Philippe Vonnard - Creating a United Europe of Football: The Formation of UEFA (1949–1961) (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe)

This series publishes monographs and edited collections in collaboration with a major EU-funded FP7 research project FREE: Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. The series aims to establish Football Studies as a worthwhile, intellectual and pedagogical activity of academic significance and will act as a home for the burgeoning area of contemporary Football scholarship. The themes covered by the series in relation to football include, European identity, memory, women, governance, history, the media, sports mega-events, business and management, culture, spectatorship and space and place. The series is highly interdisciplinary and transnational and the first of its kind to map state-of-the-art academic research on one of the worlds largest, most supported and most debated socio-cultural phenomenona.

Editorial Board

Richard Giulianotti (Loughborough University, UK)

Kay Schiller (Durham University, UK)

Geoff Pearson (Liverpool University, UK)

Jrgen Mittag (German Sport University Cologne, Germany)

Stacey Pope (Durham University, UK)

Peter Millward (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)

Geoff Hare (Newcastle University, UK)

Arne Niemann (Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany)

David Goldblatt (Sports writer and broadcaster, UK)

Patrick Mignon (National Institute for Sports and Physical Education, France)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14987

Cover image: Austria Press Agency/Draw of the semi-final of the European Cup Winners cup, 21 March 1967 (in Vienna)

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This manuscript is the result of ten years of research on the establishment of a European perspective in football. I wanted to understand the process by which playing at the European level became something natural, arguing that theUnion des associations europennes de football(UEFA), founded in 1954, was a key actor of this process. Due to the lack of studies about the creation and early years of UEFA, most of my work focused on this topic and, more generally, on understanding the European turning point of football unfolding from the end of the 1920s to the beginning of the 1970s. It is important to note here that the book focuses exclusively on mens football (womens football was not very developed during the period studied).

The present book is a synthesis of these researches even if it focusses mainly on what happened during the 1950s. It takes into account the reflexions developed from my master thesis (published in 2012 under the title La Gense de la Coupe des clubs champions, CIES), then enlarged with a Ph.D. thesis realised at the University of Lausanne (published in 2018 under the titleEurope dans le monde du football, P.I.E. Peter Lang) and during a postdoc conducted at the University Paris-Sorbonne between 2017 and 2018. Several research results have already been published in sport sciences journals (Soccer & Society,Sport in Society,Sport in History,Sport History Review,European Study of Sport History,Sport et sciences socialesandStaps. Revue internationale de sciences du sport, Storia dello Sport. Rivista di Storia Contemporanea) and in generalist contemporary history journals (20 & 21 sicle. Revue dhistoire, Journal of European Integration History,Contemporary European History, Hispania Novaand theRevue Suisse dhistoire).

I have also developed some thoughts on the history of European football thanks to collaborative projects like the editing of several books includingBuilding Europe with the Ball(Peter Lang, 2016),Beyond Boycotts, Sport During the Cold War in Europe(De Gruyter, 2017) andDes rseaux et des hommes. Participation et contribution de la Suisse linternationalisation du sport(Alphil, 2019); and the coordination of different projects: two special issues, one on the international sport bodies (Sport in History, 2017), the other on the transnational history of the World cup (Soccer & Society, forthcoming); and the ongoing work on European exchanges in sport for the online Encyclopdia Ecrire une histoire nouvelle de lEurope (EHNE) ( www.ehne.fr ).

As I will explain in more detail in the introduction (Chapter), which enables me to develop my ideas and understanding of the history of sport through detailed, informed discussions with a supportive and friendly network of inspiring researchers.