Fandom, society and politics in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Abstract

This chapter discusses the past and present of fan cultures in three neighbouring countries, whose football traditions have always been strongly interconnected, but nevertheless differed considerably: Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Four times World Cup winner Germany until the post-war era resisted official professionalism and only in the early 1960s established a nation-wide elite league championship that already in the 1970s became one of Europe’s leading houses. Nevertheless, football games in Germany have attracted huge numbers of spectators since the early 1920s. Austria in the interwar period was one of the pioneers of professionalism in Continental Europe, however, restricted to the capital city of Vienna. In the post-war period, the country’s football culture underwent a process of ‘austrification’ with elite football expanding to areas outside Vienna and witnessed a decline of the national team’s strength. Multilingual Switzerland in the late nineteenth century used to be a bridgehead for the diffusion of football in Continental Europe, but football’s take-off to a mass spectator event in the interwar period was rather modest.