The Football Club Heritage Outreach

Football clubs can strengthen their community engagement and societal impact through heritage-based outreach.

The Football Club Heritage Outreach

There is no shortage of football media in the world: The evening television talk shows, the live radio broadcasts, the non-fiction best-sellers, the documentaries, the podcasts, the countless social media content makers, the magazines, and so on. But the majority of these deal with football for the sake of the sport itself. A relatively small portion of these deal with the societal context in which football resides and which football actively shapes. Football clubs and the communities around them actively contribute to the football media spaces. These spaces are mainly about current affairs, but more and more attention is paid to the club’s history. Meanwhile, most (professional) clubs’ communication departments keep such content minimal. Heritage outreach can be much more than marketing while strengthening the brand and fanbase in the process.

A day in the life of FC Town

Today FC Town launched its new heritage content online. Three youngsters, one of which is an active club member, are checking it out while hanging out in the town’s central park. The content includes a new section on the club’s official website, but also short videos telling interesting histories of iconic places and objects and a digital archive with testimonials of people who have experienced important moments. Fans are invited to calls to action and share their own thoughts, experiences and emotions.

Forms

At Football Makes History, we recognise outreach as one of the Key Practices for engaged heritage work. With regard to this practice, we want to know: How can football clubs make heritage communication and interaction part of their 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? 

Heritage outreach by football clubs is usually found on a ‘history page’ on their website. If the club has a museum, it might have its own website. More common, however, is for the football club museum to have a strong social media presence. Club supporters may have large social media groups (e.g. Facebook groups, Telegram channels, etc.) where information is exchanged. Clubs may contribute to, but seldom themselves produce historical documentaries. Also physical forms are plentiful, such as the reprinting of old match-day programmes or simply decorating the stadium or club house with historical images or history-inspired artwork.

In this open article we discuss several examples of heritage outreach 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 happy to add your reflections and/or suggestions to this article as well!

Form 1: Active curatorship of online content

Heritage is a living thing, and history is a conversation without an end, given personal perspectives and emotions. This makes heritage outreach a very potent form of engagement. The most visible expressions of this would be the ‘our history’ page on a clubs website and the occasional #onthisday posts a club’s social account might post. These are important but are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of community engagement. At the same time, there is an ocean of (volunteering) online conversations on matters of football heritage.

Leicester City set up a page including an active series with testimonials from former players, highlighted pioneers (players who played a significant role in society to open doors for others), as well as object-based stories. The heritage department of Ajax Amsterdam also runs an active website with dedicated blog posts, related to its online searchable archive.

In the same vein, Manchester United and St Pauli have a dedicated section of their website to club history. These more static approaches, without clear community involvement, offer a set narration of the club’s origins, sporting performance over the decades and short biographies of key players. While this might seem highly appealing to supporters, it does not utilize the engagement potential of heritage outreach.

Football clubs do tend to take their (online) marketing and communication seriously. Often these are large departments where communication professionals seek to leverage a club’s popularity to increase fanbase and brand recognition. If history is referred to, it is usually in the aspirational sense of the word (e.g. “let’s make history”). But sometimes football clubs’ social media managers would actively connect their message to heritage. For example, recently, when Feyenoord played Benfica in the Champions League, it published a post on Instagram featuring a set of objects (stemming from the Feyenoord Museum) related to a historical match the two clubs played against each other decades ago.

What kind of historical online content can you find on the website of your club? How actively is it maintained? Do you recognise curatorial styles? What do you think could be done more?

Form 2: Heritage as a conversation in and around the club

A very important form of heritage outreach is through events, meetings and the offering of spaces for people to share stories, reflect, discuss and collect. In many cases, a desire by club members, management and/or supporters to somehow sustain such spaces led to the creation of football club museums. Currently, such spaces can also be shaped around podcasts or other more journalistic initiatives.

Football clubs employing historians can help ensure that the museum operation can become more sustainable, and the heritage outreach more diverse and effective. Derby County, for example, uses heritage outreach through events and education as a way to take care of the relevance and maintenance of its collection.

More often, football heritage outreach is driven by interested historians, journalists or other researchers who are external to the football club management. In those cases, clubs which have a fixed contact person (e.g. museum director, archivist, heritage coordinator, etc.) can help in the creation of high-quality content (e.g. podcasts, documentaries, books, etc.) as well as help with the dissemination of these products. 

The podcast Belhamel about the life of Ajax player Eddy Hamel, for example, was an initiative by independent researcher Jim McGough, who gives credit to various people of clubs (such as WV-HEDW who helped in the creation of the material.

More creative forms of non-digital engagement also exist in which clubs contribute to heritage outreach. In Rotterdam, local theatre Walhalla helped produce a live talk show among supporters of the three professional clubs in this city about their fan culture and its heritage called Ken je dat niet horen dan (Can’t you tell?). The same theatre also produced a location-based opera in and around Feyenoord’s De Kuip stadium, which includes walking to historical places.

What does your club do in terms of non-digital engagement on heritage? When podcasts and documentaries are produced, is the club management actively involved? If not, why do you think that is, and do you think it should? How could the club support more real-life spaces where people can engage with the club’s cultural heritage and history?

Form 3: Archival research publications

In order to have good curation of online content and/or public conversation, football clubs also endeavour to make their archives accessible to allow further storytelling to happen in a good quality way. This means that historical analysis of archival sources is first performed through research. But how to communicate this in a way that can be then further used?

One interesting example comes from Eintracht Frankfurt who since 2012 published a Yearbook. Each year a new theme is chosen, and thus new opportunities for storytelling and events emerge. In the paper Eintracht Frankfurt fans and the museum director Matthias Thoma explains:

In 2013, this was football players and cars; in 2014, it was international encounters; and in 2015, use of the term Eintracht in literature. The 2016 Yearbook was entitled Black and White and contained articles about the highlights and low points in the club’s history. 

Besides the thematic focus, the yearbook always contains articles about sports history written by professional historians or university students. For example in 2014, the yearbook contained an article about club members who were killed in World War I, and how the club remembered them. A first roll of Honor was published in 1929, yet ten years later in 1939, the Jewish soldiers and club members were no longer listed.

Many clubs, including grassroots non-professional clubs, will recognise the annual cycle of creating yearbooks or the production of almanack or other anniversary histories. 

Does your club publish annual books or booklets related to anniversaties? To what extent are these made with historical source analysis and fresh views into the clubs archives? How do you think such practices at your club can be improved to better serve the needs of community engagement and communication?

Engaged Heritage Outreach

Compared to many other sports, there is a lot of financial traffic in professional football. There is tension between the running of an effective business with its core aim of delivering a high level of sport performance (and winning games) and the cultural value of clubs as heritage communities. This is visible in the discrepancy between the content produced by the club management and the supporters- and stakeholders-made content. 

Heritage professionals and volunteers involved in football have no problem motivating themselves to engage, because often they are supporters themselves. This may lead to the creation of content which ‘self-serves’. If, however, it is seen as a mission to help young people develop historical awareness, support their social development, etc. the club community heritage can be a treasure. 

Events where the club community can gather to exchange stories and discover perspectives on current events in historical perspective, can have a positive effect on young people’s sense of belonging. But clubs need to be brave enough to take risk and enter the heritage arena more actively. Long-form fixed stories about one’s history will not appeal to younger people.

Another aspect which plays into club management’s possible ‘shyness’ to foster spaces for cultural heritage engagement is the fear of dealing with dark pages from the club’s history and/or painful heritage (inspired) practices (e.g. offensive chants).

What makes Heritage Outreach a key practice?

Let’s go back to FC Town, and it’s a novel communication effort. The new website has led to a new steady stream of inquiries from people in the city. Schools want to know more about the educational materials. Citizens are inspired to share that one story about the time grandmother went to a match with her husband but was not allowed to play herself. A local podcast producer has put together a new proposal to create a special series about forgotten women in the clubs history, and FC Town welcomes it on its page and socials. And the young people on the bench in the park? Well, one of them subscribed to the channel. For the rest, we will wait and see… we don’t know what the next notification on their phone might be, but at least the weather is nice.

FC Town’s communication, like all examples mentioned in this article, is more than the hunt for clicks and views. When clubs and their communities work on heritage outreach, they can:

• create a stronger bond between the fans, the management and the team;
• reinforce the internal and external perceived club identity, reinforcing the club brand
• live up to their social (community) values;
• open up a new channel of civic interest in the club, and possibly gain new fans;
• learn to be more comfortable with uncomfortable conversations;
• facilitate more relevant cultural heritage production.

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 what you could do to organise new meaningful remembrance 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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