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

I have a new mic, and I trust you can hear the difference and any future episode will be  beasier on your ears. Thank you for all your support. I hope there’s not too many of you who have given up on this during the last episodes when I was not able to produce decent sound quality from a fairly pricy mic plus mastering software. The new one should do the trick, give them recording room I am in. I...

Since moving from its century-long home to the former London Olympic Stadium just 3 miles away in 2016, West Ham United have undergone a severe identity crisis that can not be papered over even by success on the pitch. Though not owned by global billionaires, the former Ironworkers’ club has seen large scale fan protests over the stadium move, the club’s identity, the owners’ approach to fans and...

In front of the Stadium Maksimir, home to the World Cup's 3rd place finisher, Croatia, and to its biggest club, Dinamo Zagreb, a large memorial put up by Dinamo's fan group Bad Blue Boys is dedicated "to Dinamo fans for whom the war started on May 13 1990, and ended by laying their lives on the altar of the Croatian homeland.” That war is the Croatian war for independence, part of t...

A different kind of city sightseeing, through the lens of AIK, Djurgarden and Hammarby. Viktor Asp, Stockholm-based soccer journalist and cultural observer maps his city's landscape along the lines of a gameday: it's three big clubs, their distinctives, the origins and present of their rivalries, and the growth of Ultra fanculture. And he entertains my questions about the tensions below...

A world traveller, author, philosopher and former semi-professional soccer goalie in Austria, Gabriel Kuhn has written extensively on sports, politics, anarchism, socialism and punk. His book on soccer and radical politics merges travel narrative, anarchist football handbook and vignettes for a different future of the game. We sat down for a conversation on all that, his own journey - and on wheth...

If you want to shake off all that syrupy World Cup coverage, join us for a free flowing conversation with Eva-Lotta Bohle, who follows quintessential 2nd league club Arminia Bielefeld - home and away - and has plenty of tales to prove it. She also takes an active role in shaping a better, louder and more inclusive fan culture at her local love. We talk about the joys and sorrows of getting into me...

A historian’s and fan’s view on how soccer is not just affected by politics, but has foreshadowed, accelerated and even influenced the political and cultural transformations in independent Ukraine since 1991. Kateryna, a PhD student at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany takes us from the glory days of Dynamo Kyiv, the coaching genius of Valeriy Lobanivskyi, strange oli...

In this one - and only - World Cup-based episode, Stefan Schirmer, co-founder of the fan-run German initiative boycott-qatar and fan of Mainz 05 explains why the resistance to this year’s cup is so organized and so strong in Europe, particularly in Germany. How have fans organized? How do they view the engagement of the World Cup by the rest of the world? What do they mean by “boycott”? And what i...

For this first episode, I am talking to Matt Ford. Matt is from Manchester, an active United supporter, longtime critical fan journalist, and a professional football journalist by day as well, for the English speaking public broadcasting service of Germany. He now lives in Germany too. Matt gives us the inside scoop about the protests among Manchester United fans against that club’s owners, partic...

Today, I am talking to Chris Lee about the role that football and particularly football fans have played, and are playing in the fight against fascism on and off the field. Chris is from England, and runs the football culture blog “Outside Write.” He is an active groundhopper and has visited many historic stadiums across Europe. He does really good historical research, and his book “The Defiant: A...