‘Uniting Histories’: Football Heritage and Dialogue for Social Inclusion

‘Uniting Histories’: Football Heritage and Dialogue for Social Inclusion

EFDN was invited last week by NGO partner FARE Network to join ‘Uniting Histories’, a two-day event exploring the intersection of football heritage, social inclusion, and education. Hosted by the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam individuals and representatives from sports organisations and institutions participated in roundtable discussions, film screenings, interactive workshops, and listened to expert panels. All activities aimed at using football’s cultural impact to foster community connections and inspire educational initiatives.

There is no shortage of football media in the world but the majority of these deal with football for the sake of the sport itself. A relatively small portion deals with the societal context in which football resides and which football actively shapes. Football clubs and the communities around them actively contribute to the football media spaces. These spaces are mainly about current affairs, but more and more attention is paid to the club’s history. Heritage outreach can be much more than marketing while strengthening the brand and fanbase in the process.

Football, through the many people it involves, the moments it stages and the communities of belonging it fosters, it cherishes, keeps and makes heritage. How can football heritage create spaces for inclusion, for education and for societal action?

During the panel conversation with Kyra Fastenau of Kazerne Dossin (Belgium), Felipe Bertazzo Tobar of Football Studies and Clemson University (Brazil &USA), Andreas Kahrs of What Matters Agency (Germany) and hosted by Menno Welling of Reinwardt Academy (The Netherlands) the meaning, principles and different types of Remembrance were discussed and how clubs can connect their local history and identity to it. Heroes and Highlights are not the only part of a club history. clubs should try to make a connection with objects like trophies or medals from the past to understand its relevance but also the past and the ideology behind it. Clubs have to open up their past and to share and promote new, hidden stories and see the educational relevance of this heritage.’

The Football Makes History project has done research to better understand how this heritage work in and around football takes place. The main focus was to see wherein resides the potential of football heritage work to act as a catalyst for enhancing education, fostering social cohesion and deploying the various positive added value of cultural engagement. Eight key practices have been identified on how FC Town engages with the city’s inhabitants and these practices were presented in a poster, serving as a creative, inspirational, and reflective toolkit. One of the key practices which we have identified is around remembrance. This particular multifaceted practice includes anything from the famous one-minute silence before a game, to the visits of memorials and monument, to multiday educational visits to sites of memory and/or longer term oral history and/or archival research.

Find out how FC Town supports history teaching, how it collaborates with museums, how it takes care of its archive and collections to make it accessible and how it enriched it with new voices from the town. And indeed, how it takes an active role in safeguarding the towns memory culture. This toolkit will be available to all participants as posters. The aim is that these posters can be hanged in football clubs’ museums and/or heritage partners and further inspire clubs and their related museums and communities to recognize the added value of their heritage work, and to seek to do more of it.

Find here the other toolkit of the Football Makes History project inspiring collaborations between schools and football! We will soon launch the poster toolkit for all EFDN Members on our learning platform.

The ‘Uniting Histories’ event was a co-production of Fare Network and the Reinwardt Academy in the dual-context of the Erasmus+ Project Football Makes History and the EU CERV project “Moving On“.