ABSTRACT
Football’s conquest of Europe was already well under way as the twentieth century dawned. Born in England, the modern game first became professional there in the 1880s. Other countries saw the emergence of professional football somewhat later but precise dates are unreliable since professionalism was generally preceded by a period of unregulated amateurism and semi-professionalism. There was no national organization of football in France, for instance, until 1919, where professionalism was eventually openly recognized in 1932. In Spain, a national league was established in 1927-28 as professionalism became officially accepted. In Italy football turned professional in 1929. In Germany, political changes curtailed the nascent professionalism in the early 1930s and the national professional Bundesliga was not established until 1962, despite the foundation of the German FA back in 1900 (Hesse-Lichtenberger 2002: 62). Football, then, was professionalized across Europe at different stages in its development, often reflecting the social, historical and political contexts within which it was played (Wagg 1995) and meeting varying degrees of resistance or indigenization. As the socio-economic value of football (and sport more generally) to Europe increased, so did its coverage in the media. Indeed, such is the attention paid to all aspects of football today (from the coverage of matches on television, radio and newspapers, to pre-and post-match analyses, endless radio phone-ins, text alerts on mobile phones, fans’ fora on the Internet and tabloid gossip about footballers’ private lives) in the ever-multiplying media available to consumers that commentators talk now of over-saturation. This has not always been the case, however, and in our analysis of the print media in major European football nations over the last century, which is the subject of the present study, we have been able to track the development in terms of the burgeoning attention paid to football in the newspapers in our sample and, more interestingly, its rôle in the construction of national identities.
