Live from East London: Clapton CFC - Left-Wing Soccer on the Pitch that Fans Mowed

06/12/23 • 74 min

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

Clapton Community Football Club is a very special member-owned club in East London, just two Tube stops east of West Ham United. Its members saved its own ground, rebuilt it, host workshops on how to monitor police violence in the neighborhood, will host St Pauli’s women’s team from Germany in a few weeks - and have very good reasons for why they do not want to play too high up in the league pyramid.
Kevin Blowe, one of the a club's longest-standing officeholders and current treasurer, talked to me at the famous Old Spotted Dog Ground, London's oldest senior football ground, about the place, the club and the people that make it an unusual and heady and fun and beautiful place to love soccer: member-run, committedly political, community oriented, and rooted in the history of this part of East London. We recorded outside, in the stands, which gets you a good sense of the place I hope, and we’ll give you an audio tour - but it also means you don’t have studio quality, though the audio giot considerably better with mastering. I trust that is fine.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Clapton CFC, official website
Clapton CFC on twitter
Clapton CFC on YouTube, incl. games
Old Spotted Dog Ground, website of the trust, with photos of the ground
"Clapton CFC: How Our Antifascist Football Shirts Found a Global Audience," The Guardian, September 2018
"The Contested Legacy of the Antifascist International Brigades," Guardian, October 2020

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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help.
Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Previous Episode

Teaching Soccer: Three Actual Professors of Football on their College Classes, and Soccer Literacy in the U.S.

It's the first episode with American guests - and the first one with three of them. For this episode of The Assistant Professor of Football, I am joined by three (real) professors who regularly teach, in American university classrooms, about football - its culture, its meaning, its history. We talked about how that teaching is going, what would it be like to take a class with them, what do they assign, and how did they get into this subject in academia in the first place, and what good books are being written about the beautiful game beyond the well-known popular ones. And then we went on to opine more broadly, about the future of the game globally as well as here in the US, the next World Cup, why awful people run clubs, and what makes the beautiful game such a unique angle to understand the world.

These guests are:
- Dr. Brenda Elsey (Hofstra University, History Department), co-editor of Football and the Boundaries of History: Critical Studies in Soccer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and author of Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019)
- Dr. Peter Alegi (Michigan State University, Department of History), author of African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World's Game (Ohio University Press, 2010) and Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa (University of KawZulu-Natal Press, 2004); founder of The Football Scholars Forum
- Dr. Pablo M. Sierra (University of Rochester, Department of History), author of Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge Press, 2018)

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help.
Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.

Next Episode

The Flight of the Bumblebee: Live from Degerfors in Sweden's Rustbelt, a Football Family on Soccer's Big Stage

Degerfors IF in Sweden's top tier surely must have one of the most unusual, lovely and countercultural stories that professional football in Europe has to tell at the moment. It's roots lie in a rich history of steeltown football that led the club to national fame in the mid 20th century, and its present is headed by a chairman who is a sociologist without any football background until he ended up on the board of a first league professional team. How he and his club chart the course of a largely volunteer-run club in a small steeltown in which football means so much to the people there amidst the pressures of global soccer capitalism is a fascinating story. On top of that, the little town houses Sweden's only football museum. A little audio tour is included in the episode.

I think this hour and 20 minutes will be enough for you to find your sentimental favorite among European professional teams.
HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

There is extremely little beyond results, the odd international transfer news etc. on the club that is in English. Nevertheless:
30 Photos from my visit to Degerfors
Degerfors IF (official website, Swedish)
Degerfors Football Museum (Facebook, Swedish)
Degerfors Football Museum (Värmland tourism site, English)
Heja röda vita laget (Come on red-white team, Degerfors hymn, Youtube)
Degerfors hymn by Blakk Petter and Rob Inc., heard at the end of the episode (Youtube)
("The Alternative/Countermodell), article by Gabriel Kuhn, also known from this podcast, in German. Analyse und Kritik, 5/17/22.

NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or signup)

Recommend The Assistant Professor of Football. Spreading the word, through word of mouth, truly does help.
Leave some rating stars at the podcast platform of your choice. There are so many sports podcasts out there, and only ratings make this project visible; only then can people who look for a different kind of take on European soccer actually find me.