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Playing for and against the nation: football in interwar Romania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Florin Faje
Florin Faje*
Affiliation:
Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Nador Utca, No. 9, Budapest 1051, Hungary
*
*Email: florin_faje@yahoo.com
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Abstract

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions.

Keywords

footballnationalisminterwar Romaniaregionalismsport
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 160 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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