Ron Krabill: Hello, and welcome to the Global Sport Lab podcast. I’m Ron Krabill, and I’m your host, as well as the director of the Lab, and a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. Listen to the end for a more detailed description of the Global Sport Lab, but for now, let me just say that we would love for you to connect with us. You can find us on the web or via email at globalsportlab@uw.edu.
Today, our guest is Dr. Ansgar Mohnkern, University Docent of the University of Amsterdam, and the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor in German studies this spring at UW. He has published multiple well-received books in German, including “Narration in Melville and Proust,” “Grounding and Metaphor,” and “Form, Repetition, and Metaphor in Goethe.” All that said, the book we’re most interested in here at the lab is titled — and here you’re going to have to forgive my high school German — “Betrachtungen zu Fußball und Ideologie,” which translates to “Someone Always Loses: Reflections on Football and Ideology.”
Ansgar has also been working on a project on the cult of tradition, football, and the rise of the new right in Germany, which he spoke about last week in a public lecture here at UW. So all of this gives us a lot to talk about this morning. Welcome, Ansgar.
Ansgar Mohnkern: Welcome. Yeah, thank you for having me.
Ron: I thought we would kick off today by asking you about the title of your book, the “Reflections on Football and Ideology” part is relatively straightforward, but I’m really intrigued by “Someone Always Loses.” I love that title. Can you say more about that title, and maybe the book as a whole?
Ansgar: Yes, very much. Yes, the, I mean losing is one of the key elements of the game, right? Often forgotten — we mostly speak about the winners, the great legends, the great heroes of the game. We remember — I live in Amsterdam, everyone remembers Johan Cruyff, who actually was one of the losers in the sense that he never won the World Cup, but he was, of course, winner in many other, many other occasions; but we barely speak about the great losers, or maybe also the not-so-great losers. Those are produced more or less every day in soccer, because whenever you play a game of soccer, the idea is at least, even though there’s the idea of a draw of a tie — so you go — but even then in the competition you eventually will either win or mostly lose.
If you think about the World Cups coming up, there’s going to be, I think, 64 teams —
Ron: 48.
Ansgar: 48, not that inflated yet.
Ron: It’s going to be next time, I’m sure.
Ansgar: It’s probably 128 teams.
Ron: Every nation.
Ansgar: Exactly, right. But there’s going to be one winner, but the rest will be — you might consider to be a loser in a neutral sense — not that they are losers — but they, they go home and have nothing in their hands except some experience. Maybe they played well, maybe not, but —
Ron: And maybe some fees from FIFA, but.
Ansgar: Well, probably, right? Infantino will, Infantino will go find some way of making some, some money on that. But there is, of course, the sense of loser, of losing the game and losing it, and therefore that the game produces losers.
Now I have to say that I’m interested in soccer for many, many years, of course. When you grew up in Germany, there’s no way of getting around soccer — that’s everywhere. And you start being a fan or follower of a team, mostly a fan, depending on where you, where you live, and what the traditions are, and where you come from. But yeah, you start following teams and you start developing a certain kind of passion. And then you, you know, you win, but then you also kind of lose, and the disappointment, the sadness, the whatever is involved in that, whatever comes, comes up in these moments, those are all crucial elements; but there is also something that, that is something that you do not have, let’s say in club soccer, here in the, in the U.S., and this is certainly this element of divisions.
The game is organized in divisions. You have the — and can speak about Germany, for example — you have the Bundesliga, the first division, and then there’s the second, it’s 2. Bundesliga, and then there’s some low leagues, and so on. And if you think about the system, the way it works, those teams — even though they win games in the second league — they have at some point lost, at least they’ve kind of — they didn’t manage to play in the first division. Therefore, what you will have eventually is some sort of a symbolic way of a class division, literally. So, when you speak, for example, the lower class in Germany, you do not speak about — I’m not speaking about the legal division. We mostly speak about the classic, particularly lower — the lower, the lower divisions.
And so there’s a sense of losing that is part of the system, and of course, the game itself. I mean, the way it’s designed, as many games as — there’s basically, there’s very few games, of course we play, but where people do not lose or win or lose is extremely competitive. And of course, it has as many games in modern sports history. It’s about they, they started becoming big or becoming important in the 18th — 19th century, right? In particular, the late 19th century, when professional sports was invented and started to rise — and there’s also all other sports, but that, of course, I would claim — and I think that I’m not the only one who does so, right? This has to do with the logic of modern capitalism in a very broad sense, right? A capitalist, let’s call idea or ideology of a certain type of competition, and the competition is something you need to earn, you need to — you need to earn your victories, and if you do not earn your victories, you kind of fall behind, maybe you lose, maybe you go bankrupt, whatever you like to call it, right? And yes, that is exactly what I think the game of soccer deals with in a very symbolic way — in many ways — and therefore, since it is, of course, a very symbolic way of doing so, well, I think it attracts so many people because so many fantasies, hopes, projections go into the game. Often, however, focused and maybe one-dimensionally focused on the winners, sometimes losing those who fall behind, maybe lose. Yeah, I think that’s, that’s basically what interests me.
Ron: I think it’s so interesting that you mentioned that connection between capitalism and the competition and the class divisions, the league divisions, partially because in the U.S., one of the arguments we often hear is soccer will never take off here because you can have a draw, and that there’s something fundamentally un-American about that — this drive towards competition. And yet we don’t have promotion and relegation, and it’s this interesting intervention of a capitalist system that protects the investments of the elite in the major leagues so that they don’t risk relegation and they don’t risk the economic blow that relegation would lead, so it’s a super interesting sort of coming together of different, different systems, and maybe some contradictions in there, sort of.
Ansgar: Yeah, I entirely agree. I mean, I’ve never really — that’s, as a European soccer fan or sports fan general, it’s very difficult to understand the American logic of organizing sports. And exactly the fame, the fact that there is no such thing as relegation. You might also say no such thing as degradation. I mean, you lose, and then the season is over, you start all over next season again, but you’re still in the pool, and you have very little to lose as long as there’s enough investment coming in, and perhaps also as long as there’s not enough revenue flowing out, right? So that’s part of the, that’s part, that’s part of the game, and part of the logic. Here in Europe, it’s a bit different, right? Maybe you can say it has also a little bit to do with not only sports history, but in general history, the way it’s organized, that’s more — there’s still might say some, some element of the old world involved, like that society works in pyramids, right? There’s not the sense of this horizontal system, and it comes with pyramids, that’s at the top, there’s a certain type of group, and then everyone is trying to work your way up, or maybe falling down, whatever. It’s a little bit like history, right? There’s the aristocracy loses contact at some point, right? And they fall behind and are being sort of, say, replaced by, by new forces in history. And I think, yeah, and that is, I think, an important element to understand.
Ron: It strikes me that that aligns with sort of American ideologies, which are sort of want to imagine themselves horizontal, want to imagine themselves as meritocracy. So you have, for instance, in NFL (National Football League), or even (MLS) Major League Soccer, you have an imagination of a horizontal structure, but without relegation, there’s like a safety net name — pardon me — a safety net for the top of the pyramid. So it keeps you from, as you say, falling down, relegation, degradation, even in the name of horizontal structures, right? And it’s why MLS team valuations are so much larger than they would logically be based on sort of the size of their followers and the significance of their success on the field,
Ansgar: Right. It comes with a sort of tough monopoly, right? No way to lose. It can even, say, you can even call Peter Thiel, like the famous competition is for losers. So as long as you’re in the pool, you can compete with those who don’t compete, right? There’s one element that goes into this very much, and of course, and therefore, I mean the way sports is organized already use — it becomes obvious that that sport itself is a certain type of ideology you won’t claim produces ideas, produces, you call it imaginations, fantasies; and those fantasies are mostly about the way the world is.
I mean, sounds weird to say, but it naturalizes structures, it naturalizes our relationship to the world, how we understand ourselves, how we understand our efforts in society — very broadly speaking — and it naturalizes it, right? So that means even though it’s history — I mean, sport is as anything else, it’s historical, it could change, it could be done very differently — it comes always with this notion of never ending, and it’s going to be the same, and there’s not going to be enough another season. I mean, just think about the term season, the seasonality. There’s no spring and winter in sports, but there is, of course, a summer break. I mean, at least in the Germ[an] — in the, in the European context, but then it has a certain, a certain repetitiveness, and therefore it’s kind of meant to be forever, right? That is how soccer is, and it will be that way for the rest of history. It feels right.
Ron: It makes me think of that phrase in American sports, ‘Wait till next season.’
Ansgar: Exactly.
Ron: That sort of constant hope that 1. that there will be a next season, and 2. that that next season will, you know, hope springs eternal kind of thing.
Ansgar: Exactly right. And there’s always going to be a new equal playing field. I mean, the statistics in the beginning of the season, everyone starts with zero, right? And then, of course, in speaking about German soccer, it’s always Bayern Munich winning, and there’s some —
Ron: Another inevitability?
Ansgar: Another inevitability, right. Exactly right, and the rest kind of struggling to get by. I mean, maybe pay the bills, if you want to say so. I like that, that image. One thing about soccer, paying the bills. And then there’s always three in one of these divisions in the Bundesliga, three can’t pay the bills, and then they will be relegated, and they have to try again to come back — many don’t come back, but yeah.
Ron: So say more about how you mentioned that this sort of naturalizes, sort of structures, our entire worldview. One of the recurring themes of this podcast, and really all the work of the Global Sport Lab, is examining the intersections of sports and politics. How do you think about that intersection, and how does it — it’s one thing to say it naturalizes our worldview, but what are the mechanisms that it does that through?
Ansgar: It does so, of course, by — first of all, I would say it’s also by being very regulated. It’s a rule, right? Every game has very strict rules, and that already is something that is, in the case of soccer, it’s quite simple. I just went to a baseball game, and barely — I struggle with the rules as a good European.
Ron: It’s not terribly intuitive, right?
Ansgar: Exactly, but that is, of course — that of course is in soccer extremely strong recognizability. Everyone is, so to say, invited to not only understand, maybe even participate. That’s, of course, one of the ideas, and maybe one of the illusions, and for the game that everyone can make it.
And that, of course, resembles a political, so to say, assumption. And very broadly speaking, that liberal modernity that everyone is about to make it, or maybe not make it. But then the stories are being told of making it, and, and of course, sports, as football as any other — or soccer as any other sport, is precisely doing that. But there’s also some, some very specific elements. As I talked about divisions already, right? The element of naturalizing class, naturalizing divisions. I mean, the term itself is, I think, pretty telling. That’s one of the other elements of that, but then also, if you look at the way the plot, the way the game is played, there is this sense of a political scene almost being put up, right?
I mean, it was, I think, George Orwell, it’s what is — ‘What is a war without shooting?’, and that’s a little — and I think to a certain extent this is still, still the case: there is a game, and it’s hard for them, it can be very emotional, and can be produce great winners, but also great losers. And notoriously it comes with, with the, with the language of war. We speak, like many — also in other sports, of course — we speak about tactics, we speak about strategies, we speak about lineups, right? Those is all military language. But also, at the same time, it comes with this sense of you or me. This, in a problematic sense, you might say, it repeats a logic that some of the problematic figures in the history of theorizing law, and the public, and something like the constitutional law — in particular, Carl Schmitt defines as the political sphere — it’s about the war, it’s about an enemy or friend, that’s exactly what the political sphere is about according to Schmitt. And whether that is the case is a different question, but soccer kind of like reinstalls precisely that conflict over and over again, it naturalizes it, therefore, and if you want to say — if you want to think about this in a broader sense, therefore, it is, of course, an ideological formation that’s that’s being restaged — you want to say so over and over again. It comes with certain theatricalities, but with rituals, with things that repeat — but what people carry away is that sense of getting used for precisely that.
Think about, there’s also very specific elements. I thought for a long time what it actually means to not be able to touch the ball with our hands, right? Like many other sports, but in soccer, it’s so obvious it naturalizes that what if you play soccer with very small children is so unnatural, namely not taking the ball into the hand. I mean, if you have a small 2-year-old child, he will always take them — they will always take the ball into the hands, and then you feel the game’s interrupted, but you realize he’s breaking the taboo of just, just grabbing it and carrying it away. And everyone’s yelling at the child, ‘What are you doing? Let us play. Come on, come on.’ You’re invited to participate in that taboo, and I mean, it was — I mean, taboo is, I think, a very interesting topic. I always think about Durkheim, the old French sociologist who, in his study of religious life, related taboo to the idea of property, right? So, there is an element of not touching it, because it’s the property of someone else. I mean, there’s quite something to be said about precisely that, of course, the political economy of the game itself, and there’s also other elements of the political symbolism, if you want to say so, soccer, think about — I mean but they are obvious, right?
The involvement of Infantino, and when you see Infantino is standing next to Putin, I mean he would really go to bed with everyone, right? I mean that’s an obvious element, and that is an element that doesn’t really interest me all that much, because it’s so obvious, right? Elements of corruption, of being in coalitions with basically authoritarian rulers, that’s so obvious about the political function or the political instrumentalization of the game. But what’s more interesting is really what the game itself does, right, that’s something that interests me.
Ron: Yeah, no, I think this relates to something you talked about last week in your, in your public talk, and you made this argument that German football’s commitment to tradition makes it an especially fertile breeding ground for right-wing politics and right-wing ideologies. So, how would you describe that relationship between tradition, specifically, and ideology in sport?
Ansgar: Yeah, I mean, the term tradition, first of all, I think makes it clear that every historical consolation produces your new type of — not necessarily soccer — but also a new type of relating to soccer. And I think in these days we live, well soccer now, it’s more or less been institutionalized in the 19th century, so it has quite a long history, and tradition is something that, of course, is celebrated around the game. But it’s celebrated differently depending on which kind of team you’re rooting for and what the historical consolation precisely is. And speaking about the German consolation, is this says, of course — I mean, follow the Premier League in England; you have these couple of teams that are mostly in the Premier League, they always compete around — I mean, the top teams are more or less always the same, but they’re rather stable at 20 teams. And there’s some traditional teams being relegated, from time to time, but it’s the pool is rather small.
And in the German soccer, it’s a little different. So you have 18 teams only. It’s a big country and there’s also lots of history. And you have, thinking about the different divisions you have, in the first division you have — this has to do with the way the game is organized and also the way finance is organized around German soccer — a little different. There’s no investor coming from, I mean there’s investors here and there, but they are not allowed to own more than 50% of 49, or 50 minus one of the club. That means you don’t have these external investors coming in and just buying a club and do with these clubs what they want. And so there’s this sense of, it’s still a little bit owned by the people. At the same time, of course, there is great clubs that have a great history regularly being relegated. Just this morning, I read a little bit there — we sometimes read the soccer news. I read the soccer news around. There’s this old Munich club, the club for Munich. We know, of course, Bayern Munich, but there was another club that actually was a champion — won the championship before Bayern Munich won the championship — and it was the 1860 Munich, an old traditional club, working class club in Munich. They already played in the third division, so they were quite more or less at the bottom of the experience, but again, insolvency threatened them. I think it’s more or less decided now that they have to go down to the fourth division, right? And so that’s, of course, a degradation, and they have, of course, tradition — they’re a traditional club, right?
Ron: And I believe, 1860 is — I don’t know if you saw this, but at the celebrations for Bayern winning the league, they put — they made a satirical banner that looked like the Bayern but said something else and got the fans to unfurl it, and they just assumed it was the crest, and it wasn’t.
Ansgar: Yeah, exactly right. And a couple of years ago they shared the stadium together with Bayern Munich — they got out. It was all too expensive for them, and they couldn’t just — they dropped, basically, and they lost competitiveness. And so what does it do to the people? That’s the question I ask myself. So they hang on to that tradition, to these great memories from the past, but what does it do to the people is that they live, therefore, in the past. They also celebrate the past more than they celebrate, of course, the present. I mean what is there to celebrate? If you play against, you play solo, right?
And you have many clubs in the second division. I mean, last year in the second division there were teams, now two of some of them came back now. But they were, there was, I think, in the season ‘24 – ‘25 were teams from Hamburg, from Cologne, from Gelsenkirchen, or Alfeld. Those are big teams, right? They all play Champions League, they all won something. You have, you have teams from Eastern Germany, you have teams like Magdeburg, and many of them are Dresden. And then there’s also many of the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) teams playing the third division or fourth division. They are entirely, they entirely lost this element of competitiveness. And of course the people still live with these memories and they live with these feelings, and the question is what they’re going to do with those, and I think tradition, therefore, has to do with well, with a past that is imagined very often. Of course there’s images, there’s legends being involved, but it also creates a sense of, I want to say, regressive fantasy, right? Going to the past, the past was kind of better, and the past was the past where everyone could win. We won, and others, we were part of the tradition, and now we got kicked off by these new clubs, new money moving in. Let’s say Bayer Leverkusen was the first one in the 70s, right, financed by Bayer, the big company, Bayer. You have also clubs like Hoffenheim — I mean if you’re not from Germany you might not know it — but it’s basically financed by SAP money, the big tech company. Then you have, of course, the obvious case of RB RasenBallsport, because it doesn’t mean RasenBallsport, it means Red Bull Leipzig, which is an irony, right? It’s the only, aside from Union Berlin, it’s the only East German club in the first division, but it’s financed with Austrian money.
And they have a very specific club structure. There’s no public club members allowed, so they have a very specific structure. And that, of course, leaves losers behind with lots of tradition, with lots of past, lots of victories, and that victory can only be celebrated as in the sense of commemorating, make new victories, and then together with that tradition comes really the sense of grief, of mourning, I think.
I mean, my favorite team is the team Kaiserslautern — Americans might not know, except those who maybe went to the army, because there was U.S. Army around — but for a long time Ramstein is not far away. But yeah, that team is, I think, a great example. And when Germany became world champion in 1954 there were five players from Kaiserslautern. And so they were, you might say, they were the best team in the world. They did not win the championship all the time, because they were basically organized as a cup, so you had to play a final, and they lost some of those. But they really dominated German soccer, and that’s what the people celebrate. In the 90s they had a great time. They won the championship twice. They beat, they did beat all these great teams. Madrid came there to lose 5-0. Bayern Munich was beaten regularly, so they had good scores against great teams, and that’s what people celebrate. And now they play second division, and there’s 50,000 people coming to a game in a city of 100,000 people, and they celebrate these mystical, almost rituals, and they pull up these choreographies. Those are the things I’m very interested in. The last 25, 30 years there was this — the choreographies became bigger and bigger, and they paint these huge images of old legends, and they show them, bring to the game. It’s almost as if the spectators, some of them at least, are not even watching the game, right? They just watch the past, they watch the images of the past, and I think that is, that is part of that tradition. So they search rescue, if you want to say so, in the past, in tradition, but then you ask yourself, ‘What is the political element of that?’ I think one element is crucial, that is namely that the historical understudies — the understanding of one’s own historical position is that one has come too late to a certain extent, and that there was a great time in the past, and that’s over. And in the state of grief, tradition is also about a type of projection that reaches out to a greatness of the past that might not even have existed, right? I mean, of course, the team was great, but was life better in the 1950s, 60s? Who knows, right?
Ron: Make America Great Again.
Ansgar: Exactly. That’s that’s the common theme, right. And I think there is, there’s something to be said about the celebration of the past, formally, at least — it’s not that it’s done by any Nazis or fascists, but, but there is formally an element that’s very much related to how fascism works. The way celebrating a past that might have never existed, right? And I think that’s part of the, part of the political — not alignment, but the political, the symbolic political dimension of the game — and it’s around how it’s celebrated. It’s not only more about how the game actually is and who wins and loses, but yeah, it’s organized around a spectacle of winning and losing at the same time. So it’s celebrated, it’s overshadows, so to say. Often the game itself, even though the production of losers — that’s part of the game, right?
And, of course, when you are a fan of Kaiserslautern you feel like being a loser for about 30 years now, and that does something to you. And Eastern Europe would also be a great case, thinking about the, I mean, the East German clubs I already mentioned, but I’m interested in Serbia, Red Star Belgrade, this last great Yugoslav moment being mourned and being lots of grief about that great team they had. Of course it came out of the Yugoslav system of organizing sports, they were a fantastic team, but it will never happen again. I mean, these clubs are entirely lost — lost competitiveness. I mean, they might be part of the Chairman’s League in there, but they all are always going to be beaten. They never will win anything anymore, and so there’s this state of grief — which is celebrated itself — and I think this does something to people. It’s of course not the, not the cause for, for let’s say the rise of the new right — and I mean the Serbian case would also be with Aleksandar Vučić right now, and the direct links to the Belgrade fan/ultra/hooligan scene. I mean that’s obvious, it’s known, but there’s, there’s more to be said about just, just that direct involvement. It really becomes a vessel for, let’s say, historical — the historical dimension, a political dimension, and that’s what I find very, very interesting.
And their soccer, at least in Europe, is more or less unique. There’s other traditional sports, but the mythology around soccer is unique. I mean, if you go to one of these stages where you see these choreographies, it’s breathtaking. It really catches you, and it does something to you, just something else. It’s when you sit and watch a game on TV, when you go there, you’re part of that community that does something to the people —
Ron: The stadium experience is different than on TV, for sure.
Ansgar: Yeah, and I think that’s, that’s the case, of course. There’s other consolation — it’s globally, you know. All global conflicts are different, and that’s important to recognize. There are certain structural elements, of course, let’s say Latin America and the fan culture there, and the way — what the game meant in times of authoritarian regimes. That’s something else again, right, but even there, I think the element of tradition — the longer the game exists, the more tradition will be added, and so the more past will be in the game. And sometimes I wonder, what will people think in 500 years from now?
Ron: So in that sense, do you think it’s intrinsic to either football, specifically, or sport generally a sort of either a given right-wing ideology or a right-wing conservative tendency, or is that more an accident of history in the, in the actual historical formations that have taken place in say Germany or Serbia or elsewhere?
Ansgar: I think it’s rather about consolations, historical consolations, and I think we live in an age where this consolation suddenly works. It would have not worked maybe 50 years ago. There was — of course it’s about much, I mean, just many elements, and whether you — this is old melancholic nostalgia around Yugoslavia and Serbia, or whether there is this sense of the good old times in the Bundesliga in Germany. I mean, the club of Kaiserslautern is a club that’s so linked to the history of West Germany. They were always part of the first division, and they were always there. It’s like Helmut Kohl. You think about, I mean if you grew up like me in the times of Helmut Kohl being a bonus chancellor, you thought for many years that there no other bonus chancellor be possible. It’s like Kaiserslautern, Helmut Kohl, and what else, right? And a little bit of Bayer Munich but that, that’s what it is.
So, it’s about this historical consolation, and that’s over. But it lives on. It becomes, so to say, it becomes one of those ghosts, almost like a returning ghost haunting the present in that sense. So what I would claim — what that element of grief also has to do with — is that, that it really, that it really is about that sense of, ‘Oh, those were the times, the golden times,’ with less inequality, perhaps, with less competitiveness — that had to be less, less need to perform everything with, we can also simply say with less neoliberal formations, right? And so it’s understandable that there is a certain grief, perhaps, around around that fantasy. So that is a, in this moment we live in, I think that consolation works, because that’s exactly what Make America Great Again is in the end quite. It’s related to precisely that sense of tradition, and we never know, was America actually that great? I don’t know. I guess, I guess —
Ron: For some people, and not for some people.
Ansgar: Exactly, right. And that’s exactly the same, I think, in Europe. And therefore, the consolation works. Of course there’s other immense — there’s other elements possible. There’s also emancipation around the game, right? Think about women’s soccer, and just women being present, being represented in the game, and suddenly they’re there. That’s something that’s remarkable, emancipation. There’s also, of course, left-wing emancipatory ways of looking at soccer, or at least organizing culture around it. For example, there is, it’s this minor, minor, minor phenomenon — phenomena — but there’s some, some hardcore fans around a left-wing club of St. Pauli. There are sometimes now — there wasn’t in the first division, now they’re in the second division — but there’s these hardcore fans that only go to the second team, right? And in Amsterdam, there’s also this phenomenon. There’s a group of people who only go to Ajax, to the Amsterdam second team, where only the young players go because they say that’s where football really is celebrated.
Ron: Right, which is its own form of sort of fetishizing tradition.
Ansgar: Absolutely.
Ron: A purist sort of “before” football became tainted by everything else. This is like where the pure, the true form of it exists.
Ansgar: Right, exactly.
Ron: I mean, I guess that’s another question. Is, as football continues to become even bigger business — which might be sort of shocking that it’s even possible at this point, but it does seem to still be heading in that direction, certainly in the states, but also globally with FIFA, etc — does it become more ideological, less ideological, differently ideological, more right, more left? How do you think about that relationship between big business investment in sport and football, in particular, and ideology?
Ansgar: To a certain extent, it becomes first of all more diversified, because every place in the world has a different history with it. And so what works in Germany doesn’t work in, let’s say, in Saudi Arabia — there’s an entirely different kind of mythology around the game. It has less history. It has a different history. And therefore soccer becomes something else in various places of the world. So, that’s, I think, that’s important to recognize. So, there is maybe no such thing as one soccer. There’s one game, and they all meet at some point. They play the World Cup, and then everyone kind of meets, but it means — soccer in Serbia, soccer in Russia, soccer in South Africa, soccer in Argentina means something entirely different than soccer in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, also, I think it has a different, and that’s, I think, important.
What soccer has a different symbolic value, and the symbolic value is never the same. There are some mythologies around it a taboo, I think, is very important around it — the regulations, the ever sameness that that soccer shares, basically around the globe. But I think the symbolic value of the game can differ enormously, and therefore each consolation might bring up a different sort of, say, value in the sense of whether it’s emancipatory, whether it’s not, whether we can, we can win something for making the place, the world a better place, or not, from soccer. That’s really up to the concrete consolation, I think. And that’s, I think, important to recognize, because soccer, after all, is part of history. I mean, it is historical — sometimes you might even say it is history — and, and I think that’s important to recognize.
Ron: It’s compelling to think about if the universalism that you’re describing, the sort of — the fact that the World Cup is this major world event, allows all of those different constellations to also lay claim to something that is common or universal, or connected so that it’s — it’s different than other sports that might be only played in a few places and have that sort of fragmented sense, and so it changes the way people imagine about it. You can imagine, you can be in a rural part of Peru, play soccer, but still imagine yourself as part of a global soccer community in a way that you can’t with every sport, and that sort of changes the dynamic.
Ansgar: It very much changes the dynamic. And that universal aspect of the game, I think, has also some — as always, there’s something utopian about it, right? We all speak the same language, we all know the rules, we don’t even have to speak the same language symbolically, right? We all know how it works. We have a ball and how we play. I don’t, I don’t need to talk to you, but we get along. Maybe we’re even on the same team, right? There’s something great about this universal, almost radical universal value of the game, of many other games too, but there in particular, it’s a team sport. You can also just play it in the park, right? Soccer is not only what FIFA does, soccer is not only what happens in Kaiserslautern or Munich, or who knows — or in Belgrade. But soccer’s there, what happens next door. And then it has an entirely different value, but that promise of this great universalism, I think, will never go away entirely. And therefore also, this promise that’s always in the game — whether it’s regulated or not — is a different question. Wonder what Gianni Infantino might think differently about it than I do.
Ron: I hope so.
Ansgar: Yeah, I think so. There’s also this, this utopian element in this, and I think this, this is not going to go away. But at the same time, as all promises, there can be, you know, you can realize, promises can be realized and they can also be disappointed, and many of them are also disappointed. That’s when it becomes interesting.
Ron: Someone always loses, right?
Ansgar: Yeah, someone always loses.
Ron: Well, it raises the question for me about sort of how — you’ve been in the States a little while this time. I know you also did your Ph.D. at Yale, so this isn’t the first time you’ve spent an extended amount of time in the States. What observations do you make from, say, going to a Mariners game or other kinds of pieces sporting culture, either football in the United States — I’m meaning soccer — or American football, or baseball, basketball, or anything else you’ve just sort of picked up or observed while you’ve been here?
Ansgar: I have to say, the baseball game I just rented, it was my first couple of games ever. There was some fascinating element to this — the quietness, there’s all the families around, and sometimes you ask to cheer. OK, you go ahead with that, you go along with that —
Ron: By the PA system, right? You have to be told by the speakers, which is different.
Ansgar: And then suddenly this, this, the anthem wasn’t — no, it was another song. Americans celebrate a little bit of patriotism. That would not happen, at least in Germany, but then, but there’s also this sense of, I mean there’s so many games. I mean not maybe in the major league soccer, but in baseball. It’s fascinating, it’s 162 games. I mean if you lose, ‘Ah, that’s OK.’ There’s even more than just one season, right? You can have streaks, and then it’s like you win a couple of games, and then you lose them again, and the slowness of them is quite remarkable. And, honestly, I found it fascinating. I could see myself becoming a baseball fan if I had to start all over. It doesn’t exist, but I — in the statistics, the way of — of course it plays on the same paradigms, You think about them, wasn’t it, there was this movie around baseball —
Ron: “Field of Dreams,” is that what you’re thinking?
Ansgar: No, the money.
Ron: Oh, “Moneyball.”
Ansgar: “Moneyball,” right, and how statistics and probability has gotten the game. So the mathematization of the game, which is also the case in other modern sports —
Ron: And it spread in part from the “Moneyball” folks. I think that’s part of where it’s reached even European soccer.
Ansgar: Exactly right. So it’s about calculating probabilities, and then suddenly we looked at players differently. Maybe these players were not really known, they had no star characters, but they suddenly turned out to be extremely effective, and that also changes the game. And in baseball, it’s obvious this is so over-mathematized, it seems to me. And, of course, this is so — you want at some point when you go to a game — and, like me, like was really not, not knowing much about the game, you see the surface, but underneath is something entirely different at work. A statistical system, almost like an algorithm, which you never see. It’s like going online — you work on what you see, you see that one text, but underneath is this text of algorithms, you’re directed to different places by precisely that text. That’s a little bit how that game works to me, at least, and I found this fascinating.
Ron: My high school best soccer coach was also the high school baseball coach, and he always said that he preferred coaching baseball because he felt like he, as a coach, had so much more influence, which has always sort of stuck with me as an interesting sort of claim. Like yeah, in baseball you’re making so many decisions as the coach for the team as a whole, whereas in soccer, I think once the play begins, coaches can’t do that much. I mean, they can prepare you for the play, but once the play starts, it’s sort of up to the players to execute the plan,
Ansgar: Exactly. I mean, there’s certain type of formation the way the team is put together, and you, of course, try to optimize statistics. I guess that’s in these days, I think, often done, which also then is related again to the notion of tradition. I mean, what people mourn is this old type of football that was supposed to be real, pure. You just go in, and what counts is mentality, right? All you have to do, you have to, you have to want it. You have to want it more than your opponent.
Ron: That was also my high school coach’s favorite line. Which was a little frustrating.
Ansgar: Exactly, right. You didn’t learn anything.
Ron: Exactly.
Ansgar: But that’s also part of that, right? I mean — and it goes into that, I think, this mathematization of games. Think of other sports, think of cycling, for example, the way they, they turn cyclists into machines that are that are surveilled all day, all night. And that is also, of course, a totalization, if you want to say so, almost like a totalitarianism of numbers. And, of course, people feel alienated — they can’t keep up with that, they even don’t understand it anymore, and that’s part of the tradition of wanting to go back to a world where the level of — I mean sounds an old school term, but I still like, I think Marx was right in that the level of alienation has become so, so high that that, of course, an element of grief kicks in, and you say, ‘Those were the good old times.’
Ron: And especially if it’s tied to your experience as a child playing a sport then it has even more of that nostalgia, that sort of sense of, like, before ‘I became alienated in all these ways through the labor market, etc.’ you know, that pure childhood joy of playing,
Ansgar: Exactly. Which comes also with a promise, again, of playing — there’s the notion of the game, a game being something that has, that supersedes, and there’s actually even bigger than history that we just play. I mean, there’s this famous German — maybe not so famous anymore, but writer Friedrich Schiller, who has this great notion and this enthusiastic understanding of what it means to play, that’s where he says is where we really become human. He doesn’t speak about winning or losing, but it’s just this essence, or this part, is also part of this, right? Joyful playing, and that goes away, of course, in the moment of total mathematization of the games and creating probabilities.
And of course, you see these great, these really great strikers, someone like Harry Kane, when he given the ball, I think in 95 of 100 cases, he hits the goal light on the lower left, on the lower right, and it’s basically as a keeper, hard to defend, and that’s what it is. You create statistics, you create probabilities, and in the end you most likely win — and that’s what’s gone. Therefore, the game is kind of gone for many people, they don’t get there. And of course — this is related not only, they don’t even know, grief is not only related to soccer, but of course also they have many of the people lost also in real life, right? And that’s where it really becomes interesting. Then the consolation suddenly makes sense, and so it’s a symbolic way of mourning. One might even say that is part of that, that experience, and also sort of working through, the call it, objective losses that cannot be worked through, whether for political reasons or for other reasons, the kind of work through the loss of your job or the loss of your perspective or the way that you can’t pay your rent and everything became so expensive.
Ron: And then that’s projected onto a sports team that you support. You either have fellow travelers who commiserate with your loss and find that sort of community in that way, or it becomes, ‘I may have lost in all these areas, but I’ve won — you know the Seahawks won the Super Bowl, so I’m happy.’ You know what I mean? Like it’s almost a consolation prize.
Ansgar: A consolation prize, that’s very much what it is, I think. Even if you win only a single game, let’s not forget, I mean even though you can win games in soccer, you have 34 games in two seasons. When you have 18 teams and you have 34 games, you win a couple of games, and some of them are dramatic, and you, you celebrate together, at least that you carry away. As long as you are not being relegated, which will happen to 1860 Munich, then you’re going to be relegated at some point. Who knows how low you can fall? But yeah, then yeah, do you have people, people to share it with?
Ron: It also strikes me hearing you talk about baseball, 1. that baseball is the sport in the states that has the longest sort of tradition, so you have more of the sort of, sort of deep-seated, what’s the phrase — mom, baseball, and apple pie, right? I’m not sure that’s the phrase, but it’s something like that. I’m embarrassed that I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but there is this idea of like baseball being deeply sort of embedded in histories and tradition in the United States. And then also, as you pointed out, it’s — as a spectator — it’s an incredibly social sport, because you’re not having to watch the field every moment, so you’re getting beers and you’re chatting and you’re hanging out. And it’s, you know, two-and-a-half, three, four hours long, as opposed to 90 minutes. So there’s just a lot more sort of social, low-key social time. So I’m certainly not arguing that football stands — meaning soccer stands — aren’t social, because they certainly are, but it’s a different kind of sociality, because you’re so focused on the action on the pitch.
Ansgar: Absolutely right, yeah. And it also, everyone is welcomed, kids too. I mean, they can feel safe and all that, right? I mean, it’s not all the games — I wouldn’t want to go necessarily to the hardcore or fan scene, let’s say Red Star Belgrade — I wouldn’t go there necessarily. I really wouldn’t want to be there with a child. And so that, that integrates everyone. And there’s part of, part that also invites you, even though you can only read the text that’s presented to you on the surface, right? And that I found striking. Really, I, in my second level when I become a baseball fan.
Ron: I’ll look forward to the book on ideology, reflections on baseball and ideology. There’s certainly a book to be written there. I think it’s probably a different book than the one you wrote, but yeah, there’s a book to be written there.
Ansgar: Yeah, maybe I’ll work my way into that. But therefore, but what they share, of course — and that I think all different sports have in common — they are really symbolic ways of negotiating history. And that is, I’m a literary scholar normally, and that’s what I’m interested in, what is the symbolic value? What it is, there’s always two questions to ask, right? The first question is, what does it mean? And the second one is, what does it solve? What problem is solved here, at least for the moment? And I think those are the questions you have to, you have to ask. And you come to similar answers, is my guess, my hypothesis here. But again, different historical framework, different historical experiences.
Think about college sports too, right? I mean, America is so much bigger than, so the local dedication works differently. And college sports take much of that, let’s say local energy, that in European sports or in European soccer is done by the Southwest team. We are the one. This is our region here, and we’re the team from Hamburg, or we are the real team from Hamburg, because St. Pauli is not, or the other way around. So that sort of say that an American context doesn’t work quite that much, because tradition works different, history works different, everyone has a migrant — history of migration. There’s no, I mean, even though we try to do it, there’s always the sense of that there is no, maybe the pure traditional element of being bound to, which has to do with your local identity, right?
Ron: Right, exactly. It leads to a hyperlocal identification, including with sports. So I grew up in Indiana, and so high school basketball was as big or bigger than college basketball or pro basketball. You talk about sort of Texas, Arkansas, and football — you have this hyper localization of the experience of sports. Still today, journalism — it’s the section of local newspapers that still actually is able to survive as local sports, the one place where it’ll be covered that you can’t get from somewhere else.
Ansgar: Exactly right.
Ron: Even more than local politics.
Ansgar: Yeah, and expertise also. You need someone to be there to have direct link to the coach, to the managers, whatever, right? Yeah, these people are still around, they could still, they also still get paid, right?
Ron: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. Not much. But yeah, yeah, thank you so much for the conversation today, Ansgar. And special thanks to all of you for listening.
To say a bit more about the Global Sport Lab, we are a new collaboration based in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, in partnership with my own school, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Bothell. The lab uses the lens of sport to explore the big issues of our global world, from migration, politics, inequity, racism, and gender discrimination to popular culture, democracy, human rights, and the economy, to name just a few. We are particularly focused on the global sport of football, better known as soccer in the United States, during the run-up to Seattle’s hosting of the FIFA Men’s World Cup in 2026 — which, as of today, is just one week away — but we are interested in a wide range of sports, well-known and less well known, from the grassroots to the professional levels, and how they help us make meaning of the world.
Special thanks to musician and scholar of global football, Laurent Dubois, and WOTI Production for the use of our theme music, “Merci Kylian,” available on Spotify and Apple Music. If you would like to join more conversations like this, please reach out to us at globalsportlab@uw.edu We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, and keep playing.
