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

Eurovision has many things that soccer does - underdogs, spectacular collapses, bloc loyalties, political scores settled through performance, and a continent watching the same spectacle at the same time. And this year, the Eurovision Song Contest, a live-for-TV music contest with continent-wide public voting, is happening in Vienna, this coming weekend. Why there? Austria won it last year. Here is a primer of, a short debate about, and a quiz about the Song Contest. And an outlook on how this...

This is PART 2 of a two-part episode. The 1st part aired two weeks ago, and is the most recent on on the Assistant Professor of Football. Please add a like, a comment, a star rating or spread the word by mouth! I was a little starstruck when David Goldblatt showed up on my screen today. His books have done very well for very good reason. You may have read The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football or The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football. David is a sociologis...

It's a fall of unrest in East London again. Hammers United, the largest organized fan group at West Ham United, has so far refrained from calling on members of the board or the CEO to resign. Until now. They have launched the campaign "No More BS," targetted specifically at CEO Karen Brady, the B, and chairman David Sullivan, the S. Beyond leafleting, black balloons or protest marches before games, Hammers United are for the first time calling for a match boycott, at West Ham’s next home game...

This is Part 2 of an unusual episode, on the move through countries, memories, wounds, war, peace and the beautiful game. Sturm Graz is and was a workers club when I came to the club in the 90s, one year before Ivica Osim arrived. We knew he was a mathematician, soccer player and coach, and he knew workers clubs, from Željezničar, in Grbavica, back home in Sarajevo, the city then under a yearlong siege in the Bosnian independence wars. But he added something else. To him, the game was discour...

Damiano Benzoni, Italian journalist and seasoned groundhopper, has written a wonderful book - an "emotive map of football in Berlin," a rich portrait of a city through the eyes of football. And when that city happens to be the German capital, torn by wars, shaped by the dvide between two Germanies and various migrant influences, the texture of such a book happens to be particularly interesting. The book, for now, is available only in Italien, so consider this an English language exclusive. We...

With Ana Ascencao e Silva, Eva Lotta Bohle, Andy Payne, Alex Kirby, Paul Reidy, Wayne Gamble, Christopher Hylland - on their club's or cause's season, what happened since we talked, and what the outlook is like at the moment. Plus, each guest picked one song - well, except Eva Lotta, who picked two. Union St. Gill, Arminia Bielefeld, West Ham, Rayo Vallecano, Leeds United, Argentina NEW: send me a text message! (I'd love to hear your thoughts - texts get to me anonymously, without charge or...

Gabriel Kuhn is an Austrian writer and researcher who works for the Central Organization of Swedish Workers - and sat for an in-person interview (he has been on before when we talked about his wonderful book Soccer vs the State in 2023.) In this episode, we time travel to "red Vienna" in the 1920s, to talk about how antifascism, organized workers' sports, the professionalization of soccer and sobriety intersected then, and what promise they can hold for the present. Our baseline is the ...