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

Today's episode is a mix between soccer detective story and true crime podcasting. British investigative journalist Paul Brown is our Visiting Professor for the day. He and his colleague Philippe Auclair have piled up pathbreaking research on the backstory, money trail and flat out baffling activities of a group called 777 partners. Their activities in the insurance and airplanes business would be a story well worth telling in and of itself, but they feature here today because they own stakes...

We begin with the Eurovision Songcontest and end with Sturm Graz's cup win, but consider, most of all, FC St. Gallen. Saint who? True, if I would ask you who invented club football in Europe in continental Europe, would you guess that the answer is the same as to the Ricola cough drop question? The Swiss did! Well, technically English students living in Switzerland, but nevermind - the year was 1879 and the place was right near St. Gallen, Saint Gallen, and the continent’s oldest soccer club ...

The excesses of global soccer capitalism are well documented on this podcast. Perhaps no footballing country is more affected than England, the birthplace of the modern game and home to arguably the wealthiest clubs and league. To take it up one notch, six of its big clubs attempted to join the breakaway Super League while, around the same time, historic club Bury FC collapse and fell under administration. The fan protests surrounding both, the striking inequality growing in English football,...

Kay Bernstein was elected the president of Hertha BSC, then in the 1st Bundesliga, in June 2022. He died at his home near Berlin on January 16th of this year, with Hertha being in the 2nd Bundesliga. What sounds like a short and - on the pitch - unsuccessful presidency is in fact the most significant shift and opening up of possibilities in club leadership in German and, possibly, European club leadership over the last years. In his memory, are dedicating an hour today to his club, to his lif...

"The era is brought to life by the accounts of Albanians who lived through it, which capture the importance of football to a populace starved of any other source of communal enjoyment. The otherworldliness and innate cruelty of the Stalinist regime provide a terrifying backdrop to their tales," reads the blurb for Phil Harrison's book The Hermit Kingdom: Football Stories from Stalinist Albania. Albania, on the far eastern edge of Europe, followed a rather unique path through the Cold Wa...

... of all people! Raphael is a German political scientist, whose book "Peace to the Terraces, War to the Federations and Leagues" is a pathbreaking materialist critique of "modern soccer" - the game as purely an entertainment market commodity. The book is only published in German so far, and we were in the process of rolling out his thoughts with the ongoing conflict between German fans and the German Bundesliga as a case in point (you know, the one with tennis balls and remote-controlled ca...