For the past twenty-five years or so, historians have gradually chipped away at the once terrifying image of the communist dictatorship in East Germany. The picture of an all-powerful state whose intelligence services penetrated even the most intimate areas of personal and private life has been replaced with a more nuanced one in which the government's power over its people was often limited, contested, and, at times, even negotiated. The People's Game continues this trend through a close examination of the world's most popular sport in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Viewed from a variety of perspectives—those of the teams, players, and fans, as well as that of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) bureaucracy—McDougall paints a picture of a disordered and frustrated regime that was neither able to use soccer for its project of building a socialist society, nor capable of erasing its popularity. What resulted, then, was a hesitant dance between state and society, in which soccer was alternately a place for building national identity, a site of resistance to communist ideology, and a space that proved remarkably resistant to politicization of any sort.

McDougall's book makes three key arguments. First, it holds that soccer provided a medium for non-socialist expressions of identity. Borrowing from Alf Lüdtke's notion of Eigen-Sinn, McDougall presents a picture of a stubborn population that refused to adopt an exclusively socialist or East German form of self-identification. Instead, McDougall argues that individuals asserted their own local, regional, and (pan-German) national identities by rooting for West German teams or by placing the needs of their own local clubs above the idea of an East German national good. Second, McDougall argues that soccer “exposed in unique ways the limits and dysfunctionality of the SED dictatorship” (29). Unlike its sharp control over and support for most performance sports like gymnastics, swimming, skating, or boxing, the SED was never able to bend soccer to its will. The game's propensity for making celebrities out of individual players and its tendency toward cosmopolitanism always made it suspect in the eyes of the regime. Moreover, this bureaucratic frustration and sense of mistrust increased because of the nature of the sport itself, which was difficult to police and control. Their desirability in the Bundesliga made soccer players potential candidates for Republikflucht (defection to the West), and soccer stadiums represented a relatively safe environment for conversations and actions that were otherwise not permissible. For instance, GDR citizens could protest against the state secret police (Stasi) by criticizing the soccer club it sponsored; the singing or chanting of anti-Berlin slogans during matches were similarly an expression of critical attitudes toward the regime. In response to these threats, the SED adopted a clumsy approach that tolerated but never really embraced soccer.

The People's Game also asserts that soccer “was a liminal activity, at once dependent on the centralized state and detached from it” (30). During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, soccer actually provided politically disinterested workers with a means of contributing to the construction of socialism, most notably by allowing them to volunteer to help build municipal stadiums. Yet, by the 1980s, the failure of the state to modernize these facilities, and the general level of corruption present in the highest leagues (the Stasi-sponsored Berliner FC Dynamo won ten straight league titles from 1979–1988, often with the help of questionable refereeing), led to growing disenchantment with the regime on the part of many of these same workers.

McDougall's thoroughly researched book laudably looks at the world's most popular sport from a wide range of perspectives. Alongside chapters on the East German national team, the leading club teams, hooliganism, and the players themselves, there is an examination of women's soccer, which is often overlooked in the literature, as well as of fan culture and spectatorship. McDougall also reminds us that the popularity of soccer extended beyond its professional expression, and that it was, in some ways, the amateur variant of the game that proved to be the most resistant to the construction of socialism. Simply put, “the game was a site for ordinary social relations, building friendships, and sharing experiences” (252), and this made it an extraordinarily problematic space for the SED to control.

There are many funny and surprising anecdotes in the book as well. For example, we tend to think that the relocation of teams is a product of present-day capitalism, but The People's Game explains that the SED routinely moved teams for political and personal reasons. In 1954, for example, the defending champion, Dynamo Dresden, was moved to Berlin midseason simply to give the capital city a better team, which was rechristened SC Dynamo Berlin. Such wholesale transfers of teams were not always successful, as in the case of the Saxon team BSG Wismut Aue, whose fans (mostly miners in the uranium industry) foiled an attempted move to Karl-Marx-Stadt/Chemnitz by threatening to strike. In the end, the regime came up with the odd compromise of renaming the team SC Wismut Karl-Marx-Stadt, though it continued to play in Aue. All in all, this in an excellent and entertaining piece of scholarship that should interest historians of the former GDR, sports history, and soccer enthusiasts alike.