club seeks to build positive fan engagement. This one afternoon has helped to annotate several objects with stories and memories shared by the participants. In addition, the participants have deepened their interest in history and society. The club’s archive is eager to continue with more specific, thematic afternoons, and the supporters’ organisation is ready to help host new sessions.
FC Town’s Collection effort, like all examples mentioned in this article, is more than nostalgia and obsessive fandom. When clubs and their communities work on their collection, they:
- Foster a sense of belonging and community among all participants;
- Can better service storytelling (e.g. marketing campaigns, anniversary books or documentaries) in a way that enriches the club’s own collection;
- Actively build intergenerational understanding;
- Ensure their collections can remain relevant and useful in the future;
- Can attach personal stories and perspectives to objects, and better understand their core values;
- Cherish multivocality in heritage work by having different perspectives and stories on single objects;
- Strengthen the connection between supporters and club;
What are your examples?
Our initial examples are based on a limited series of conversations conducted in the context of the Erasmus+ Project Football Makes History: Schools and football club museums unlocking local heritage education – mainly with Dutch and German partners. We hope to continue to collect more examples! Please use the contact form to share with us your example of socially engaged remembrance work at your football club, and we will work to add it to this very article.
Support available
Did you find the examples inspiring, and are you curious about what you could do to organise new meaningful collection activities at your club? Get in touch through the contact form. We look forward to hearing all about your initiative and providing hands-on advice, references and more.
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