ABSTRACT
For many, football is at its core a game about space. Indeed Johan Cruyff, one of the greatest players of the postwar era, was called ‘Pythagoras in boots’. And yet, although analysts and observers have long commented on the use of space by the players on the pitch, far less critical attention has been paid to the nature of the designed space in which that activity takes place: the stadium. Likewise, many historians of sport and historians of architecture have neglected the architecture of stadiums as a site for inquiry. This article mines the intertwined social practices of sport and architecture in order to understand how the visual iconography of the stadiums are deployed to define urban, national, and sporting identity.
