The three works reviewed here employ very different methodologies to developments in different contexts of time and place. The first brings art history and sport history together in a transnational analysis of workers’ sport spectacles in interwar Frankfurt am Main, Vienna, Moscow, Prague, Budapest, and Berlin. The second is a local history of the former Soviet city of Kirov and its football team. The third is an ethnographic study of another town and another football team located in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The one thing that they share is centering sport in their analysis and in European developments of the twentieth century. Taken together, they demonstrate the potential of sport to serve as a lens on various aspects of modern European society.

Przemysław Strożek analyzes the visual representations surrounding the socialist Workers’ Olympics and communist Spartakiads planned or held by Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International (LSI/SWSI) and Red Sport International (RSI) respectively. As Strożek notes, both athletic events “were always accompanied by propaganda posters and art in the public space, printed ephemera and official guides, workers’ photography, photomontages, films and theatrical performances, which reinforced the role of sport as the largest cultural movement of the working class” (4–5). Along with embracing the “cultural and visual turn in the field of sport history” through visual analysis of these cultural artifacts, Strożek examines the written work of sports officials through the major newspapers and journals of the worker’s movement, including those covering workers’ sport, photography, physical training, art, and other elements of worker culture. As he avers, “the workers’ sport movement regarded sport as an integral part of the labor movement, a legitimate form of political activity connected to mass participation in physical culture and mass spectatorship” (3). Strożek shows that many of the works of art and culture surrounding the Worker’s Olympics and Spartakiads were created by leftist modernist and avant-garde artists who participated in international and transnational movements of workers’ culture, including literature, theater, photography, and film. Like their peers in the workers’ sport world, these artists saw physical culture and sport as an important avenue for the creation of a New Man (and New Woman) who would take center stage in a new social order. Usually “depicted either naked, half-naked or clothed in a sports uniform, either with sport equipment, or with a hammer, or strict military equipment (as in the case of RSI),” these New Men appeared as allegorical figures drawn from ancient myth and history, like Hephaestus or Spartacus, “placed variably against a background of red flags, stadiums, and natural environments, and were depicted as fighting fascism (in Frankfurt), represented as a mythological titan (in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Prague), a fearless person breaking the laws of gravity (in Moscow and Vienna), a hurdler who overcomes obstacles both in sport and daily life (in Moscow and Berlin), and a soldier in the upcoming revolution (in Moscow, Prague, and Berlin)” (204–5). Artists in both groups also embraced photography and photomontage as an essential instrument for propagandizing and documenting the workers’ movement that brought worker athletes into the construction of a “new proletarian culture and art for the proletarian masses” (6).

The late professor emeritus at the University of South Alabama, Larry Holmes, takes a more traditional historical approach in his Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985. Building upon his groundbreaking work in the local archives of Kirov, Holmes situates the Kirov Dinamo football club within the broader developments of Soviet football. Holmes poured through archives at the local, regional and national level, including materials related to the Kirov regional soviet and sports committee, correspondence with the USSR’s Sports Committee, located in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and Central Committee documents housed in the Russian State Archive for Contemporary History (RGANI), as well as local press to trace the history of Kirov Dinamo. He argues that this history “illustrates at the regional level much about the nature and place of professional sports in the USSR. In particular, Dinamo’s story reveals an obsession by clubs and their sponsors with winning at any cost and a concomitant exercise of political power in the late Soviet Union to make it so” (11). To be competitive in Soviet football, clubs offered perks and privileges to talented players. Successful teams could also rely on funding from the regional and national sports bureaucracies, as well as avoid being scapegoated for breaches of regulations meant to curtail the massive spending on athletes. Losing teams risked being cut off from state funding and sanctions, possible disbanding, by the regional sports committee. In the case of Kirov Dinamo, the team’s administrators were able to beg and borrow enough money to build a winning team that made it to the First League for two seasons. Unable to sustain such expenditures, the team fell out of the First League, the team’s management was scrutinized for mismanagement of funds, and while the team avoided disbandment, Kirov Dinamo was never able to recover from the loss of financial backing. Tracing the history of this particular team, Holmes’ work serves as a case study in the corruption that was endemic in the late Soviet Union.

The Croat Fortress and the Cave Dwellers: Nationalism, Identity and Football in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Massimiliano Maidano and Gary Armstrong serves as both a history of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) and an ethnography of Široki Brijeg, its local football club Široki Brijeg NK, and the team’s ultras fan group the Škripari (Cave Dwellers), named after a pro-Ustashe Croatian guerilla militia of that name. The book explores the role of football in identity formation in BiH following the Bosnian War, or Homeland War as the country’s Croats refer to it. Maidano spent twenty months engaged in “deep ‘hanging out’” with members of the Škripari, attending football matches with them and engaging in conversations at the clubhouse and at local pubs (44, 50). In addition, “the researcher attended football matches but also bars, music concerts, basketball games, places of worship, parties and celebratory dinners thereby driving ethnography to understand how mainstream society influenced the ideology of the town and football club and vice-versa” (52). Maidano also spoke with charity shop and other business owners, parents of the Škripari, politicians–including the town mayor, veterans and soldiers, Franciscan clerics, members of the SBNK women’s team, female students and older women of the town, as well as town members with no specific connection or interest in football. The authors grounded the ethnographical data in a detailed analysis of anthropological and sociological theory. Seeking to “[locate] the significance of a football club in a town celebrated as a fortress, in a nation the citizens of that town did not recognise,” Maidano and Armstrong argue that “both emotionally and geographically central to the town, SBNK was more than a football club. Like most football clubs it serves as a gathering to promote the exchange of ideas, and it builds networks, but more importantly in the context of SB it is the most visible entity where BiH-Croatian ethno-political sentiments were manifest” (142). In this way, events surrounding Široki Brijeg NK and the Škripari have become a key vehicle for the articulation of Herzegovina-Croat identity. Maidano and Armstrong assert that “the Škripari were facilitators of collective claims to both truth and cultural identity in proclamations and chants that could draw on both a sense of defiance and a celebration of defence” (164) of the town and of Croat culture; historically against allied forces, communists, Serbs, and Bosniaks during the Second World War and the Bosnian War; religiously against the secular communist state as well as the rival Orthodox and Muslim faiths; and currently against “the contemporary hostile warriors as represented by the lawyer, the accountant and the bureaucrat who personify that perceived as the hostile state emanating from Sarajevo” (354). For the Škripari that defensive stance is evidenced through hostile, at times, violent actions surrounding football matches, rooted in a sense of victimhood as an oppressed ethnic minority in a multi-ethnic, post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Taken together the three works reviewed here highlight the potential and the limitations of sport as a force for radical social and political transformation. Strożek’s avant-garde and modernist artists as well as socialist and communist officials saw the potential of sport to be the vanguard of a workers’ culture that would engage the working class and unite them across national boundaries in the struggle against capitalism. However, as he notes, the cultural programs attached to the socialist and communist games never reached the level of engagement as those of the “bourgeois” Olympics they sought to combat. Additionally, the more moderate modernist artists who supported the LSI/SWSI Workers’ Olympics tended to be less radical in their artistic break from traditional forms. In fact much of the art and several of the artists associated with the First Workers’ Olympics in 1925 in Frankfurt would later be associated with the “Nazi Olympics” in 1936 in Berlin. For the Workers’ Olympics mass spectacles similar to the RSI sponsored Spartakiad were staged, but the themes evoked the ancient world and German classicism, like the mass theater production staged in the stadium modeled after an ancient Greek theater, which ended with the singing of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the entrance of a figure holding a burning torch in reference to the Olympic flame (33). The cultural program surrounding the first Workers’ Olympics likewise represented “a very traditional offering” of music from Joseph Haydn and operas like Carmen and Die Fledermaus (34). At the Second Workers’ Olympics in 1931 in “Red Vienna,” more traditional sculpture and painting depicting sport themes adorned the city, while the visual reporting of the event used workers’ photography and photo-montage not only “to document daily life, but also to express political and social thought in the form of photographic images” (76). For the avant-garde artists associated with RSI and the Spartakiads, workers’ photography and photo-montage became a staple of depictions of sports events as “the camera was to function here as an objective apparatus, and the photographs taken by workers were to fulfil the essential function of documenting the life of the proletariat and visually expressing its aspirations” (184). However, the reach of RSI was limited, as those in power feared the growing influence of communism and sought to curtail their activities, banning their sports festivals and undermining their propaganda efforts. Even in the Soviet Union, the more radical designs and initiatives of the avant-garde did not meet with the approval of Soviet authorities, especially once socialist realism became the only approved artistic style under Iosif Stalin (110).

Ultimately, the project of creating a new type of socialist sport remained unrealized. The Kirov Dinamo team emerged at a time when the nascent Soviet state sought a socialist alternative to “bourgeois” sport, but by the early 1930s, professionalism had taken over Soviet football as clubs sought the best players by awarding them “fictional jobs, bonuses, and other benefits to include apartments or rooms in a hotel rather than in the dormitory” (Holmes, 30). After World War II, the impetus to “win or else,” as Holmes notes, meant that teams who scored records and victories received more funding, and preferential treatment in the arbitrary enforcement of rules against transfer, while losing teams were cut off and left to flounder on their own. Kirov Dinamo tried to parlay their unexpected success into a new sports center, a bus for team travel, a football school, and a training base to create a pool of local talent to sustain the team’s fan base and with it their financial future (115). These did not materialize, however, and Kirov Dinamo struggled to maintain the level of funding necessary to keep talent and stay in the First League. After their disastrous second season in the First League, the club was bankrupt, the fans deserted them in droves, the team management was charged with mismanagement of funds and players, and the team was “stripped of its financial backing” (177). For Kirov Dinamo fans, the team’s poor performance, and perhaps the “shabby stadium with stands still under repair” led to curses and insults being thrown at the team during matches (166). Fans also expressed their dismay at the team’s performance through writing numerous letters. The local press in Kirov was more explicit in their criticisms of the teams coaches, and while not overtly calling out the corruption, criticized breeches of sports regimen, dependence on outsiders rather than local talent, and the “blind reliance of fading stars” (165–6). All of these are symptoms of the entrenched second economy of apartments and privileges provided by sports clubs to attract and retain the necessary talent to win. Funding such perks took resources away from the development of local talent and facilities that could have made the teams’ success more sustainable. Additionally, the enormous expenditures on professional football players stripped resources away from promoting physical activity among the masses–the purported purpose of Soviet sport.

The collapse of communism in Europe had a tremendous impact on socialist sports systems as they were opened up to the free market in players and sponsorships. The collapse of the Soviet Union exposed Kirov and its Dinamo club to the pressures of privatization as state funds dried up and sports clubs of all kinds were forced to look for funding from elsewhere while losing talented athletes to the wealthier sports complexes of the capitalist west. Failing to “generate investment by an outside oligarch, a benevolent carpetbagger, as it were,” Kirov Dinamo ceased to exist from 1994 through 1998 (Holmes, 193). While the collapse of communism destroyed Kirov Dinamo for several years, the post-communist transition contributed to Široki Brijeg NK’s success in the 1990s. Having been starved of resources under communist rule, in part because the government in Sarajevo feared a successful team from a hard-core, Croat region would upset the multi-ethnic balance, thanks to General Zlatan Mijo Jelić, club president from 1995 to 2017, and funding from the local coal and marble company, the team flourished, becoming one of the most successful teams in post-conflict BiH (139–40). However, the centrality of the football club to the town’s identity and key tourist revenues means that the city officials must maintain that success in order to keep young people from seeking better opportunities abroad (276–77). Maidano and Armstrong also highlight the endemic corruption that took hold during the transition from communism to capitalism. The Škripari and other ultras used occasional violence to express their outrage over corruption. In UEFA qualifiers in 2007 and 2009, fans disrupted the matches with fireworks and chants of “Savez-Mafia,” referring to the corrupt Bosnia-Herzegovina Football Association (128). At another European Championship qualifier against Italy in 2014, Škripari threw fireworks onto the field to express their disgust at the corrupt vice president of the Croatian Football Association who was facing charges of “bribery, match-fixing and embezzlement to the sum of 15m Euros” (154).

These works also demonstrate sports potential to elucidate the relationship between the local and the global. Strożek shows how local towns who hosted socialist and communist sports events responded to and were affected by modern developments of industrialization, World War I, and the economic and political turmoil of the interwar years. Holmes’ local history of Kirov Dinamo not only situates the town and team within the context of the Soviet Union, but also shows how the team and city were impacted by global events like the FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games that, playing out within the context of the Cold War, perpetuated the “win or else” mentality undergirding Soviet sport. The history Široki Brijeg in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its football club cannot be separated from global developments. From the Ottoman and Austrian imperial expansion through two world wars and the rise of communism, the lands of the former Yugoslavia were shaped by world events. As Maidano and Armstrong note, “the town of SB has seen all the great 20th Century European ideologies and hegemons and epitomises in many ways the brutal history of the Twentieth Century” (347). The collapse of Yugoslavia into ethnic conflict can be seen as a reaction to and continuation of that traumatic history, and as Maidano and Armstrong show, the Široki Brijeg NK football club grew out of both the turmoil of the Homeland War and the economic growth of the post-conflict era. Indeed, the nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was largely the creation of the international community, and much of the current resentments of Herzegovina-Croats that animate the Škripari are rooted in the peace as well as the conflict. “Pan-European concerns over immigration from the Global South and the concomitant rising inequalities and insecurities caused by faltering global economic markets” also appear in BiH and in the town of Široki Brijeg (363).

While modern sport was meant to mitigate violence, whether it be football in the factories to instill discipline in workers and avoid labor actions or the Olympic Games, which aimed to promote peace between nations, the works reviewed here show that there is strong connection between sport and violence. In Strożek’s work the RSI enjoined the proletariat to train to fight in the struggle of worker revolution, and the art surrounding sport displays often highlighted the military applications of sport. Indeed RSI was the successor to the Central Agency for Universal Military Training (Vsevobuch) which provided physical training and mass recruitment during the Russian Civil War (85). One of Gustav Klucis’s postcards for the 1928 Spartakiad in Moscow featured male and female worker athletes shooting at a target against the slogan “every athlete must be a good shot,” continuing under the RSI as the “militarizing [of] physical culture and sports for the envisioned global class struggle” (84–85). Such training was put to the test in the 1930s and 40s as workers’ sports organizations were largely closed outside of the Soviet Union as the rise of fascism brought Europe to war. As Strożek notes, the worker athletes who gathered in Barcelona in 1936 to participate in the Popular Olympics “actually took to the barricades, fighting against General Franco’s troops on the side of the communists” (111). Kirov Dinamo was part of the Proletarian Sports Society “Dinamo,” which was founded by the Soviet state security apparatus initially to provide physical training for the military. Dinamo sports societies never shed their association with political violence and police repression. In fact, an early head coach of Dinamo Kirov had been deported to Kazakhstan along with millions of other Soviet citizens under the direction of the secret police (Holmes, 99).

Maidano and Armstrong show that while football has the potential to serve as a unifying force, it also holds the potential for violence and division. In communist Yugoslavia, authorities attempted to use sport to unite the multi-ethnic federation by promoting a national team in international play. Despite Yugoslavia’s international successes, however, people perceived that “the real victory belonged to one of the three constituent peoples who made up the nation of Yugoslavia. The athletes thus were ‘really’ Muslim-Bosnians, Serbs, or Croatians. The brotherhood of man that the Communist sought could in reality rarely think above the pre-existing ethno-political nationalisms that for centuries defined this region of Europe” (147). In the late Yugoslavia, violence erupted around football matches before escalating into full-scale war. After the Bosnian War, rival football associations formed in the former Yugoslav province, each representing one of the three main ethno-political groups. Even though a single association was formed under pressure from FIFA and UEFA, clubs continued to reflect ethno-political divisions. For the Škripari and even ordinary Široki Brijeg NK fans, Bosniaks in power in Sarajevo continued to give preference to Muslims on the national team, so the residents of Široki Brijeg, along with other Herzegovina-Croats, show support for the Croatian National Team at international events like the World Cup and Euro Cup. Memory of wartime violence and its occasional outbreaks, whether it be brawls between ultras before football matches or by the police assigned to maintain order, remain an integral part of Škripari identity, as “the Škripari of the time in a sense continued the Homeland War on the football terraces” (371). Though Maidano and Armstrong note that a younger generation of Škripari that did not serve in the war were “more moderate in opinion and more open to ethno-political dialogue” and that “such positivity arguably reduced some violence,” the potential of violence is still there (372). For Maidano and Armstrong, the centrality of Široki Brijeg NK to the town and the fervent embrace of a Croatian national identity shows that football can be a vehicle for identity formation, but in this case a transgressive one that hampers the efforts to build a Bosnian-Herzegovina national identity and keeps BiH in a liminal space between war and peace, and between the communist Yugoslav past and a future of full expression of national identity in the concert of Europe.

While these works may highlight the limitations of sport, especially competitive sport, to bring people together, they also demonstrate the potential of sport to bring academic disciplines into dialogue. As Strożek argues, while sports historians have to a degree embraced art historical analysis, the field of art history has yet to fully embrace the study of sport. His study of modernist and avant-garde engagement with sport in central and eastern Europe in the 1920s goes a long way toward opening up sport to scholars in other cultural fields. The study of football is much more developed in the literature of various disciplines. As Holmes notes, “over the past few decades, professional football, among other forms of sport, has become fair game for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, feminists, and investigative journalists. They have written extensively about its intertwining with a whole host of topics: politics, business, the drug trade, sexuality, ideology, religion, diplomacy, gender, fashion, self-identity, national identity, and ethnic prejudice” (1). The extent to which the practitioners in those fields are aware of the work being done by others, however, is not so clear. The works reviewed here reinforce the potential of sport to break down academic boundaries and inspire cross-disciplinary pollination.