Governance, Citizenship and the New European Football Championships: The European Spectacle

Over the past decade, European football has seen tremendous changes impacting upon its international framework as well as local traditions and national institutions. Processes of Europeanization in the fields of economy and politics provided the background for transformations of the production and consumption of football on a transnational scale. In the course of such rearrangements, football tournaments like the UEFA Championship or the European Champions League turned into mega-events and media spectacles attracting ever-growing audiences. The experience of participating in these events offers some of the very few occasions for the display and embodiment of identities within a European context.

This volume takes the 2008 EUROs hosted by Austria and Switzerland as a case study to analyze the political and cultural significance of the tournament from a multidisciplinary angle. What are the special features and spatial arrangements of a UEFAesque Europe, in comparison to alternative possibilities of a Europe? Situating the sport tournament between interpretations of collective European ritual and European spectacle, the key research question will ask what kind of Europe was represented in the cultural, political and economic manifestations of the 2008 EUROs.

This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Wolfram Manzenreiter is associated with the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, where he teaches modern Japanese society. His research is mostly concerned with issues of sports, popular culture, media, and labour in a globalizing world.

Georg Spitaler has widely published on sports, popular culture and the politics of nationalism. The independent researcher is a part-time lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, as well as editorial board member of Austria’s leading football magazine, Ballesterer.