The Football Club Remembers

Football clubs can improve their heritage work and community engagement through remembrance.

The Football Club Remembers

Football club cultures form societies of their own. Such communities experience pain and grief together likelike any other part of society. Large disruptive experiences such as wars and genocides, but also (natural) disasters, forced migration, terrorist attacks, and deindustrialisation (and subsequent loss of work) feed into club communities’ collective memory as much as individual traumatic events, such as diseases and deaths of members of these communities. In all these cases; the football club remembers. Many, if not all, clubs have invoked certain rituals to commemorate collective and the individual experiences. 

A day in the life of FC Town

Today, two club players at FC Town laid down their flowers at the World War 2 memorial in the town’s main park. They are wearing the special commemorative kit. It is a special occasion for the club, as club management and supporters gather. The limited edition kit brings back the shirts worn on the eve of the town’s bombardment in World War 2. The mayor speaks about the present tensions in the town. She refers to the importance of social solidarity between people of different backgrounds. She compliments the club for organising this special remembrance, referring to the troubled history of the club, which has both lost members to the death camps but has also seen the club’s public alignment with the totalitarian dictator. The club management was initially not keen on this supporter initiative, but soon recognised the social and intergenerational value of doing this, of this practice.

Forms

At Football Makes History, we recognise Remembrance as one of the Key Practices for engaged heritage work. Concerning this practice, we want to know: How does this football remembrance connect with societal values, such as solidarity, democracy, justice, peace and so on. Which forms of Football Remembrance contribute to the community’s sense of these values?

This particular multifaceted practice includes anything: one-minute silence before a game, the symbolic armbands, the visits of memorials and monuments, educational visits to sites of memory, and/or longer term oral history and/or archival research.

In this open article, we discuss several examples of value-driven forms of remembrance by football clubs. We hope these may inspire other football club communities to reflect upon their practices and/or to try out new actions. We are open to add your reflections and/or suggestions to this article as well!

Form 1: Monuments and Memorials

The most visible form of engaged remembrance in and around football clubs is the presence of plaques and statues, and the related organisation of memorial matches by the club as well as special commemorative actions by supporter groups, e.g. special flags, songs and/or fireworks. 

Football clubs’ stadiums are important locations for the community. In 2018, Go Ahead Eagles dedicated a special Memorial Garden at its grounds, which has since become a site of commemoration of deceased supporters. Family members use this space to actively commemorate their dead. The garden is also used for more social commemorative events, such as National Remembrance Day. The impact of this space has on the community is clear from its special (supporter-led) social media account. 

At the increasingly famous AFC Wrexham a new stadium-side monument is being erected to commemorate the town’s impactful Gresford mining disaster. This comes following the new leadership of its Canadian and American celebrity owners Ryan Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney who have weaved their club development into the town’s social and cultural history and presented this in a Disney+ documentary Welcome to Wrexham. Many clubs would also have a special stand named after a notable person in the club’s history. 

Football clubs can also work with local, regional or national (depending on the country) stolpersteine organisations to mark the address where a victim of the Holocaust has lived. There are many examples of this action, which includes doing some research about the victims who have been part of the club, contacting the stolpersteine makers, and organising a special moment to put in the monument. However, it does not end there! Ajax Amsterdam for example made sure the process of commemorating the American-Jewish player Eddy Hamel was well-documented and it also hosts a clear page on its website about it.

There is no shortage of statues of former players at or near football stadiums, but there are also clubs which have dedicated special remembrance monuments. In 2014, Newcastle United opened a Memorial Garden for two of their supporters who died in the MH17 air disaster on the way to watch a friendly match and serving to commemorate deceased supporters ever since

Does your football club take part in local memorials? Does your club stadium include special plaques? What is being remembered and why? Are there special places (e.g. stands) named after notable people? What do you know about these plaques and names? And: Are there events in the past which your club is ignoring? What kind of plaque or memorial could be organized to address this?

Form 2: The Commemorative Shirt

One of the most iconic ‘heritage objects’ in football is undeniably the jersey. Maybe it was the one worn by that player in that final who scored that goal. Maybe it is a weird retro shirt which is made vintage. Whatever the historical or personal circumstance, football supporters love collecting them. They tap into a collective memory and are easy conversation starters among lovers of the game. But they are directly tied into remembrance practice when clubs harness this object’s wide appeal to mark a moment in their past.

Football clubs can issue a special jersey to facilitate remembrance of a particularly important event in history. Leyton Orient, for example, introduced a limited-edition Somme Memorial shirt to honour the club’s contributions during World War I, marking the death of three of its players at the Battle of the Somme. This shirt is a replica of the kit worn by Clapton Orient (the club’s former name) at the outbreak of the war. This shirt was worn during one match, a pre-season friendly against Hearts of Midlothian in July 2024. Only 1,000 shirts were made available, each presented in a special box with a certificate of authenticity. 

Football clubs can add a communal remembrance activity to such a special shirt. Ahead of the 2024/2025 season, NAC Breda issued a special commemorative jersey in collaboration with a local memorial to mark the 80th anniversary (on 29th October) of the town’s liberation by Polish troops under General Stanisław Maczek. On 26th October it played a match in this jersey, as it had invited descendants (both local and some which flew in from Poland) of the Polish liberators, along with special supporters action with Polish flags.

Commemorative shirts can also relate to other local histories. In October 2023, AZ Alkmaar launched a limited-edition “Victorie” shirt to honour the 450th anniversary of Alkmaar’s 1573 victory in the Eighty Years’ War. The purple shirt was inspired by “The Siege of Alkmaar”, a painting in which the Spanish army tries to climb the city walls of Alkmaar. That attack was repelled by the men, women and children of Alkmaar, in cooperation with the ‘Geuzen’.

There are many more examples of such commemorative shirts. Most of the time these refer to the team’s own former colors. Sometimes they address historical events. Sometimes this overlaps, as in the case of the 2008 Manchester United who cherished the memory of the Munich plane crash of 6 February 1958, where 23 people died, including the team. 

Such special jersey projects arise from good local collaborations and often connect with a special match-day. The shirts are usually printed in a limited edition, selling out fast. Such actions seem to have a wide outreach, but the impact in terms of raising of historical awareness can be questioned. More accompanying activities, including educational workshops and community outreach could be envisioned to ensure the momentum of commemorative shirts is transformed into wider impact.

Did your football club issue special jerseys? For what occasion? Do you think it contributed to awareness-raising? Can you imagine future shirts for the club to consider? Do you think the management and/or supporters would appreciate it? Why (not)?

Form 3: The Remembrance Visit

Competing in football is much about travelling. During league seasons, both teams of players as well as supporters take the bus more or less every other week. It is no surprise then, that one particular active form of remembrance is the field trip or study visit where we can see football clubs and their communities connect strongly with history and heritage. 

Such visits have often taken place in the context of an international tournament. For example, during the World Cup 2010 in South Africa, various national teams visited Robben Island. At the more recent European Championship in Germany 2024, a special national programme with a central exhibition was created by the initiative Football and Remembrance, led by the German agency What Matters.

Here, however, our focus is on local football clubs. Over the last decade, more active programmes have been developed to support clubs to conduct educational visits, for example to former concentration camp sites, such as Kamp Westerbork in The Netherlands or Kazerne Dossin in Belgium. In both these cases clubs are offered special educational programmes. Educators working at these sites tell us that football is the social vessel through which football people can get further interested and become more curious to learn about history. 

Such remembrance sites are also actively engaged in working with football clubs to combat various forms of racism through the collaborative design of educational workshops and actions. The Anne Frank House Fancoach project, initially in partnership with Feyenoord and FC Utrecht and later with Borussia Dortmund and more clubs across Europe, plays an important role in connecting remembrance education to football, where societal values such as democracy and human rights are central. Following this rich collaboration, the Anne Frank House-led project Changing the Chants produced a set of guidelines for football club stakeholders, available in Dutch, English, German, as well as an online one-hour masterclass in collaboration with the EU Fundamental Rights Agency.

In addition to these mainly institutionally centred remembrance visits, there are many fan projects in Germany and Austria, whereby supporters connect the club’s history of World War 2 to local heritage education work and awareness raising. Several of these are discussed in the Compendium of Best Practice, also produced by the Changing the Chants project in 2021, which looked at ways in which clubs work to combat antisemitism. 

Visits to so-called ‘sites of conscience’ have the potential to awaken a person’s sense of citizenship, of social responsibility, because they fold together a football narrative, deeply connected to the person’s life, with a wider issue of social concern, such as racism and discrimination. This is for example also evident in the long-running Peace Pitch programme, initiated by The Children’s Football Alliance, which centred on youth work at the site of the World War One Christmas Truce in Belgium. This connection is recognised and developed by remembrance institutions that help clubs take part in visits and educational programmes. There is much more, however, that clubs could do in this space.

“What is lacking is a strong coordinated effort in which memorials and museums, football clubs and governing bodies” – Bas Kortholt, Kamp Westerbork

Does your football club organise remembrance-related visits for players and/or supporters? How are these conducted? And if not, why not? If you have yourself taken part in a remembrance activity, was football (or sport at large) part of it?

Form 4: The Digital Monument

A lot of football knowledge seems to revolve around names and dates, whether it is the casual conversation with a stranger in search of a shared witness in football history, or the collecting and trading of (analogue and/or digital) football cards. Strangely, also remembrance is much about remembering the names and dates. A well-known practice in remembrance is the reading out of names, to keep the memory of their lives alive. Many war monuments, moreover, list the names of victims and the dates of their deaths.

Many football clubs, including hundreds of (non-professional) national league clubs, have participated in a unique project to build an online memorial site called Voetbalmonument for all the World War 2 victims who were also members of their clubs. This online monument, moreover, is set up in a way that it can keep growing, and the logged names are also added to a wider research infrastructure.

In Germany, the Arolsen Archives collaborated with Borussia Dortmund to gather short biographies of victims who were Football Players and created educational workshops for teachers in Dortmund and beyond to use. The book Football Players in Focus is available in English and German.

Does your club have a history website? Can you find out if it supports a digital monument? 

Engaged Heritage Work on Remembrance 

No football club is the same. Many have existed for over a century, others are newly formed. Some are financially powerful multinational commercial enterprises, others are local grassroots groups of friends and neighbours. The examples above are meant as inspiration, not as direct copy-paste practices. Instead here is some guidance for football clubs to develop meaningful remembrance work:

Which remembrance activities fit with the social values which your club wants to promote? Talk with community members to find out what they care about and why. In terms of more national remembrance, often related to world wars, it is important to plan ahead and get in touch with the organisations who are coordinating (and supporting) such programmes.

Disruptive events, such as terroristic attacks and (natural) disasters, have often shown people who support opposing football clubs to collaborate in solidarity. Commemorating such events can be a good opportunity to revisit this solidarity in order to help reduce tensions and animosity in present-day society.

Remembrance in relation to historical and/or contemporary conflicts may in itself be a political act. In (post)conflict societies, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, what may be a positive value-driven act of remembrance by one football club, could be seen as offensive and hurtful by another side. It is important to be aware of this, for example by engaging in conversations with people of different backgrounds. Engaging with such sensitivity may help remembrance contribute to reconciliation.

What makes remembrance a key practice?

Let’s go back to FC Town, and its special commemorative action. The creation of the special kit, the role of supporters and management. The collaboration with the city authorities. The significance of the park memorial. The powerful speech. Remembrance is a key practice when it can actively connect social values with the sense of community experienced by people involved with the club in whatever role. 

FC Town’s special event, like all examples mentioned in this article, is more than an afternoon in the park. When clubs and their communities work on socially meaningful remembrance, they:

• provide society with opportunities for inclusion;
• show socio-political maturity;
• create new partnerships;
• stimulate new reflections and conversations to emerge;
• enhance historical awareness;
• contribute to democratic citizenship;
• foster and practice their core values.

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 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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