The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.

Sturm Graz is and was a workers club when I came to the club in the 90s, one year before Ivica Osim arrived. We knew he was a mathematician, soccer player and coach, and he knew workers clubs, from Željezničar, in Grbavica, back home in Sarajevo, the city then under a yearlong siege in the Bosnian independence wars. But he added something else. To him, the game was discourse, it was beauty. He explained soccer to us in a way we’d n...

Damiano Benzoni, Italian journalist and seasoned groundhopper, has written a wonderful book - an "emotive map of football in Berlin," a rich portrait of a city through the eyes of football. And when that city happens to be the German capital, torn by wars, shaped by the dvide between two Germanies and various migrant influences, the texture of such a book happens to be particularly interesting. The book, for now, is avail...

Daniel and Romina are dear, longtime listeners of the podcast. Back in April, I sat down with them at their kitchen table in Stockholm to work out the story behind the many images that circulated online last season: a stunningly large mob of active supporters in fine voice home and away, tifo and all. This wasn't just one big game in a big stadium for the sake of a record. This was organic, homegrown, ultra-themed. At most Eur...

With Ana Ascencao e Silva, Eva Lotta Bohle, Andy Payne, Alex Kirby, Paul Reidy, Wayne Gamble, Christopher Hylland - on their club's or cause's season, what happened since we talked, and what the outlook is like at the moment. Plus, each guest picked one song - well, except Eva Lotta, who picked two.

Union St. Gill, Arminia Bielefeld, West Ham, Rayo Vallecano, Leeds United, Argentina

NEW: send me a text message! (I'...

Fort Wayne is a city of around 260,00 in the very east of the northern half of Indiana. Like many mid-sized midwestern cities, it has been shaped by the industrialization of the late 19th century,  immigration waves from Western, Central and Southeastern Europe until the 1920s and from the rest of the world today,  deindustrialization after World War 2, the decline of urban America as well as revitalization more recently. 

It also h...

Gabriel Kuhn is an Austrian writer and researcher who works for the Central Organization of Swedish Workers - and sat for an in-person interview (he has been on before when we talked about his wonderful book Soccer vs the State in 2023.) In this episode, we time travel to "red Vienna"  in the 1920s, to talk about how antifascism, organized workers' sports, the professionalization of soccer and sobriety intersected th...

This is the second part of a two-part episode - the first part is here, episode 54, from March 31.

We will start at FC St. Pauli, now in the German Bundesliga, at the club’s museum which has very active researchers, and we’ll end at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the bigger question of what right remembering looks like in professional soccer - and what it can look like. We will take that journey with no less than 3 guests: Celina...

This is the first part of a two-part episode.

We will start at FC St. Pauli, now in the German Bundesliga, at the club’s museum which has very active researchers, and we’ll end at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the bigger question of what right remembering looks like in professional soccer - and what it can look like. We will take that journey with no less than 3 guests: Celina Albertz, a researcher and also in the curating team ...

If you are in England on the nice Spring weekend of March 22nd, I hope you didn’t book the trip to see a Premier League game. Because there are none. It’s a dreaded national team break again. But on the other hand, that weekend may also be one of the best to soak in English football culture, because it’s the Annual “Non-League Day," an annual, grassroots-led spotlight on non-professional football in England, a chance for those...

Note: This is an unusual episode, in reaction to the events unfolding Thursday and Friday, with little time to edit or the usual setup. All sounds fine and is audible, but not as nice as usual. My apologies!

Back last Summer, many Premier League clubs announced they would change, or do away with, "concession tickets" for seniors and youth, as well as a price hike on season tickets. Resistance formed at many clubs, but at W...

There is a lot to say about Argentina and football that we are not saying today. There is a lot about Argentina and football that we are saying today. We’re even saying things about saying things about football in Argentina: Christopher Hylland joins me, an English author and educator with a Latin American past and a Norwegian present. His football-centric travel report Tears at La Bombonera is out since 2021, and he has just publi...

The EU, Europe's great post-war peace project, can feel beleaguered today. Global and continental uncertainties collide, and things are complicated in Brussels, Belgium, the heart of the European Union. Two clubs from that capital survived in the Europa League, though none bear Brussels’ city name: RSC Anderlecht, with the beautiful color of purple, and Royal Union St Gilloise, a recent regular guest in European club competiti...

Norway is regularly listed among the "happiest countries in the world." It is one of the wealthiest too, and its not a country with revolutionary fervor. It’s not France. It’s not even Germany. Yet the Video Assistant Referee, known widely as VAR, has raised Norwegians' hackles. Organized fans have mobilized enough, and in enough forms, that the country's two professional leagues recently cast a majority vote to...

Thank you for making 50 Episodes of The Assistant professor of Football possible! Whether you celebrate anything this season or not, I hope these days are refreshing for you, hold people and emotions if you want that, and space to breathe in if you prefer that. 

Last year at this time, I read Michael Foreman’s classic picture book War Game as a Holiday special. This December special is me. That is: an audio interview with me that I ...

SC Freiburg, a former yoyo club from a pretty progressive town on the very southwestern edge of Germany is now firmly established in the Bundesliga. The club is 120 years old this year, and just a few days ago published its first investigation into its own history during Nazi rule in Germany. It’s one of the German clubs that paid attention early on to football for women, is a pioneer in the establishment of youth academies in Germ...

I've said something like this before: I believe the means of global soccer production should be controlled by fans, players and the community the club is in, collectively or cooperatively, and not by firms and companies based half a world away from the clubs in question. So, this podcast is not a natural avenue for an American multi-club owner of European clubs to share his story.
In an exception to that pattern, here is ...

Martin Luther (not the King) nailed 95 protest theses against the Christian church of his day to a church door in Germany on October 31st 1517. And Protestants , properly understood, have been protesting ever since. As we near "Reformation Day" again, David Kilpatrick, a Professor of English and Sports Managment, channels that spirit of protest to the world of soccer. His playful, bold and short book "95 Theses on th...

Today, we are taking a Fall break trip to Vallecas, a working class neighborhood in the Spanish capital Madrid. La Liga - the Spanish first league - holds global appeal chiefly due to its two dominators and their massive global following. However, there are wonderful and many layered stories of politics, local pride, past glories and regional conflict below that shiny surface. Rayo Vallecano, the Lightining Bolt of Vallecas, repres...

The McDonald’s on Elland Road in Leeds, near the stadium of Leeds United, is, apparently, the only McDonald’s there is that has removed any element with the color red. Because Red, that is Manchester United, the rose of Lancaster in the badge of Manchester City. And roses, as well as soccer shirts, in Yorkshire are white… except until this Summer, when two red bulls, the logo of an Austrian energy drink, gallopped onto that white j...