Football as Living History
Football as Living History

Summary/Abstract: This book is both compelling sports reading and a guidebook, a political snapshot taken from a good distance and a life story. It would hardly have come into existence in this form had the author not spent a holiday with his parents in Yugoslavia quite a few years ago, and had he not felt, based on his special experiences and adventures, the same way as the author of this review felt when he was a small child. The work of author Jonathan Wilson recalls this world, this sentiment, this run-down but still colourful socialist milieu: the Eastern Bloc behind the Soviet-dominated Iron Curtain – which had to take an unknown path following the collapse of the regime. And yet, it is very difficult to write such a book. Primarily because, just as it was easy to track the state-dominated structure of sports and football in the former communist countries, the system by which the Soviet Union and its satellites demonstrated their grandeur, like a clenched fist, against the “highly developed West,” so it is difficult to paint a picture of the depths of the transformation, the “abuses” – let us use this term – that came together with the sudden advent of freedom and democracy. And there is no shortage of these abuses. On the one hand, the real question is in what way the situation is different when (using a Ukrainian analogy) the leader of the communist party calls a small club on the phone saying “your midfielder will be on our team from tomorrow,” from a situation where a business magnate calls saying “for some extra money, he will be on our team tomorrow.” However, we can identify some conspicuously crucial points concerning the features of the world after the political changes: by way of example, there is the emergence or resurrection of nationalism and bursts of anti-Semitism. It is hard to imagine Croatian football fans back then holding up banners with legends like: “Thank you, God, that my wife is not Jewish or Serbian!”[…] (Jonathan Wilson: Behind the Curtain – Travels in Eastern European Football, Orion, London, 2006.)

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