The Football Club Museum for All

Some of the world’s most visited museums are football club museums. Some of the world’s most followed tours are football tours. Often these refer to the sport highlights of the club, showcasing trophies, or marking key locations in town referring to important players or former stadium sites. Other historical layers can also be conveyed through such museums and tours.

Football’s historical development intersects with 150 years of social, cultural, political, economic and technological history. So many stories can be told which connect football to local, national and global history and locations. Club museums can be excellent hubs to collect and curate such stories – both in a museum building and outside, through tours.

A day in the life of FC Town

Today a group of visitors to FC Town’s club museum are embarking on a city walk. One of the museum’s most knowledgeable volunteers is taking the group on a walk down memory lane. During this tour he connects with his group, and their interest in football, as well as history. The tour is offered by the museum as a short walk which departs and concludes at the museum – creating a tangible relation between the exhibit in the museum and the urban environment. The group right now is taking a closer look at the time when the club emerged as a youth movement, closely related to the town’s university, and how they worked to establish the club as a place for ‘the beautiful game’. The guide does not only explain what happened in the past, but also asks the group – in particular the young people – what does sport mean in their lives now?

Forms

At Football Makes History, we recognise having creative, engaged and open club museums as one of the Key Practices for engaged heritage work. With regard to this practice, we want 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?

There are different forms in which clubs and club communities are addressing this. The central form is having a club museum, which could be run by the club, or by supporters (with the support of the club organisation), and where the driver for the curatorial and presentational work is value-based storytelling, and not (exclusively) commercialisation and/or experience-making. Having a club museum as a central engine for the club’s history, the second form is tours. These can be physical, walking, biking, driving, or even virtual tours, whereby the stories which the museum seeks to tell are packaged and delivered by tour guides or through self-guiding routes.

In this open article, we discuss several examples of museums with active touring offered 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 Football Club Museum

Most people visit their football club museums as part of a guided tour, to be close to the trophies, or on route to the giftshop. But there are also club museums that truly function as a ‘living room’, providing informal meeting spaces, lectures, presentations, educational programmes and more. Places where people spend hours. Focal points for cultural work in/around the club, connecting generations of supporters as well as other members of the public. Being an inclusive and open space, welcoming connections between sport and culture, football club museums connect these two worlds; between corporate (sport) management and cultural standards, such as ICOM codes and guidelines on local social responsibilities.

Of course, there is a high degree of variance. Big clubs handling global brands may seek to cater their museum to an audience of (global) tourists, while grassroots clubs would first consider the museum a type of supporters’ home. And in between these archetypes lie many variations. What connects them across size and scope is the idea that football clubs need a dedicated space for cultural heritage sparking conversation.

Wikipedia lists many different types of football club museums, but this list is far from complete. On the one hand, they can be fan-owned displays of memorabilia with a strong focus on fandom, such as tickets to special matches, jerseys worn by important players and other artefacts which connect to the club’s history. On the other hand, they can be club-owned spaces where visitors can see the trophies, watch clips from the past matches and read into the history of the team. Between and beyond such types lies a whole spectrum. Among the many different types of football club museums, there are interesting and inspiring examples of how using the local connections which clubs have to a city or region can be used to foster local/regional historical awareness and/or belonging to the benefit of club, visitor and society. 

In the exhibition Cruijff y democracia FC Barcelona Museum has integrated the history of Catalunya in the club’s history, including the various political phases it has seen during the club’s existence. 

In similar fashion,the GoalMine museum adjacent to KRC Genk strongly connects the local and regional mining history to the history of the club. In our Toolkit on how schools can collaborate with football club museums, we spoke with GoalMine coordinator Jon Hoste. He explained this focus on the mining history: “When building the museum’s collection, we had to start from scratch. All the shirts, scarves and banners were thrown out during the fusion of THOR Waterschei and FC Winterslag. That meant we had to find another angle and show different material. The mining history was an obvious choice, since there are so many parallels. Did you know that the workers wore the same shin protection in the mines as they did on the field? We display a pair of those at GoalMine, as well as old leather footballs and shoes with actual spikes. We also show testimonies of former players telling about the hardships in the mines. The mining focus makes GoalMine relevant for tourism and education, which means we could start the project with funding from the provincial government.”

Borussia Dortmund’s museum – the Borosseum – stands out as a museum. It is centred on fans and fan culture. It even includes a mock stand where visitors can do karaoke with club songs. Showing club silverware is deemed less important. In the final exhibition room, they only show one example of each trophy in club history. This is noticeable across many German football club museums.

St. Pauli’s museum forms an important vehicle for the organisation of fan projects around history and civic values, and it is also interesting to notice that this museum is aware of the standards of international museum work, set by ICOM. Some twenty Reinwardt Academy BA Cultural Heritage students recently visited the St. Pauli Museum. They reported: The main exhibition shows stories of former players and the known history of the club but it’s mainly coloured in by the fans that run this museum. It tells the history of the relation to the squatting movement and how that ideology blended into the culture of the main group of fans. The museum gives you enough general football history but it also makes you feel the identity of a St. Paulian which is essentially one of the hardest things to capture in a classical museum setting. Clubs considered grander in the sense of trophies often fail to capture what it feels like to be a fan of a club in their museum. This again comes down to the way the museum operates.

The Eintracht Frankfurt Museum has a strong focus on education and bringing together people around learning. It was founded in 2007, out of a movement of fans. In an interview, Frauke Koenig, at the time museum employee, told Football Makes History junior researcher Bente Verseput: “Supporters wanted a room to meet, for events, but also a room for the big cups the club has won and to see the history of the club. In 2005 our stadium was rebuilt, due to the upcoming world cup in Germany. In the stadium, there were now places where a museum could be organised. There wasn’t such a place before. We got about 400 m2 for the museum to be built in. Not too big, but it was possible to create an exhibition with the cups and the history of the club in there. This was made possible by the supporters, who wanted this museum and talked to the heads of the club multiple times.”

River Plate museum, was visited by Football Makes History contributor Augstin de Julio, who in his review also noted the multifaceted aspects of this museum, going well beyond being merely a space for trophies.

In such examples, it becomes evident that football club museums can be social spaces. Going further than the more ‘traditional’ museums, which might base themselves in their collection and its appeal to a public, such football club museums have a natural appeal to those who identify with the club identity and values.

There are many football club museums in the world, and we would love to build up this collection more! Which one’s have you visited? How was it? Do you think it was more fan-owned or more club-oriented? Was it story based or object centred? Did it feel like a museum, or like an ‘experience’? Why? 

Does your club have its own museum? Does it present its history in the context of local and/or regional developments? If not, how do you think it could do so?

Form 2: The Football Tours

When planning to visit a football club, the first thing which comes to mind is a visit to the stadium, the stands. As Marijke Edel of the Feyenoord Museum put it: “The stadium as museum.” Just like any tour, it is composed of several stops where particular stories might be addressed. But football connects to more than ‘just’ the stadium, and in many places, there are tours on offer which connect the clubs, and stadium as well, to the town.

Football clubs offering stadium tours sometimes have completely scripted tours with pre-set stops and stories. But sometimes, like Manchester City, they can ensure the guides carry with them their own knowledge and experiences and have the freedom to bring in these human stories and cater them directly to the people in their group. When the tour guide is a person who has lived experience, and the freedom/capacity to bring in stories, the quality of the exchange and conversation on history become more relevant.

Football clubs can also contribute to tours in town, where the urban development, and social-cultural history of the people can be connected with the history of the football club. Famous city tours which do this well include Liverpool’s Anfield city tour, Celtic city walking tours, or Wrexham’s Football Heritage Tour, and are large tourist favorites.

Supporters themselves, as well as other stakeholders, may also develop tours which connect the club to the town’s history. Touring apps, such as Izi Travel, and city marketing agencies will include many examples of this, but more personalised examples (such as a walking/cycling tour of the town which draws out the club logo (link) or tours with special thematics, such as graffiti. With such examples of other stakeholders packaging the tours, it is important to see: how might the football club and its heritage work benefit along with the wider community? 

Have you taken part in a football tour? Where was this? How did this tour connect history and football? Did it connect with the club museum, if so: how was this organised? Does your club offer a tour? If not, how might you see this in terms of design and, which stops would the tour look at?

Engaged Heritage Work in Museums and Tours

Some football clubs have become global brands, and in the context of tourism, will appeal to many tourists. This impacts their museum and touring offer. It is interesting to notice how in some cases, this leads to overly shallow or scripted tours – catering to the direct need of the tourist to ‘have been there’ but not providing any authentic storytelling. More interesting are the clubs who have a self-initiated museum approach, rooted in core values, where a professional staff is available to curate tours with societal relevance. Moreover, in such cases, museum visits and tours will appeal to both tourists and local groups, such as school classes or an interested local public.

Another aspect to note is the extent to which the museum and/or tour presentations also address difficult pasts, such as wars, conflicts, dictatorships and genocides. It is understood that presenting and telling football stories will mainly be about football, but by also addressing complex and troubled pasts (for example clubs or stadiums which have had past connections with authoritarian regimes that committed human rights violations, or stadiums which have served as sites of dehumanisation), clubs can equally become educative and transformative spaces.

Finally, there is a large space for more fan-narrated tours and museum presentations in the football club world. Within this impetus to ensure more voices are allowed to ‘tell the story’, we see the potential for football clubs to actively seek marginalised groups to also have a central voice in the stories told by the museum and in tours.

What makes Museums and Tours a key practice?

Let’s go back to FC Town, and its special tour was concluded with various thought-provoking conversations. The local kids taking part in this tour will now notice many new layers in their day-to-day environment. One interesting aspect which came up in the conversation related to one of the participants’ fathers. This was a man who came to live in Town having fled his home country that succumbed to a civil war. This man was a football player and had even played one short, though not successful, season in the mid 1990s, when FC Town was in the 3rd division. The student telling this about his father to the group made the tour guide focus on various other refugees who had entered the club squad. After the tour, the guide shared this story with his colleagues at the club museum, and they decided to investigate further if they could pull together a temporary exhibition on the refugee community in Town and the many connections between refugees and the club’s history. They may even dedicate a special tour to it!

FC Town’s Museum and Touring packages, like all examples mentioned in this article, are more than just tourism and football obsessions. When clubs and their communities work on their museums and tours in a more authentic, supporter-led way, they:

• Add a narrative layer to the Town’s history and identity
• Connect history to learners (of all ages) on ‘their terms’
• Raise interest with local heritage stakeholders (e.g. city museum, archive, schools, marketing departments)
• Grow a larger and more durable fanbase

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 museum and touring 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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