A People’s History of Football by Mickaël Correia: Making the case for the sport as a progressive social force

Football fans, famously, have only two emotional registers: dewy-eyed romanticism and cynical fatalism. Sentimentally speaking, the game belongs to the people; in reality it is run by powerful moneyed interests with only a tenuous relationship to the fan base – and it feels like there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about that.

Mickaël Correia, a French sports journalist, prefers to look on the bright side: in A People’s History of Football – originally published in 2018 and now available in English thanks to Fionn Petch’s translation – he chronicles a distinguished tradition of activism and dissent among players and supporters alike, and makes a persuasive case for football as a progressive social force.

Correia revisits a number of politically significant episodes in the history of the sport, such as Austria’s defeat of Germany in a 1938 exhibition match to mark the German annexation of Austria. The Austrians were supposed to lose but, defying threats from the Nazi regime, they dominated the match from start to finish. Another fascinating vignette involves an incident in 1958 when a number of French-Algerian players flew to to Algeria on the eve of an international friendly match between France and Switzerland. The players, who had been due to play for France, “defected” to a self-styled “Independence Eleven”, risking their livelihoods to show support for the anti-colonial struggle.

It was Benito Mussolini who first cottoned on to football’s propaganda value in the era of mass culture. Italy’s triumph in the 1934 World Cup was a PR success for the fascist regime, starting a trend that continues to this day of authoritarian governments using the tournament to buy moral credibility. But, as Correia explains, co-opting football necessarily entails allowing fans a certain amount of leeway; in societies governed by oppressive regimes, football stadiums can be “privileged places of social expression”: FC Barcelona was a hub of anti-fascist resistance under the Franco dictatorship; supporters of Corinthians were a thorn in the side of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985; in Egypt, fans of Al Ahly played a prominent role in the 2011 Arab Spring uprising; and in today’s Turkey, where political dissent is all but stifled, the fan base of the Istanbul club Besiktas have been openly hostile to president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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Fan power is a running theme. The formation of supporter-owned clubs like AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester – the latter founded after the leveraged takeover of Manchester Untied by the Glazer family – offers a blueprint for wresting back control at the local level. In Italy, a controversial digital ID card for supporters was abandoned in 2013 after a mass mobilisation by hard-core fan groups known as ultras.

Correia likens these groups to trade unions – a powerful bulwark against the commodification of the game. They are the life and soul of the matchday spectacle, with their banners, fireworks and irreverent banter. (Interventions include “exhibition of coffins in the colours of the opposing clubs, symbolic death notices, heckling outside the players’ hotel to disturb their sleep on the eve of the match ...”)

Correia’s upbeat take on fan culture is refreshing, although his characterisation of 1970s English hooliganism as “a Dionysian catharsis at the very heart of the mid-20th-century leisure industry” – a subculture mainly concerned with the “rites of male socialisation” rather than violence per se – is a little too forgiving.

The book is admirably broad in its scope, encompassing everything from women’s football to the struggles of Palestinians in the occupied territories; there are chapters on the famously left-wing Hamburg club St Pauli and the late Diego Maradona, whose virtuosic playing style and propensity for cheating are attributed – somewhat patronisingly – to his creole roots.

Sadly, there isn’t much in the way of critical analysis or a distinctive authorial voice; the book reads like a curated highlights reel of stories that have been told with greater vitality elsewhere – in titles such as Jimmy Burns’s Barca: A People’s Passion; Guillem Balague’s , and Carles Vinas and Natxo Parra’s St. Pauli: Another Football is Possible. But if, like me, you enjoy plummeting down Wikipedia rabbit-holes for the sheer nerdy pleasure of discovering new titbits, you’ll probably be able to overlook Correia’s workmanlike and slightly under-edited prose, since the material is interesting enough in its own right.

[ Saudi Arabia’s attempts at sportswashing back in the late 1970s sound depressingly familiar ]

Correia’s message is simple: that football has always been inseparable from politics, and it is thanks to the sustained, collective efforts of players and fans that it retains its special legitimacy as the people’s game. An obvious point, perhaps, but, at a time when the game’s integrity is being further compromised on multiple fronts – by greedy media companies, gambling sponsorships and Saudi sports-washing – it bears repeating.