‘The Beautiful Game’ is a nickname for football that speaks to the sport as an aesthetic practice at the heart of societies across the world. Football is a form of theatre with collectivity at its core, whether one is watching or participating. Performed on a variety of stages, with a multitude of players: from kickabouts on the street and grassroots football to elite clubs and international championships. In these theatres people play, watch, pray, chant, and cry. These practices demand expressive and virtuosic skills, but also codified, traditional, even ritualistic habits. They are playful, fun, sometimes even silly. Above all, football practices are collective and highly affective. But are they always beautiful? Football expands the capacities for ludic, joyous, and euphoric expression, but also reflects the most competitive, bellicose, and chauvinistic in people. It creates communities, but also excludes. With bullying and insults as part of the pitch vocabulary, the game can turn ugly, aggressive, even dehumanizing, making many feel unwelcome on such stages. 

This participatory and discursive event explores the significance of football as practice in the context of contemporary European society, one battling with rising levels of exclusion and hate. Does football have the potential to be a space for reconciliation? Informed by his research on the role of sport in post-conflict Colombian society, cultural anthropologist David Edgar explores these themes as a reaction to the men’s UEFA European Football Championships. Edgar is joined by members of three organizations and groups that are working to create accessible, equitable, and solidary spaces via the international language of football. The conversation is followed by an optional participatory practice utilizing some of the creative approaches used by the organizations. In this session, football, play, and spectatorship are felt and reflected through the body. The event offers the opportunity to practice, tell stories, share tactics, and explore the potential for the beautiful game to truly live up to its name.

This event takes place in the frame of On Football and the Theatre of Collective Body Making.