Football events,memories and globalization

ABSTRACT

Key events and episodes in football’s history are central to the making of personal and collective understandings of the global game at local, national and transnational levels. To explore these themes, this paper is organized into three main parts. First, I explore how diverse key events are spotlighted in the game’s social history, including episodes that are socially contested and/or with aspects of ‘disaster’. Second, I outline how events connect to the shaping of identities through forms of biographical and collective memory. Third, I consider how football events and memories connect to wider socio-cultural and political-economic processes, with regard to knowledge production, globalization, commodification, and postmodernisation.