Football memory in a European perspective: the missing link in the European integration process

Abstract

The missing link in the process of European integration seems to be a sense of a European collective identity. The article therefore analyzes how European football might add some cultural substance to the European institutional frame. Indeed, football appears to be very suitable to fill the gap as it receives wide media coverage and succeeds in touching many people around Europe emotionally. The central question is, if there are already some lieux de mémoire which have been established by European football and which have turned into pan-European narratives. In the light of recent research on European football, several cultural phenomena are examined if they could work as realms of a shared European memory: historic matches on the European scene have to be taken into account as well as stadiums themselves as sites of memory or even a disaster like the catastrophe of Heysel in 1985.