Abstract: Historians of sport have paid little attention to the ways in which modern sports such as football were transferred from its place of origin to receiving cultures around the globe. While it is recognized that this ball game emerged in nineteenth-century English public schools, little is known about the transformations this game underwent in becoming modern-day German football and modern-day Argentine football. Applying the model of intercultural transfer, this chapter will investigate the process of the transfer of this ball game from English public schools to German and Argentine high schools. The emergence of football and its transfer across the world was carried out by teachers and students and it was part of educational reform since this game offered an alternative to the traditional ways of imposing discipline. Discipline did not come from an outside force such as the teacher but from the rules of the game. This game, further, encouraged teamwork in order to achieve victory and offered sons of middle-class families an introduction into the mechanisms of the capitalist market. The introduction of football into urbanizing cultures was also part of social hygiene debates and many of the protagonists of this game were also involved in social reform debates about improving the quality of living in modern cities. The application of the intercultural transfer paradigm to the global dispersion of football also shows the advantages of this paradigm over traditional nation-focused approaches. In nation-centered approaches to the history of football, attention is paid nearly exclusively to the relationship between this sport and the construction of national cultures and identities. Its global and transnational character is easily overlooked. Applying a horizontal instead of a vertical approach to the study of football reveals its close relationship with school reform and the role of football in advancing student-centered forms of learning in a global setting.

This chapter was first published in Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 20, 10 (2017): 1371– 89.

Introduction

Football is undoubtedly a global phenomenon. Yet, historians have studied the emergence of football nearly exclusively within the narrow framework of nation states and with an eye on the construction of national cultures and national identities.