Heritage as culture, is a very broad term. It includes the language you speak, the songs you sing, the gestures you use, your world-view, your knowledge and utilisation of history, how you make and perceive art, the games you play, the performances and movies you watch, the exhibitions you visit, your house decorations, your family photo albums, and much more.
Football, as a (cultural) domain of its own, formed mainly (but not only) by football fandom, strongly connects to culture. Clubs form communities, and within club communities a wide variety of cultural expressions take shape, and are continuously shaped and reshaped in a dynamic process. Club histories are discussed, exchanged, researched and narrated. Football is culture.
A day in the life of FC Town
Today FC Town is playing a European match against Dynamo Miestas. As soon as it became clear the two teams were to play each other, the heritage group of FC Town got together and brought into memory that the last time these two clubs had an encounter was at a key moment in European history. It was a year after the devastating earthquake in Miestas. At that time, supporters of FC Town had collected relief money and on matchday, it was given to Dynamo’s players as a token of solidarity. That shared past, the heritage group decided, was a good reason to get in touch with the Dynamo Miestas communication team. The result of a couple of weeks of online meetings and planning is that today, on matchday, there is a special stage in the fan zone where the players and supporters who had been involved in the historical match share their memories and reflect on it. Everybody knows, of course, that one hour from now, people in the stadium will be cheering on their teams, waving their own colors, but at this moment, something bigger is present; a shared football heritage, with direct bearing on the values of solidarity and unity.
Forms
At Football Makes History, we recognise Marking Shared Heritage as one of the Key Practices for engaged heritage work. With regard to this practice, we want 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?
In this open article we discuss several examples of Marking Shared Heritage 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: The cultural space of Matchdays
The first form we have found is a complicated one. Matchdays can be festive cultural affairs, being special moments in the daily life of supporters as they can meet each other in various groups and networks of fans. People meet to talk, sing songs, share a meal and a drink. Often groups would have prepared choreographies, special chants, and so on. Matchdays, as it was explained by the club theologian of Eintracht Frankfurt, are events that bear resemblance to religious meetings. The ritual, the collectivity, the projection of the divide onto the pitch and so on. But, matchdays are also all about competition, about territory, about intimidation and dangerous group dynamics which can spiral into hate and violence. Well-known are the street fights, stadium riots and the clear lack of safety – and what this costs society in terms of police and health care efforts.
On a somewhat lighter note, as more money is entering into professional football in some leagues, matchdays are also commercial places. From the scarves and mugs signifying the uniqueness of a particular matchday to the role of sponsorships and promotion of brands, money plays a visible role.
All in all, matchdays can be complex events. It is important to note that for most professional league clubs (who do not take part in the financial dynamism of Europe-level competition), matchdays remain essentially festive gatherings around a football match.
So, what if football matches were not only a spectacle of rivalry, but also a festival of shared passion for the game?
One interesting example is the ‘Waldtribüne’ of Eintracht Frankfurt (Germany). This is a cultural program taking place on a stage set up in front of the Eintracht Frankfurt museum. It takes place on home-days. In the program, there are short interviews held with away supporters or heads of the away club. For Eintracht Frankfurt, it is important to show that competing clubs are not only rivals but also all football lovers. The Eintracht Frankfurt museum opened this stage to show that they are “open for everybody.” With this program, Eintracht Frankfurt is actively contributing to more openness and friendliness in the world of (professional) football. “We are all just supporters”, says museum director Matthias Thoma.
Heracles Almelo (The Netherlands) also opens its museum for fans on game days. Hundreds of fans walk through the museum on every game day, engaging with the enthusiastic volunteers of the museum and enriching their historical knowledge of Heracles instilling a sense of tradition and belonging.
How does your club bring in culture and heritage during matchdays? Are the possibilities for fans to appreciate their ‘commonhood’? If yes, how is it done? If not, do you think it could be done, and how?
Form 2: The marking of history around matches
Any match is about much more than the goals and points to be earned. For many supporters, matchdays are moments of gathering as a community of belonging. As such, these days – like birthdays marking the life of an individual, special days of prayer making a spiritual connection, or national or international days marking historic events or themes – relate strongly to the historical consciousness of supporters and the broader football community.
There is a great variety of forms of how such connections can be marked. A deceased person – important to the club community – may be heralded by song on a particular minute during the game. Players might wear special armbands or jerseys. Supporters might wave special banners, or perform a special choreography with flags to draw attention to a historic event, and so on. Pre-game and half-time moments can be used to introduce special people and tell their story.
Football clubs can take an active role in designing matchdays as commemorative moments. Vitesse (Arnhem, The Netherlands) annually marks the city’s liberation in World War Two by inviting the last still living veterans and their relatives who took part in Operation Market Garden to a special matchday. The commemoration becomes the headline of the event, also during the match through extra programming.
Football clubs themselves, as communities of culture, highlight special songs, artists, visual artworks and so on. Sparta Rotterdam (The Netherlands), for example, both mourned and celebrated together the life of its late famous jazz-poet Jules Deelder through a recital and a special jersey – heralding jazz and nightlife.
Football clubs can also mark particular historical connections related to the match-up of a particular game. Well-known are local or regional derbies and in every league there will be at least one ‘Classico’, which carries with it tensions rooted (or perceived to be rooted) in the past, in the social fabrics, and perhaps in ideological, religious or political differences. The cultural aspects of such matchdays grow from the fertile ground of opposition, but still can provide supporters and communities with possibilities for cultural ‘exposure’ or ‘learning’. For example, supporters of Feyenoord (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), when hosting Sevilla in 2024, hoisted a large banner to remind the Spanish of their defeat in the so-called ‘Eighty Years War’ (when the Dutch Republic got its independence, 1568-1648). Bringing in this historical conflict, which rarely sparks emotive responses, might have been meant to intimidate the opposition, but in fact speaks to a notion of shared history.
Does your football club bring culture and heritage into matchdays? Which moments or references come to mind? Do you think that more could be done to speak to the ‘cultural being’ of football supporters and followers? What would that be, and why?
Engaged Heritage Work on Marking Shared Heritage
Football matches are cultural moments. A lot of good comes from this form of cultural participation in the everyday lives of people. Through their interest in football, a wider world of cultural and historical significance can be made available. The forms discussed above are expressions of club community values. We also see the rise of clubs’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work connecting to the potential of culture and heritage on matchdays. But what happens when cultural intervention is polarising politically? Sometimes football clubs are explicit about their political values, which translates into cultural (shared) actions. On the 7th of October 2024, we saw only football clubs from Austria and Germany express their solidarity with the hostages captured by Hamas. Other clubs have cherished the cause of a ‘Free Palestine’. Most clubs seem to rather avoid the political space. Perhaps because they seek to cater to diversity among their supporters? Perhaps because political profiling brings in commercial risk? It is important when looking at cultural expressions on and around matchdays to also speak about the underlying values.
Another important aspect to note here is gender. Men’s football matches are remarkably different from women’s matches. Evidently, there is a general difference in attendance numbers, but also the cultural expression of fandom differs, whereby women’s matches carry much less tension and conflict with them. As the women’s game keeps developing and growing, it will be interesting to see how supporter culture, and their cultural expressions, might converge or remain distinct.
Finally, bringing historical perspectives into football matches can have a transformative effect on social relations. When NAC Breda (The Netherlands) recently commemorated the Polish World War II liberators, it also invited the local Polish community, as well as representatives from Poland. It seems that this helped to normalise how Poles are viewed in the city. At this instance, not as ‘migrant workers who came to take local jobs’, but as fellow citizens, fellow Europeans, and so on. Much more, however, can be done by clubs to explicitly highlight diversity and inclusion through their cultural programming with reference to their heritage.
What makes Marking Shared Heritage a key practice?
Let’s go back to FC Town, and its matchday activity. It took quite some effort to get the shared cultural programme on track, and essentially it was only possible because of pre-existing ‘normalisation’ of matchdays as safe, ‘family-friendly’ events. This was a cultural and behavioural shift which took place over decades. The supporters of FC Town and Dynamo Miestas got a chance to learn from their peers about a shared past. Some of them got inspired to do further research at home on the topic, others may have subscribed to that one sport history podcast, or have started to follow social media of the other club, and so on. The heritage groups who had prepared this event knew this would not be the last time. It created a new connection. Local media wrote about it, and last but not least – the elderly supporters got a chance to share their stories from the past with each other as well as a younger audience, connecting generations.
FC Town’s activity, like all examples mentioned in this article, is more than just another stage during matchday. When clubs and their communities work on Marking Shared Heritage, they:
- Provide non-formal opportunities for culture and heritage education;
- Foster volunteer and professional relations among heritage enthusiasts in and around football;
- Support value-drive work of their CSR departments;
- Contribute to civic awareness of young people through intergenerational dialogue;
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 cultural 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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