The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
The academic treatment for English-speakers who get that soccer is more than gamedays, stars and goals. Who wonder about the histories, subcultures and politics that make the game so different from many American sports cultures; and who care about a critical take on soccer as a global capitalist machine. A European-guided journey, with one expert "visiting professor" each episode.
The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
Part 1 – The Heart of St. Pauli, or: What Should We Then Sing? Soccer Clubs, Museums, and the Work of Remembering
This is the first part of a two-part episode.
We will start at FC St. Pauli, now in the German Bundesliga, at the club’s museum which has very active researchers, and we’ll end at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and the bigger question of what right remembering looks like in professional soccer - and what it can look like. We will take that journey with no less than 3 guests: Celina Albertz, a researcher and also in the curating team of the FC St. Pauli Museum; Sönke Goldbeck, Board chair and director of the museum, and Felipe Tobar, Assistant Professor in the Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management Department at Clemson Universit in South Carolina and founder of the Football Studies youtube channel. He is also the mastermind of a new documentary on public memory and football, which we will also talk about.
Part 1 is mostly concernedwith the research on the famous St. Pauli matchday song "Das Herz von St. Pauli" ("The Heart of St. Pauli"), and the discussion started by Celina's research into the composer, lyricist and performer of that song. Part 2 funnels out from there to larger questions of soccer, research and remembering, and features Felipe more heavily.
If you want to know more about FC St. Pauli and what makes the club special, especially to this podcast, listen in to episode 26, from 2023, when I talked with two social workers that are employed by the club. Felipe Tobar has also been here before, he has talked about his work and research in episode 31, last february.
HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Das Herz von St. Pauli sung in the Millerntor Stadium (YouTube video)
Deutsche Welle report on the song and its roots, with Celina's research
Felipe Tobar's documentary, "The Match That not Every Club Wants to Play" (YouTube, Football Studies channel)
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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/