The International Journal of the History of Sport

Manufacturing the Past: Sports Clubs as Sites of Memory and Power

A sport club is not only a sporting institution. It is a dense accumulation of founding myths, statues, museums, official histories, hall-of-fame portraits, anniversaries and commemorative rituals through which a collectivity tells itself who it is. In Pierre Nora’s terms, the club operates as a lieux de mémoire: a site where a chosen past is consecrated, made visible and put to work in the present. This special issue takes that proposition seriously and asks a single guiding question across different national settings: how does a club’s manufactured heritage actively shape its present.

Clubs and sporting institutions across the world have become heritage industries in their own right: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Boca Juniors, Flamengo, River Plate, the New York Yankees, the great American college athletic programmes such as Notre Dame and Alabama, and the South African rugby establishment around the Springboks, to name but a few, all now run museums, curate archives, stage centenaries and market memory as both identity and revenue. Yet the historiography of sport has tended to treat this material as backdrop or branding rather than as an object of analysis. The memory-studies tradition — Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger on invented traditions, and Jacques Le Goff on the passage from document to monument — offers an analytical approach for it, but has rarely been brought to bear on sport in a systematic, comparative way. Sport is an unusually fertile site for such an enquiry precisely because its heritage is at once highly visible and intensely contested: rival narratives, erasures and commemorations are fought over openly in the press and among supporters.