‘Creating a United Europe of Football’. These words were pronounced by the Swiss football leader, Ernst Thommen, at the beginning of a congress held in Basel in June 1954 among 27 European football national associations that came from all parts of Europe. The goal of this meeting was to create a European body. For Thommen, football leaders had the opportunity to give an example to European citizens because—as I will describe later in detail—while other European organisations were founded in the fields of economy, culture, sciences and telecommunication during the same period, these bodies were composed of countries that came from Western Europe or were ‘neutral’ in international relations (like Switzerland). Thus, the will to create a pan-European body in football was something special and had the potential not only to impact the administration of the game, but more generally the European integration process.
More than sixty years after this congress, every season around 300 men’s and women’s football clubs from all over Europe take part in European competitions, playing a total of over 500 matches. In addition, each national team plays around ten official or friendly games each year, not counting the finals of the European Championship (known as the Euro), which take place every four years. These professional competitions have created a true football tourism sector, due to the thousands of fans who readily travel hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres to see their club or national team play. However, this movement of people is not restricted to professional football, as many youth teams and amateur clubs also play international matches. What is more, most international matches involving professional teams are broadcast live and innumerable television programmes cover European professional football on an almost daily basis. Additional movements of people—mostly players and coaches—but also of capital and data on players (through the media and private statistics agencies) occur during the transfer market’s two ‘transfer windows’, from June to August and from December to January. Therefore, saying that exchanges within European football are substantial is a massive understatement.
It was considerations such as these that led Manuel Schotté to claim: ‘while the national level has historically been the main factor in structuring football in Europe, the European level has gradually become very important’ (freely translated from the French, 2014, p. 14). Football does, indeed, have a unique place within Europe, leading scholars to suggest that it could play a key role in creating a European identity (Sonntag 2008a)1 or a European public space (Sonntag 2008b; Kennedy 2017),2 with some going as far as considering European club competitions (such as the Champions League) a European ‘site of memory’ (Groll 2015).
1.1 Why Study the Relationship Between Football and Europe?
Interestingly, although European football3 has been beset by frequent scandals (violence between supporters, rigged betting, corruption, illegal transfers of players, match-fixing, corrupt referees, etc.), they have not affected the popularity of European matches or threatened the existence of European competitions. This is even more surprising given the scepticism towards European integration currently prevalent in many countries of the Old Continent (Wassenberg et al. 2010; Bouillaud 2014). However, as Andy Smith (2001) noted in the early 2000s, just because football fans follow European competitions, it does not mean they endorse the idea of creating a Europe-wide political community. William Gasparini (2017) recently made a similar point when he suggested that claims concerning football’s ability to build closer relations between Europe and its citizens should be treated with circumspection. Nevertheless, because European football competitions repeatedly bring to life the idea of a united Europe, analyses of European integration must take their effects into account, especially given the fact that integration processes have been ‘both more numerous and quite different from the major post-war political projects such as the European Community’ (freely translated from the French, Rask Madsen [2008, p. 9]). It was this realisation that led Laurent Warlouzet to prefer the expression ‘history of European cooperations’, which he believes does more ‘justice to the profound reassessment of the history of European integration over the last two decades’ (freely translated from the French, Warlouzet [2014, p. 116]), over the term ‘European integration’.
My focus on the history of European football is part of this shift in perspective. In fact, three characteristics of football make it an interesting starting point from which to examine the history of European cooperation. These characteristics are not unique to football, but they are exemplified by it.
First, football is extremely popular throughout Europe and innumerable matches involving teams from different European countries are played every year. As Weill (2011) found, the game interests a large proportion of Europeans, including the working classes, who know and understand the driving forces behind football exchanges.4 In this respect, football is similar to fields such as technology (Badenoch and Fickers 2010; Laborie 2010) and culture (Fleury and Jilek 2009; Mikkonen and Koivunen 2015), which directly impact a large part of the continent’s population almost every day—even more than the European institutions in Brussels (Broad and Kansikas, forthcoming).
Football’s second characteristic is that it quickly became structured around a supranational competitive framework. Although international tournaments for clubs and national teams—most of which were created in the 1920s (Quin 2016; Vonnard 2019a)—soon became occasions for heightened nationalism and provided an international stage on which states could demonstrate their power (e.g. Archambault et al. 2016), it was only possible to create these competitions because their participants agreed to follow standardised rules. This argument is often wielded by promoters of international football competitions (sport leaders, journalists, even politicians), who maintain that sport can help create bridges between peoples (Kissoudi 2003). Despite the somewhat utopian nature of this view, football undeniably offers many opportunities for bringing together clubs or national teams from countries that are widely separated geographically, and sometimes politically (Vonnard and Marston 2017, Dietschy 2020a, b).
Third, European football is administered by non-governmental organisations that have grown in importance over the years. World football’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which was created in 1904 (Eisenberg et al. 2004), authorises (or not) matches between national teams and draws up binding regulatory frameworks for organising these matches. Because it is FIFA’s rules that govern international football, even states—which began trying to politicise the game during the interwar years (Macon 2007)—must take heed of FIFA. FIFA is composed of national football associations, with each country being represented by a single association (Sugden and Tomlinson 1998). Some governments, especially totalitarian regimes that held sway over their country’s football association, have attempted to use this to their advantage. However, FIFA’s ruling elite5 tries to ignore the constraints of international politics, a stance that was also adopted by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) when it was founded in 1954. Remaining (as far as possible) outside world politics allows both FIFA and UEFA to view football as an intermediary for encouraging international dialogue and to promote the idea that the innumerable international exchanges fostered by football can create closer ties between peoples. In addition, as non-governmental organisations, they provide forums in which national associations can come together, talk and, in some circumstances, create alliances which international politics would otherwise render impossible.
These factors show the value of looking more closely at the dynamics underlying the current structure of European football, which emerged between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. The present research focuses on this pivotal period in establishing European football exchanges and asks whether the development of this structure was inevitable given the political and footballing context of the time.
1.2 Football in Europe: A Historical Perspective
The long history of exchanges in European football has been widely studied over the past 30 years, most notably by historians such as Pierre Lanfranchi (1991, 1998, 2002), who set the ball rolling with a now-seminal piece of research in which he highlighted the cosmopolitanism of the men who spread the game across Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century. His pioneering work was quickly followed by studies examining the transnational careers of several major figures in football (mainly players and coaches, e.g., Poli 2004; Taylor 2010), which, in turn, paved the way for analyses of other aspects of European football, most notably the creation and development of supranational competitions. Examples include studies of the Mittel-Europa (Mitropa) Cup for clubs, which ran from 1927 to 1938, the Balkans Cup and the International Cup for Nations—which were set up between the two world wars (Mittag 2007; Vonnard 2019a). As well as providing regular opportunities for exchanges between clubs and national football associations, most of which were created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, these tournaments led to greater movement across Europe by all of football’s stakeholders, including players, coaches, journalists and even supporters (Vonnard 2018a, see Chapter 1). These competitions also helped popularise the game among national audiences and spread information about football between nations thanks to early and widespread coverage by both the specialist press, which emerged during the 1920s, and the generalist press. For example, although the Mitropa Cup was created for clubs from Austria, Hungary, Italy and Czechoslovakia (with occasional participation by clubs from Romania, Switzerland and Yugoslavia), it was covered by sports newspapers as far afield as Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, which did not have teams in the competition. The longevity of these European football exchanges led Paul Dietschy to suggest there was a ‘Europe of football’, whose beginnings could be traced back to the Belle Époque (Dietschy 2016) and which was consolidated during the interwar years (Dietschy 2015). Christian Koller did not use the same terms as Dietschy, but he also considered the period from 1919 to 1939 to be a turning point in establishing different types of football exchanges—economic, institutional, even political—across the continent (Koller 2009).
Although many European football competitions have existed since the first quarter of the last century, the dynamics of European football appear to have reached a new level during the 1950s, reflected in the creation of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup (Vonnard 2014). This period was also when Europe’s football associations came together to form a governing body for European football, thereby contributing to what Robert Frank (2004) called the ‘Europe-organisation’ process in which supranational bodies were set up in a wide variety of fields (culture, economics, politics, science, sport, technology, etc.) in order to promote exchanges across Europe. Despite large differences in their size, geographical extent, objectives and social impact, the creation of all these bodies reflects an era favourable to creating connections across Europe. In football, the result was UEFA, which was founded in 1954 and quickly became a ‘key player’ (Keys 2006, p. 5) in developing Europe-wide competitions, programmes and discussions.
In its first five years, UEFA greatly increased the number of international matches played within Europe by launching European competitions for clubs (European Champion Clubs’ Cup; European Cup Winners’ Cup), nations (European Cup of Nations) and young players (International Youth Tournament). Unlike the events held between the two world wars, these tournaments were open to the vast majority of European countries. They were also highly popular with the public, partly thanks to extensive media coverage that included special sections in major sports newspapers. In addition, the second half of the 1950s saw the start of television coverage of European football matches, thanks to the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) Eurovision network, formed in 1954 (Meyer 2016). Thus, the creation of UEFA coincided with significant changes in European football and led to a new phase in its development.
1.3 Historical Studies of UEFA: State of Play
Although the literature on UEFA is relatively abundant, it is mostly the work of economists, management specialists and sociologists, who have addressed specific aspects of the organisation from the 1990s to the present.6 In contrast, historical studies of UEFA are rare, as are more general studies of European football between 1950 and 1990, and the few studies covering these decades have focused mostly on the creation of European competitions (e.g., Mittag and Legrand 2010; Dietschy 2017).
Europe’s first continent-wide club competition, the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, was designed to bring together the winners of each country’s league. The original idea for the competition had come from a group of journalists at L’Équipe (Montérémal 2007; Vonnard 2014), but it was UEFA that brought the idea to fruition and ensured the tournament’s longevity. UEFA also organised the competition and expanded its reach beyond the area envisaged by the French journalists by including countries such as East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania. Finally, UEFA took steps to increase the competition’s popularity, most notably accepting television coverage of the event, albeit minimal at first, via the Eurovision network (Vonnard 2016). Details of the first broadcasting contract were agreed during a meeting between UEFA’s leaders and the EBU in 1956 (Mittag and Nieland 2013; Vonnard and Laborie 2019). Hence, within a few months of its creation, when it was still a very modest entity (it did not have a fixed headquarters or a paid, full-time secretary), UEFA was already playing a leading role in organising and popularising European football.
As noted at the beginning of this section, the literature covering UEFA’s foundation and early development is sparse, but it provides precious information on the chronology of events and the main protagonists. First, the three books produced to mark the organisation’s 25th, 50th and 60th anniversaries (Rothenbuehler 1979, 2005; Vieli 2016) describe UEFA’s development, its activities and the actions taken by its leading executives. Laurent Barcelo’s (2007) interesting paper gives further details of UEFA’s history, including its foundation, membership and activities, although it is a purely descriptive account that does not really explain why UEFA was founded and why it became such an important player so quickly. John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson provide insights into the restructuring of FIFA in the early 1950s, which paved the way for the creation of UEFA, via studies based essentially on official FIFA reports and the sports press (e.g. Sugden and Tomlinson 1998; Tomlinson 2014). FIFA’s 100th anniversary book, which was compiled by four experienced historians,7 contains further information about FIFA’s restructuring and therefore touches on the formation of continental confederations (Eisenberg et al. 2004). Finally, ancillary information about the birth of UEFA can be found in works on the history of football in general, especially the book by Paul Dietschy (2010).8
Work focusing more precisely on UEFA’s early years can, to the best of my knowledge, be placed in three main categories. First, studies such as those carried out by Gregory Quin under a UEFA research grant show how the creation of UEFA is rooted in FIFA’s expansion in the 1920s and 1930s (Quin 2012). By analysing FIFA’s finances during this period, viewing the newly created World Cup as an additional expense for the federation, and brief examining the actions of FIFA’s ruling elite, Quin was able to produce some interesting insights into FIFA’s structure during the interwar period. He also postulated that FIFA should be considered a ‘pre-organisation’ for European football because it stimulated exchanges between its member associations.
Another body of work focuses on the relationship between UEFA’s leaders and international politics, especially the way they negotiated the Cold War.9 This category includes an interesting Master’s thesis by Antoine Maumon de Longevialle (2009), a political sciences student at the University of Strasbourg. Maumon de Longevialle highlighted the fact that, even in its earliest days, UEFA managed to avoid the usual Cold War divisions because it contained as many football associations from Eastern Europe as from Western Europe. He also uses information drawn from FIFA’s archives to briefly discuss UEFA’s geographical outreach and Turkey’s application for UEFA membership. Jürgen Mittag, who holds the Jean Monnet Chair of Sport and Politics at the Deutsche Sporthochschule in Cologne, also analysed UEFA’s desire to rise above Cold War tensions and the way its ruling elite negotiated this situation (Mittag 2015). Like Maumon de Longevialle, Mittag believes that UEFA’s early development must be viewed against the broader framework of European cooperation and supports the idea that football’s leaders had political, as well as sporting, objectives, most notably to use football to overcome the divisions caused by the Cold War.
The third group of studies includes both Paul Dietschy’s (2013) preliminary investigations of the impact of FIFA’s global expansion on its governance and the research I am carrying out with Grégory Quin (2017) into the influence of South America’s football leaders on the continentalisation of FIFA during the 1950s.
The present book pursues and broadens all of these reflections in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the development of European football and the processes that produced football’s deep European roots. By doing so, it will help fill a major gap in research into the history of European football.
1.4 Studying the Creation of UEFA
This book covers the period from the late 1940s, when the idea of creating a European football confederation took shape, to the early 1960s, when UEFA was well-established and already had a monopoly on certain aspects of the administration of European football. It combines three main lines of inquiry.
The first focuses on UEFA’s role in creating international football within an evolving football context. UEFA not only increased the number of football matches played in Europe, most notably by creating supranational competitions, it also organised regular forums (mainly ordinary and extraordinary congresses) at which football executives could meet to draw up, discuss and decide on actions to develop European football. Over the years, it has helped create and develop a tight network of European football executives, whose objective is to cultivate the game within the continent and even to initiate—and maintain—links between European countries, regardless of international political tensions. This raises the question of the role UEFA played in expanding European football. Given that FIFA provided a framework for organising international football matches within Europe during the interwar period, I suggest that creating UEFA was a new milestone because the decisions it took strengthened this dynamic.
The second line of enquiry focuses on the relationship between UEFA’s ruling elite and politics. In other words, it explores how UEFA was able to bring together individuals, clubs and even nations that would otherwise have remained separated by international politics and, more generally, how it managed to maintain its autonomy on the international scene. It also investigates how these leaders asserted UEFA’s power by analysing two aspects of their operations: the governance strategies they adopted and the policies they introduced in order to safeguard their positions. UEFA created a specific governance strategy that it applied over the long term, while accepting temporary compromises that were negotiated in response to changes in the international situation. These compromises were crucial because they strengthened the organisation’s internal cohesion, which is a sine qua non for any important player on the international scene. In addition, UEFA implemented policies to safeguard its position and curtail possible competition that could call its authority into question. This raises the question of how UEFA has managed to retain such a large degree of autonomy. I argue that UEFA’s ruling elite was largely inspired by the governance strategies used by FIFA (in particular by its governing elite) since the 1930s. These strategies, which were gradually revised over the years, were designed to help UEFA maintain a special position on the international scene so it could pursue its primary goal of developing European football without being (excessively) constrained by international politics.
The third line of enquiry examines the reasons underlying UEFA’s creation in the mid-1950s and the type of structure chosen by the organisation’s promoters. In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to look at UEFA’s origins from a global perspective that incorporates the influence of non-European actors. Adopting a global perspective is especially important here because—as in other sports (Ravenel et al. 2010)—geopolitical considerations were paramount in determining how football’s international governance developed. For the first few decades of its existence, FIFA, and therefore international football, had been controlled almost entirely by Europe’s national football associations. However, changes in the international context during the 1940s (especially the beginnings of decolonisation) and football’s global expansion were making this situation increasingly untenable and FIFA was forced to reform its governance. Hence, the creation of UEFA in the mid-1950s must be examined from a global point of view that takes into account both the disagreements and the transfers of ideas between the leaders of European and South American football between the 1930s and the 1960s.
I have combined these three lines of enquiry into a chronological narrative that traces the stages leading to the establishment (genesis and formation) of UEFA. As well as building on the above-mentioned historical studies of European cooperation and international football, I drew on recent research into the history of international relations, which has examined the impact of culture (e.g. Dulphy et al. 2010; Romijn et al. 2012; Mikkonen and Suutari 2015), engineers and experts (e.g. Kaiser and Schot 2014), dance (Goncalves 2018) and sport (e.g. Frank 2012; Rofe and Dichter 2016; Rofe 2018) notably during the Cold War.10 Further information was provided by biographical studies of FIFA’s leaders (Tomlinson 2000; Dietschy 2011; Vonnard 2017; Vonnard and Quin 2018b; Vonnard 2019c; Zumwald 2019; Nicolas and Vonnard 2019) and, more generally, reflections on the lives and careers of international sport’s most prominent leaders (e.g. Cervin and Nicolas 2019; Quin and Polycarpe 2019). Finally, it also draws on research into the history and sociology of international organisations (e.g. Kott 2011b; Sluga 2011; Herren 2014; Kaiser and Patel 2018), particularly studies of international sport organisations carried out over the last 10 years (e.g. Bernasconi 2010; Beacom 2012; Quin and Vonnard 2017; Krieger et al. in press). The result lies at the crossroads between different fields of history and incorporates approaches and findings from sociology and the political sciences.
1.5 Drawing on the ‘Football Archives’
The documents on which my research is based were mostly drawn from UEFA’s and FIFA’s archives, which are stored at their headquarters in the Swiss cities of Nyon and Zurich, respectively, and which form a resource Alfred Wahl (1989) called ‘the football archives’. These documents include minutes of the organisations’ various commissions and general assemblies, their secretariats’ annual reports, correspondence between UEFA’s secretary and national associations and FIFA circulars to members of its executive committee. My explorations of this rich and largely unplumbed source of material showed that, as for other international organisations, histories of football bodies do not have to be based on official documents and periodicals; they can also be drawn from an organisation’s archives. In this respect, I was following in the footsteps of historians such as Paul Dietschy and Grégory Quin, who had already made use of FIFA’s extensive archives (e.g. Dietschy 2004). Nevertheless, my research brought to light new documents, most notably files containing correspondence by executive committee members,11 between FIFA and national associations,12 and between FIFA and the continental confederations.13
In order to corroborate, question or expand specific points, I cross-referenced information from these archives with documents from national association archives (former East and West Germany, Belgium, England, France and Switzerland). These documents (especially minutes of executive committee meetings) revealed new information and helped clarify the most important issues affecting both FIFA and UEFA.
I also consulted articles in both the specialist and generalist press and conducted interviews with key figures in football during the period under study. The information provided by specialist newspapers, such as the weeklies France Football and La Semaine Sportive, and the daily newspaper L’Equipe, is extremely valuable because journalists attending official meetings often gave details of informal, behind-the-scenes discussions. In addition, newspaper editors were often close to sports leaders and therefore quite well informed, so they were frequently able to predict the decisions an organisation might make even before the relevant meeting took place. It is important to understand that L’Equipe and France Football were strong actors in the field of sport during the 1950s and 1960s. As shown notably by Gilles Montérémal (2007, 2010), the two newspapers—who were part of the same media group—were at the forefront of the development of European tournaments in football, basketball and, later, also defended the idea of the alpine ski world cup. Their journalists—most notably Jacques Ferran, Jacques Goddet and Gabriel Hanot—strongly supported every new projet and often developed their own idea which was quickly disseminated in other countries thanks to an extended network of international correspondents.
I was lucky enough to be able to meet with several key figures in football, including Jacques Ferran (interviewed twice), Pierre Delaunay and Hans Bangerter. All these discussions were conducted as semi-structured interviews. Jacques Ferran was a journalist for L’Équipe, which he joined in 1948 and where he stayed for 40 years, becoming its editor-in-chief in the 1970s. Pierre Delaunay was the son of Henri Delaunay, UEFA’s first general secretary and an influential leader of European football from the 1920s to the 1950s. Pierre took over from his father as UEFA’s general secretary in 1955 and was a member of its executive committee from 1960 to 1962. Bangerter was a contemporary of Delaunay’s who served as FIFA’s deputy general secretary from 1953 to 1959 and as UEFA’s general secretary from 1960 to 1989. As head of UEFA’s secretariat for nearly 30 years, Bangerter played an integral role in the organisation’s development. Additional first-hand accounts were taken from interviews conducted as part of other studies on European football.14
Although the resulting corpus was extremely rich, it has three main limits, one for each axis (see Sect. 1.5). First, as the source outside FIFA and UEFA came mainly from Western national associations and Western press, the history proposed here is mainly a Western point of view. In this matter, documents from ex-Soviet bloc football association would help to broad a more complete picture of the UEFA’s building process, and more generally about the European football developments. Second, because it did not include information from government archives, most notably foreign ministry archives (e.g. Beck 1999; Dichter 2015; Tonnerre 2019; Rofe and Tomlinson 2019), some conclusions regarding government intervention (or lack of intervention) in UEFA’s work remain hypothetical. Third, it does not give ‘equal weight’ to South America’s influence on UEFA’s leaders (Bertrand 2011) because I did not have access to the archives of the South American confederation or its member associations. Once again, any conclusions drawn in this area must be treated with caution and should be re-examined using information from non-European sources.
Despite these limitations, which are a feature of all research projects, bringing together information from such a large, varied and multi-lingual (English, French, German and Spanish)15 corpus that encompasses both primary and secondary sources enables this book to provide a hitherto unseen history of UEFA.
1.6 Structure of the Book
The book is divided into two parts, each containing three chapters. The first chapter examines the context that led to the creation of a European football confederation. By the early 1950s, the conjuncture seemed favourable to forming an umbrella organisation for European football, as several important figures in European football (leaders of national associations, club executives, journalists) had begun looking for ways of increasing synergies across the continent (Chapter 2). This context led the new generation of national association leaders who were rising to the forefront of FIFA, in particular Ottorino Barassi, Stanley Rous and Ernst Thommen, to begin contemplating the idea of forming a continental organisation (Chapter 3). However, the initial projects mainly involved associations in Western Europe, as the exacerbation of Cold War tensions that had followed the outbreak of the Korean War precluded regular exchanges between the football associations of Eastern and Western Europe. At the same time, South America’s football associations were demanding a greater say in FIFA’s decisions, which they hoped to achieve by restructuring the international federation around continental groups, set up along the lines of the South American confederation and which would take over responsibility for regulating football on their continent. After three years of discussion, this issue was resolved in November 1953 at an extraordinary FIFA congress in Paris (Chapter 4).
Part II examines the repercussions of the congress’ decision on the creation of continental confederations. Because FIFA’s new statutes allocated at least one seat on the federation’s executive committee to each continent, each continent had to create a confederation whose president could sit on the committee. In Europe, these moves coincided with a reduction in tension between East and West, a period historians refer to as the ‘Thaw’, which allowed football associations from both sides of the Iron Curtain to form a Europe-wide group of football associations. The new body came into being in June 1954 and was renamed UEFA in October of the same year. By immediately capitalising on and developing a context that was conducive to football exchanges across Europe (truly Europe-wide competitions were being launched for the first time in history), it took UEFA less than five years to become the most important organisation in European football (Chapter 5). This rapid development was largely the result of UEFA’s success in overcoming the political divisions of the Cold War and bringing together associations from both the Eastern and Western blocs. Adopting and adapting the strategies FIFA had developed during the interwar period, they succeeded in giving a UEFA monopoly over the management of European football, both internally (especially with respect to FIFA) and externally (e.g. with respect to the European Broadcasting Union). In addition, UEFA’s competitions (e.g. European Champion Clubs’ Cup) helped create or maintain regular links between countries on opposite sides of the political divide, thereby enabling it to quickly become FIFA’s largest confederation (Chapter 6). In the late 1950s, FIFA restructured itself along continental lines, allocating positions of power and seats on its executive committee to each of the continental confederations, which now covered Africa and Asia, as well as South America and Europe. Until then, the South American confederation had been the model to follow, but UEFA’s rapid development had turned it into a major player in the continentalisation of football and made it a source of inspiration for other continents (Chapter 7).