The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History. - Teaching Soccer: Three Actual Professors of Football on their College Classes, and Soccer Literacy in the U.S.

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

06/02/23 • 98 min

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

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)

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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/

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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

California Dreamin': Who is Wacker Innsbruck, the new Austrian Partner of Los Angeles FC?

This April, an unlikely press release made headlines in Major League Soccer- as well as Austrian soccer-related media: Los Angeles FC, reigning MLS champion and barely 9 years old, noted that they had “officially received approval to invest with the Austrian club FC Wacker Innsbruck,” the “living legend” that the song we just heard, Wacker Innsbruck’s anthem, speaks of. Benny Tran, one of LAFC’s vice presidents went to Innsbruck and described Wacker as having a “110 year old history and legendary fans” and promised to “return the Club to top-level, winning football.” He also promised Wacker’s fans and members, who own the majority of the club and will continue to, that their name, badge and colors would remain untouched.

The story sounds strange enough for an MLS club, period, but it becomes even stranger if we consider that, eight now, Wacker plays in Austria’s 4th tier. And for all its illustrious past, including championships and cup titles, Wacker’s last decades have been marked by more downs than ups, bankruptcies that technically don’t make the club 110 years old, and a total of three failed attempts to revive its fortunes with (supposedly) rich investors on board.

The “legendary fans” part is certainly true though. Innsbruck has the oldest and one of the most loyal active fan-cultures in Austria, a reputation for spectacular tifo, and would not exist at all anymore were it not for its most important stakeholders: it’s fan-members. So how does an MLS team, from a very different soccer culture, fit in here? And how to explain this beloved but chaotic 4th league club from the Alps to American soccer fans?

For one hour, Christian Hummer, life-long active Wacker fan, sports psychologist and one of the editor’s of Wacker’s only fan-run media, sat down to attempt some answers to these questions after sketching the club’s turbulent history over the last decades.

HELPFUL NOTES FOR THIOS EPISODE:
"Die Legende lebt!" ("The Legend lives," Wacker Innsbruck's club anthem. Youtube video with historical scenes)
FC Tirol championship song, 1988. Youtube.
Los Angeles FC press release, 4/14/2023
tivoli12.at, Wacker's fan-based online media that Chris works for

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

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

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

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.