Football is about cooperation. Usually, this refers to the eleven players and how they work together during 90+ minutes; how they use the space, how they put in an effort, how they defend together, regain ball possession or set attacking plays leading to goals.
In the organisation of football clubs, a lot of cooperation is also about the governance of a club. How are decisions that relate to the longer term, such as investing in the renovation of a stadium, made? Who has a voice? Many clubs are formed as associations, with democratic governance structures, but the bigger the budget, the bigger the chance of a more complex governance, with shareholders and/or majority commercial ownership.
Another area of cooperation can be found in professional football ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) work. Such departments, sometimes operating as independent foundations, set up agreements with public sector stakeholders, such as care centres, hospitals, schools and municipalities.
But what happens when clubs set up collaborations with stakeholders in the heritage sector (such as researchers, culture and heritage departments of municipalities, museums, archives, libraries, makers, etc.)?
A day in the life of FC Town
Today we are at an important meeting at the Town Hall, where FC Town representatives have a strategy planning session with local cultural heritage specialists, including the local museum curator, a digital archive advisor and historians from the city university and educators from the vocational school. On the agenda: How to put the club heritage to better use for inclusive education? The meeting, chaired by the mayor, comes at an important moment as the Town is preparing its bid for European Capital of Culture and FC Town recently qualified for the round of sixteen in the Europa League. There is a lot of energy and momentum to put together various plans and set up a common programme.
Forms
At Football Makes History, we recognise strategic (heritage) partnerships as one of the Key Practices for socially engaged heritage work. With regard to this practice, we want to know: How can football clubs set up meaningful and durable collaborations with the cultural (heritage) sector? Where are the mutual benefits of such collaborations?
In other key practices, we already saw the importance of organisational partnerships, for example in the remembrance, outreach and education work. Below we discuss three forms which enable football clubs to develop their knowledge infrastructure – ultimately benefiting all work elaborated in the other key practices.
One form is the possibility of setting up lasting civil society networks for football clubs to exchange knowledge at the practical level on heritage work. Another is the set-up of lasting local partnerships spanning research, policy and practice of heritage work, and the third relates to wider possibilities of partnership types (e.g. with government, commercial partners and international organisations)
In this article, we discuss several examples of strategic (heritage) partnerships 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: Networks of knowledge and practice
There is no shortage of networks within the world of football. Some are large formalized organisations, some are informal groups on social media. Some are simply strings of informal contacts. In support of the heritage work of football clubs, networks play an important role.
In Germany, the association of football club museums provides a platform for the professionals and volunteers involved in football club museums as managers, archivists, historians and/or guides to connect and exchange best practice. This network can be seen to enable the lending of objects for exhibitions, or for more straight-forward networking, in support of research, exhibition promotions, site visits and more. It is important to note that this network is run as an association with the members themselves in charge of the network governance.
Across national boundaries, there are various civil society organisations and networks which can bring together different stakeholders in football club heritage. Close to the world of research, we find The Football Collective, the International Football History Conference (Footycon), and Football Heritage which bring together contacts from different research disciplines as well as practitioners through events, social media and podcasts.
At the national level, there are several important research and education programmes, which serve to connect research and practice as well, including the Reinwardt Academy Cultural Heritage Research Group, the Clemson University Football Studies, the De Montfort University Sport History and Culture MA Programme. In individual countries, moreover, the Football Associations (FA’s) may play a role in supporting relevant networking. An important example here is the DFB/Julius Hirsch Price or the partnership between the Dutch Eredivisie and Utrecht University for the professional development of CSR workers.
When opening the theme to sports beyond football, some interesting networks can be found: Playing Pasts, Sport & Heritage and Stichting de Sportwereld. Such platforms manage to bridge academic historical work with more public interest and open access research – where many times football clubs’ heritage volunteers take part in activities.
Does your club take part in such networks? If so, which ones are those? If not, do you think your club could benefit from such collaborations? How might it do that? Perhaps you are aware of other knowledge exchange networks where football heritage knowledge exchange is facilitated?
Form 2: Local collaborations
Football clubs are a particular type of organisation in any given local society. On the one hand, the focus is clear: to play (and hopefully win) football games for all ages and people of all backgrounds. Often, the football clubs therefore are able to bring together from all parts of (local) society. A natural springboard for partnerships and collaborations!
In other key practices, such partnerships were also featured. Is the club active in remembrance? It might partner with a remembrance site. Does the club celebrate particular anniversaries? It might partner with the city archive or museum. In this form we discuss some of these partnership types.
Eintracht Frankfurt, for example, as part of the museum’s heritage work, has a long-running partnership with the Fritz Bauer Institute, the Jewish Museum and the Anne Frank Bildungsstaette. This brings the content development work, research, presentations through exhibition and general public engagement to a higher level. For the education work, these partners also help to assure quality.
Many clubs will have involved their local archives and museums in the work to professionalise their archival work, or collaborate on special exhibitions.
Often, clubs also have lasting partnerships with local institutes of higher education. This enables support for research, traineeships and further knowledge sharing. However, these partnerships are currently dominated by research on football performance and club management, and less so on history and heritage.
Partnerships can also be meaningful with local art groups or other creative sector stakeholders! A willing subject of such partnerships is the third kit. Let’s look at two examples.
Fan-owned Dublin-side Bohemians FC is well-known to dedicate their third shirt to cultural affiliations, as well as political messaging. The club has thus put out third kit jerseys dedicated to music, art and solidarity with Palestine.
And partnerships are not always institutional, and can also take place in special circumstances. During COVID-19 Italian club Pescara Calcio asked the supporters to design their kit and selected the winner through a social media campaign. The winning jersey designed by 6 Years old Luigi was the most-voted one and used by the team as 3rd kit for the 2020/2021 season.
For the season of 2022/2023 Ajax Amsterdam, following up on the successful Bob Marley-themed kit from 2021/2022, collaborated with local fashion brand Daily Paper for the design of their third kit. Ajax’s partnership with Daily Paper represented a significant cultural moment, blending football with streetwear and urban culture. By teaming up with the Amsterdam-based fashion brand, Ajax tapped into the growing trend of merging football culture with fashion, appealing to a global audience that increasingly views sports clubs as lifestyle brands. This partnership highlighted the deep connection between Ajax and the diverse, multicultural communities in Amsterdam, especially those with African heritage. Daily Paper’s focus on celebrating African roots and cultural identity is woven into their designs, symbolizing a fusion of tradition and modernity, which resonates strongly with younger, urban audiences.
Has your club established a successful, strategic partnership with a local heritage partner? We would love to hear about it! What was the partnership about? How was it set up? Or: is there no such partnership, but would you think it important? With which organisation do you think your club could partner, why and how?
Form 3: Innovative partnership types
The world of football is always buzzing. New ideas for marketing and communication, for community engagement, for research and professional development. There is a lot to unpack there. When viewed from the side of the development of heritage work, some interesting partnership types can emerge from unexpected places.
At the national level, there are many exciting partnerships between museums and the (emerging) national football museums. The Scottish Football Museum, for example, collaborated with the National Mining Museum in 2023. Also, a knowledge exchange programme between the German and Welsh one was supported through ICOM. It is interesting here to see how ICOM – the International organisation for museums – offers a platform for many football clubs’ heritage workers (professionals and volunteers) to engage in the development of their ‘heritage resources’.
At a national level, it seems not many football club museums have affiliated themselves with national museum structures. Such partnerships, for example with the Dutch Museum Association (Museumvereniging) allows a broader segment of the public to learn about and gain access to a club’s museum. For now, it seems that only the Feyenoord Museum has formally joined this association.
In the key practice of remembrance, we also find strong partnerships between football clubs and sites of memory, such as former concentration camps. In the case of Kazerne Dossin in Belgium there is a formal partnership with the ProLeague, which means all clubs can directly cooperate under this umbrella and benefit from specially organised visits and educational activities. The Anne Frank House in The Netherlands also works directly with football clubs, also on the grassroots level, to provide its dedicated Fair Play workshop to combat racism and discrimination. Also in this case, it is facilitated through a formal partnership with the Dutch FA under its anti-discrimination programme ‘Ons Voetbal is Van Iedereen’.
It is helpful to football clubs when such societal partners offer ready-made packages, which they can then adapt to local needs. This is also the case in the Dutch adaptation of Scotland-born Football Memories. A special programme where elderly supporters who suffer dementia and other brain diseases can meet up at the football club and through a special approach also regain certain strength, joy and social well-being. Alzheimer Nederland, as well as Alzheimer Liga Vlaanderen have adopted this programme and are very successful in supporting clubs to implement this inspiring social programme.
Does your club have such partnerships? What are these, and how do they support the ambitions of the club and its supporters? If not, are there specific partnerships you would find meaningful, and why?
Engaged Heritage Work through Strategic Partnerships
As mentioned earlier, the prime directive of a football club is on the pitch. Everything is organised towards those goals. Partnerships such as the ones shown above are not that easy to set up. The CSR departments of professional clubs would usually be well situated to engage with cultural partners, but they often have another focus: on health, well-being and physical education. Another factor is that the governance of professional football clubs may be heavily subjected to the results on the pitch, and the impact on budgets. Cultural activities often end up last-in-first-out. Some clubs used to have museums, but upon relegation and the need to rebalance the budget closed up the museum and put it in storage – awaiting better days. How can the heritage work of clubs be more durable in such a volatile set-up? One answer lies with supporters’ work and supporter culture. It is no accident that many of the museums described in our key practice on museums are fan-initiated and/or fan-owned. But then again, how can the club ensure lasting and professional commitment to such initiatives on voluntary basis?
From the other side as well: Cultural partners can be eager to work together with football clubs, but at times their offer can be so well-prepared, including materials, trainers, logistical management, and so on, that it becomes less likely that the club would take ownership to continue the activities on their own. From the other side as well, in case cultural partners are open to work with football clubs do they speak each other’s language? Is there enough trust in collection care and presentation goals to facilitate mutual loans and co-creation? How can such partnerships then also include certain actions to build up the capacities of clubs to sustainably adopt such practices?
What makes Strategic Partnerships a key practice?
Let’s go back to FC Town, and its high-level meeting at the city hall. All participants were very pleased with this meeting, and it led to a so-called ‘framework programme’ on the football heritage work in town. For the upcoming period, the city also pledged seed funding for small-scale pilot actions such as a neighbourhood-led tour, designed together with the local vocational school. Perhaps more importantly, the agreements on paper and the project work, will build trust between the stakeholders, who will now know where and how to find each other, building more lasting networks for whatever will happen in the future of FC Town.
FC Town’s strategic partnerships, like all examples mentioned in this article, are more than signing paper deals. When clubs and their communities set up effective collaborations with other organisations, they:
- Create new positions inside their organisation for value creation;
- Increase their abilities to sustain all other heritage work;
- Become recognised as cultural partners by the cultural heritage sector;
- Are better able to prepare and deliver exciting programmes reaching a broader audience in town;
- Open themselves up to new funding opportunities.
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 strategic partnerships 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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