Association football culture
As a football culture in both the intellectual, often feuilletonist employment with football is referred to, as well as, cultural studies influenced, cultural phenomena that are associated with football and Fanwesen, there are rituals, chants, pop songs, football photography, football movies or football literature. The football culture can pop culture be assigned.
Formation
Football was ridiculed for a long time by representatives of an elite high culture as a primitive pastime of the uneducated or even criticizes " bottom-up" for political reasons, such as distracting than bread and circuses, that is as banal pastime, the underprivileged of political commitment. The (often left-wing) political writers of the 1920s, of which not a few busy with sports and the internals often subjects from the sport in their works, preferred as Brecht and Walter Mehring the boxing and cycling.
The actual origin of the football culture began in the 1980s, when on the one hand cultural workers, leftists and consequently journalists thus began as a phenomenon beyond platter ideologies to discover football beyond banal sports coverage in all its everyday diversity and, as well as in music independent football fanzines emerged. For breakthrough in Germany football culture helped, among other things the writer Ror Wolf with his football texts, the New Frankfurt School writers, pop theorist from the environment of the magazine Spex and the journalist Helmut Böttiger. The final breakthrough into the mainstream meant the novel Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.
Background
The advent of pop- culture as well as football as an intellectual phenomenon is always associated with the decline of the political. Since left and right the world could no longer explain, you tried here, as already Roland Barthes and others had demonstrated it to pull out of small things, the everyday, the mundane, explanations for the world. Typical of this analysis by Klaus Theweleit ( 2004): " Where is the connection between 50 % turnout and 100 % Fußballgequassel? ( ...) With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the old Eastern Bloc societies [ was ] here taken many people a spiritual field of activity or theoretical pitch (...), that is for whatever strange reason, replaced by an immense amount public football. (...) He stuffs obviously some holes. The immense intellectualization of football grant would support this thesis. To know the people three decades ago still well in various ways to the Chinese revolution, comment versed today the displacements of the footballing conflict situation. Zidane would be something like the updated Lenin, a unverfänglicherer especially. The discussion about Pressing and moving were the discussions of the "right moment" of the right of political action. ( While you let the politicians their botch, where you can not change anything but make it. ) "
Importance
Authors such as Christoph Biermann and Dirk Schümer have enforced the intellectual involvement with football for some time even in quality newspapers like the Süddeutsche and the FAZ. Leading theorists such as Klaus Theweleit deal with the phenomenon, and in the wake of the success of the magazines The deadly pass and 11 friends are more football magazine was founded " with claim ". Even in film, literature, even in the theater, it is now commonplace to seriously deal with football - as in academia. There is disagreement, especially in the fan scene, the extent to which this cultural shift of employment with football not lead to gentrification of the sport, a development that is associated with targeting to other target groups, increased ticket prices at the stadiums, the fans from low income strata displaced from the stadiums.
Since 2004, a forum for dealing with issues of the connecting lines between football and culture of the German Academy for football culture based in Nuremberg.