Introduction

In their introduction, the editors discuss an antisemitic incident in the Olympic stadium in Rome and its repercussions in order to prove their point that stadiums are spaces of political discourse and that football is everything else but apolitical. In their survey of the articles presented in the volume, they insist on the necessity to look at the broader societal discourses and countermeasures that accompany the phenomenon of hate speech and discrimination in football. A perspective on football stadiums as contested spaces opens up the possibility of observing, analyzing, and eventually better understanding ressentiment and (anti-)discrimination in this specific environment, and discusses football’s relation to the societies around it.