History: Whose Game is it Anyway? - Prof. Alan McDougall

A journalist asked me recently ‘what were you doing when the Berlin Wall fell?’ I was fourteen years old in 1989; I wasn’t thinking about the collapse of communism, but about scoring goals in my next football match. Football, not politics, was the centre of my world. And I wasn’t the only one. Andy Meyer, a teammate of the future German goalkeeper Robert Enke, recalled how their team in the East German town of Jena barely noticed the momentous events of 1989 and 1990. ‘There was nothing crucial about it for us kids. The football training just went on.’ Football can be appropriated by mighty organisations. It can also resist them. The journalist’s question got me thinking again about the title of my new book on East German football, The People’s Game.

read the rest of Alan McDougall's post at the Cambridge University Press blog