Creating a United Europe of Football

The Formation of UEFA (1949–1961)

Philippe Vonnard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030423421
• eBook ISBN: 9783030423438
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a historical study of the beginnings of the UEFA, demonstrating how the formation of the organisation was linked to the decentralisation experienced by FIFA, the world governing body of football. Vonnard examines why administrators created an association that transcended the barriers of the Cold War, andfocused on the development of a network that promoted football outside the constraints of international politics. Finally, he emphasises the role UEFA played in the Europeanisation of the people's game, and in the early years of the European integration process.

The research is based on a rich body of new archival material from the UEFA and FIFA Documentation Centres, and various European football federations, as well as reports from a number of leading newspapers of the era, and interviews with football personalities of the 1950s. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the history of sport, international relations, and European studies

© The Author(s) 2020

P. VonnardCreating a United Europe of Football Football Research in an Enlarged Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42343-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Philippe Vonnard¹

(1)

University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland

Philippe Vonnard

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

‘Creating a United Europe of Football’. These words were pronounced by the Swiss football leader, Ernst Thommen, at the beginning of a congress held in Basel in June 1954 among 27 European football national associations that came from all parts of Europe. The goal of this meeting was to create a European body. For Thommen, football leaders had the opportunity to give an example to European citizens because—as I will describe later in detail—while other European organisations were founded in the fields of economy, culture, sciences and telecommunication during the same period, these bodies were composed of countries that came from Western Europe or were ‘neutral’ in international relations (like Switzerland). Thus, the will to create a pan-European body in football was something special and had the potential not only to impact the administration of the game, but more generally the European integration process.

More than sixty years after this congress, every season around 300 men’s and women’s football clubs from all over Europe take part in European competitions, playing a total of over 500 matches. In addition, each national team plays around ten official or friendly games each year, not counting the finals of the European Championship (known as the Euro), which take place every four years. These professional competitions have created a true football tourism sector, due to the thousands of fans who readily travel hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres to see their club or national team play. However, this movement of people is not restricted to professional football, as many youth teams and amateur clubs also play international matches. What is more, most international matches involving professional teams are broadcast live and innumerable television programmes cover European professional football on an almost daily basis. Additional movements of people—mostly players and coaches—but also of capital and data on players (through the media and private statistics agencies) occur during the transfer market’s two ‘transfer windows’, from June to August and from December to January. Therefore, saying that exchanges within European football are substantial is a massive understatement.

It was considerations such as these that led Manuel Schotté to claim: ‘while the national level has historically been the main factor in structuring football in Europe, the European level has gradually become very important’ (freely translated from the French, 2014, p. 14). Football does, indeed, have a unique place within Europe, leading scholars to suggest that it could play a key role in creating a European identity (Sonntag 2008a)¹ or a European public space (Sonntag 2008b; Kennedy 2017),² with some going as far as considering European club competitions (such as the Champions League) a European ‘site of memory’ (Groll 2015).

1.1 Why Study the Relationship Between Football and Europe?

Interestingly, although European football³ has been beset by frequent scandals (violence between supporters, rigged betting, corruption, illegal transfers of players, match-fixing, corrupt referees, etc.), they have not affected the popularity of European matches or threatened the existence of European competitions. This is even more surprising given the scepticism towards European integration currently prevalent in many countries of the Old Continent (Wassenberg et al. 2010; Bouillaud 2014). However, as Andy Smith (2001) noted in the early 2000s, just because football fans follow European competitions, it does not mean they endorse the idea of creating a Europe-wide political community. William Gasparini (2017) recently made a similar point when he suggested that claims concerning football’s ability to build closer relations between Europe and its citizens should be treated with circumspection. Nevertheless, because European football competitions repeatedly bring to life the idea of a united Europe, analyses of European integration must take their effects into account, especially given the fact that integration processes have been ‘both more numerous and quite different from the major post-war political projects such as the European Community’ (freely translated from the French, Rask Madsen [2008, p. 9]). It was this realisation that led Laurent Warlouzet to prefer the expression ‘history of European cooperations’, which he believes does more ‘justice to the profound reassessment of the history of European integration over the last two decades’ (freely translated from the French, Warlouzet [2014, p. 116]), over the term ‘European integration’.

My focus on the history of European football is part of this shift in perspective. In fact, three characteristics of football make it an interesting starting point from which to examine the history of European cooperation. These characteristics are not unique to football, but they are exemplified by it.

First, football is extremely popular throughout Europe and innumerable matches involving teams from different European countries are played every year. As Weill (2011) found, the game interests a large proportion of Europeans, including the working classes, who know and understand the driving forces behind football exchanges.⁴ In this respect, football is similar to fields such as technology (Badenoch and Fickers 2010; Laborie 2010) and culture (Fleury and Jilek 2009; Mikkonen and Koivunen 2015), which directly impact a large part of the continent’s population almost every day—even more than the European institutions in Brussels (Broad and Kansikas, forthcoming).

Football’s second characteristic is that it quickly became structured around a supranational competitive framework. Although international tournaments for clubs and national teams—most of which were created in the 1920s (Quin 2016; Vonnard 2019a)—soon became occasions for heightened nationalism and provided an international stage on which states could demonstrate their power (e.g. Archambault et al. 2016), it was only possible to create these competitions because their participants agreed to follow standardised rules. This argument is often wielded by promoters of international football competitions (sport leaders, journalists, even politicians), who maintain that sport can help create bridges between peoples (Kissoudi 2003). Despite the somewhat utopian nature of this view, football undeniably offers many opportunities for bringing together clubs or national teams from countries that are widely separated geographically, and sometimes politically (Vonnard and Marston 2017, Dietschy 2020a, b).

Third, European football is administered by non-governmental organisations that have grown in importance over the years. World football’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which was created in 1904 (Eisenberg et al. 2004), authorises (or not) matches between national teams and draws up binding regulatory frameworks for organising these matches. Because it is FIFA’s rules that govern international football, even states—which began trying to politicise the game during the interwar years (Macon 2007)—must take heed of FIFA. FIFA is composed of national football associations, with each country being represented by a single association (Sugden and Tomlinson 1998). Some governments, especially totalitarian regimes that held sway over their country’s football association, have attempted to use this to their advantage. However, FIFA’s ruling elite⁵ tries to ignore the constraints of international politics, a stance that was also adopted by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) when it was founded in 1954. Remaining (as far as possible) outside world politics allows both FIFA and UEFA to view football as an intermediary for encouraging international dialogue and to promote the idea that the innumerable international exchanges fostered by football can create closer ties between peoples. In addition, as non-governmental organisations, they provide forums in which national associations can come together, talk and, in some circumstances, create alliances which international politics would otherwise render impossible.

These factors show the value of looking more closely at the dynamics underlying the current structure of European football, which emerged between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. The present research focuses on this pivotal period in establishing European football exchanges and asks whether the development of this structure was inevitable given the political and footballing context of the time.

1.2 Football in Europe: A Historical Perspective

The long history of exchanges in European football has been widely studied over the past 30 years, most notably by historians such as Pierre Lanfranchi (1991, 1998, 2002), who set the ball rolling with a now-seminal piece of research in which he highlighted the cosmopolitanism of the men who spread the game across Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His pioneering work was quickly followed by studies examining the transnational careers of several major figures in football (mainly players and coaches, e.g., Poli 2004; Taylor 2010), which, in turn, paved the way for analyses of other aspects of European football, most notably the creation and development of supranational competitions. Examples include studies of the Mittel-Europa (Mitropa) Cup for clubs, which ran from 1927 to 1938, the Balkans Cup and the International Cup for Nations—which were set up between the two world wars (Mittag 2007; Vonnard 2019a). As well as providing regular opportunities for exchanges between clubs and national football associations, most of which were created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these tournaments led to greater movement across Europe by all of football’s stakeholders, including players, coaches, journalists and even supporters (Vonnard 2018a, see Chapter 1). These competitions also helped popularise the game among national audiences and spread information about football between nations thanks to early and widespread coverage by both the specialist press, which emerged during the 1920s, and the generalist press. For example, although the Mitropa Cup was created for clubs from Austria, Hungary, Italy and Czechoslovakia (with occasional participation by clubs from Romania, Switzerland and Yugoslavia), it was covered by sports newspapers as far afield as Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, which did not have teams in the competition. The longevity of these European football exchanges led Paul Dietschy to suggest there was a ‘Europe of football’, whose beginnings could be traced back to the Belle Époque (Dietschy 2016) and which was consolidated during the interwar years (Dietschy 2015). Christian Koller did not use the same terms as Dietschy, but he also considered the period from 1919 to 1939 to be a turning point in establishing different types of football exchanges—economic, institutional, even political—across the continent (Koller 2009).

Although many European football competitions have existed since the first quarter of the last century, the dynamics of European football appear to have reached a new level during the 1950s, reflected in the creation of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup (Vonnard 2014). This period was also when Europe’s football associations came together to form a governing body for European football, thereby contributing to what Robert Frank (2004) called the ‘Europe-organisation’ process in which supranational bodies were set up in a wide variety of fields (culture, economics, politics, science, sport, technology, etc.) in order to promote exchanges across Europe. Despite large differences in their size, geographical extent, objectives and social impact, the creation of all these bodies reflects an era favourable to creating connections across Europe. In football, the result was UEFA, which was founded in 1954 and quickly became a ‘key player’ (Keys 2006, p. 5) in developing Europe-wide competitions, programmes and discussions.

In its first five years, UEFA greatly increased the number of international matches played within Europe by launching European competitions for clubs (European Champion Clubs’ Cup; European Cup Winners’ Cup), nations (European Cup of Nations) and young players (International Youth Tournament). Unlike the events held between the two world wars, these tournaments were open to the vast majority of European countries. They were also highly popular with the public, partly thanks to extensive media coverage that included special sections in major sports newspapers. In addition, the second half of the 1950s saw the start of television coverage of European football matches, thanks to the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Eurovision network, formed in 1954 (Meyer 2016). Thus, the creation of UEFA coincided with significant changes in European football and led to a new phase in its development.

1.3 Historical Studies of UEFA: State of Play

Although the literature on UEFA is relatively abundant, it is mostly the work of economists, management specialists and sociologists, who have addressed specific aspects of the organisation from the 1990s to the present.⁶ In contrast, historical studies of UEFA are rare, as are more general studies of European football between 1950 and 1990, and the few studies covering these decades have focused mostly on the creation of European competitions (e.g., Mittag and Legrand 2010; Dietschy 2017).

Europe’s first continent-wide club competition, the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, was designed to bring together the winners of each country’s league. The original idea for the competition had come from a group of journalists at L’Équipe (Montérémal 2007; Vonnard 2014), but it was UEFA that brought the idea to fruition and ensured the tournament’s longevity. UEFA also organised the competition and expanded its reach beyond the area envisaged by the French journalists by including countries such as East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania. Finally, UEFA took steps to increase the competition’s popularity, most notably accepting television coverage of the event, albeit minimal at first, via the Eurovision network (Vonnard 2016). Details of the first broadcasting contract were agreed during a meeting between UEFA’s leaders and the EBU in 1956 (Mittag and Nieland 2013; Vonnard and Laborie 2019). Hence, within a few months of its creation, when it was still a very modest entity (it did not have a fixed headquarters or a paid, full-time secretary), UEFA was already playing a leading role in organising and popularising European football.

As noted at the beginning of this section, the literature covering UEFA’s foundation and early development is sparse, but it provides precious information on the chronology of events and the main protagonists. First, the three books produced to mark the organisation’s 25th, 50th and 60th anniversaries (Rothenbuehler 1979, 2005; Vieli 2016) describe UEFA’s development, its activities and the actions taken by its leading executives. Laurent Barcelo’s (2007) interesting paper gives further details of UEFA’s history, including its foundation, membership and activities, although it is a purely descriptive account that does not really explain why UEFA was founded and why it became such an important player so quickly. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. The road to creating a governing body for European football. 1949–1953.
• Part II. Unifying European Football 1954–1961
• Back Matter