An ethnographer stuntman II or a diary on the football in Germany

Abstract

The manuscript follows the form of a football diary trip, due to a work mission of two weeks in different parts of Germany, during the end of 2024. In first person, I depict actors, spaces and events related to the football subject in this European country, collecting impressions on the national sports imaginary, even at formal academic meetings or at informal situations while crossing the territory. Thanks to the collaboration of a native that is also a young professor from the University of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, as well as a reference researcher in the sports German sociology, I aim to reconstitute, based on different angles, the practices and representations of the football in cities as Munich, Nuremberg and Gelsenkirchen, among others. Like a kind of a mosaic, I comment on the dynamics of the “ultras” supporters and its urban spaces of sociability; I introduce the inside and outside atmosphere of the stadiums and the arenas, during days with and without  matches; I narrate prosaic scenes of a Sunday of women’s match in a training centre from a traditional club linked to the industrial region of Ruhr; finally, I stress and report a visiting to the Football Museum in Dortmund, with a description and an analysis of the long and short term exhibitions of this cultural equipment, seeking a brief comparison with its homonym in São Paulo city, Brazil.