Brushings with the Beautiful Game, Thoughts on Football Heritage

If you asked Jose Mourinho, the one-part iconic two-parts divisive manager of now Fenerbahce, the term ‘football heritage’ likely originated with him. He is - after all - the ‘special one’ (1). If we take this chronological line of thought, the phrase 'football heritage' began with his Manchester United tenure and 2016 press conference, where he described the club’s turgid spell of results in the Champions League. This speech has since been posted several times to Sky Sports Retro (2) and is the subject of countless memes (3). Taking this phrase as a springboard, this blog post deals with football as a complex source and conduit of identity, history and culture, all from a heritage practitioner perspective. It is not intended as a comprehensive history of the sport, or anything close, but a brief survey into how football acts as a vehicle for projects dealing with cultural heritage - especially those with a digital component.

Football Heritage as History

As an avid football fan - one of those fans who listens to podcasts about the limitations of PSR regulations, I am yet to fully reconcile this love with my academic career. In my mind, the possibility of a Leicester City trial remains a phone call away, despite not kicking a ball in months and never having been that talented. That said, I have had the occasional brush with ‘football heritage’ through my research. After completing my MA and moving back to Sheffield, I decided to upskill myself like everybody else during the 2020 lockdown. Instead of learning Python or the guitar, I was swayed by a FutureLearn MOOC course on the social history of English football (4). Sponsored by the University of Leicester, De Montfort University, and Leicester City Football Club - the club I happen to support - I spent a week being guided through the sport's historical coalescing by Neil Carter (Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort's International Centre for Sports History and Culture) and local sociologist John Williams. I also learnt that LCFC has a designated football historian, which bred a deep jealousy that I am still getting over.

Over a year later, with lockdown restrictions loosening, I started my PhD and collaboration with the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Graeme Hawley (Head of Published Collections) put me in touch with Heart of Midlothian Football Club, whose ground Tynecastle I lived across from in Gorgie during my first year in Edinburgh. The club wanted to explore automatic transcription approaches on their collections as means of discovering new knowledge about the club's origins and past workings, now that they had organised their holdings to a suitable level. Sadly, this project never got off the ground.

This appetite for football history mirrors the obvious interest of many. Football is the global sport. Some channels like Tifo deliver infomercial-style short videos with minimalist illustrations to tell this history (5). Through such digital engagement, Tifo have explored the origins of the beautiful game: beginning with Victorian industrialists adapting rules from Rugby, arguments over professionalisation and player wages, and FA standardisation, all the while including silly anecdotes and - in the case of JJ Bull - synth-wave songs about footballers (6). The origins of the game, as Tifo and the LCFC MOOC state, gravitates around the Sheffield rules (1858, 1877). Sheffield FC were the first club to play for 90 minutes with a goalkeeper positioned under a crossbar and eleven players on either side, with matches played at Sandygate - a ground that still exists, situated 40 minutes walk from our Digital Humanities Institute and 10 minutes from my favourite takeaway. More about Sheffield and football heritage later.

Lastly, to emphasise the injection of football history into digital cultural outputs, gamification has emerged as a clear feather in the digital engagement arsenal, especially toward younger audiences. Those of us who grew up playing Pro Evolution, Football Manager, or early PC versions of Fifa might see this as nothing new. However, more explicit gestures toward football history, as flattened re-enactment perhaps, can be seen in FC25 (no longer Fifa due to branding disagreements). The game franchise now includes the ability to play as 'icons' alongside modern team mates - Gianfranco Zola to Leicester anyone? (7)

Football Heritage as Intangible Culture Heritage

Mourinho, in his recounting of Manchester United’s disappointment at the highest European level, unintentionally or intentionally framed football heritage as intangible in 2016. The sport being a matter of ephemeral though incredibly important results. Football remains a physical act, directed by trophies, wins and pay-outs, with books like Joey D'Urso's More Than A Shirt (2025) utilising tangible heritage as a touchstone for discussing broader sponsorship deals and the way capital flows through the game (8). Despite such works charting new ground, cultural heritage institutions have begun motioning toward more intangible themes of ‘support’ ‘fandom’ ‘attendance’ and 'belief' as a starting point for projects. This presents an interesting case in thinking of football, sport and identity as conduits of broader meaning. In line with that famed press conference, you might even call such thinking Mourinho-esque or part of a Mourinho school.

Self-made meme based on the 'football heritage' template, Img Flip generator, https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/452020961/Football-Heritage.

In 2023, the NLS curators Patrick Hart and Dora Petherbridge partnered with Malik Al Nasir, community organiser and ancestral cousin of the first International Black football player Andrew Watson, to posit such broader themes with young Scots. In working alongside Al Nasir, as well as the Scottish Football Association, the Scottish Football Museum, and Show Racism the Red Card, the fitba project used football heritage to explore broader themes of community, belonging and identity (9). Through group discussions, they began challenging contemporary views of community as belonging. The fitba project instead framed community as stemming from alienation and connection through shared powerlessness (10). Recounting the experiences of Andrew Watson, they impressed the notion of community as not-belonging - exposing a more fleeting, harder truth about pressures to conform amidst still-felt colonial influence in modern Scotland. Of course, football has too often become a testing ground for xenophobic vitriol and violence, especially toward Black athletes - from John Barnes to Rashford, Sancho and Saka (11). Therefore, we can identity football as a conduit for wider societal sentiment, in one moment creating alienation and in another forming ways of responding to it. 

As a digital component, the fitba project culminated in a fantasy all-star line up to celebrate Black Scottish footballing achievement, with each star having a digital profile and online 'card', connected to a personal bio and map of their colonially-influenced travel. In this way, participant discussions recalcified into newfound tangible digital heritage, this time on their own terms through a project space where communities could ‘break out’ and reform in more genuine and authentic ways.

Another example of beginning a project with intangible football heritage is found in my recent teaching. This month, I have been supporting an MA student at the DHI to develop an application aimed at enhancing international fans’ experiences of English football. The app includes translated chants, information on football club history as well as context for derby games. In linking match day programming and club branding to Smith’s (2006) ideas of authorised heritage discourse, they attempt instead to create a bottom-up mechanism for Chinese fans to enjoy more accessible matchdays (12). This, they state, is especially needed due to the demagoguing of international fans as less 'authentic' as home fans, due to their lack of proximity to clubs leading many to see them as akin to tourists. Here too - football becomes the vehicle in which to renegotiate power, social dynamics and senses of community, although we have had productive discussions on where this balance of power and responsibility for community cohesion should lie. In thinking of how football frames identity, we would be amiss to not include the words of Bill Shankly, the great manager of Liverpool, ‘football is not a matter of life and death, I assure you it is much more important than that’. Words - I confess, that decorate my favourite coffee mug.

Final Whistle on Sheffield Wednesday, Football as Precarious Cultural Heritage? 

This post has shown the deep interest paid to football history and the importance of sporting heritage as a placeholder for broader identity. We finish then with a sense of where we are in preserving such valuable heritage - policy-wise and digitally. Lisa Nandy, Minister for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is soon to launch the UK’s new independent football regulator, passed through the Football Governance Bill. In interviews with The Athletic and BBC, the Minister of Culture continued to use their club Wigan as a case for the increasing need to prioritise and preserve fan interests against financially dubious owners (13). The regulator, although designed to be an ‘over the shoulder’ body and flexible, aims to work with clubs to avoid cases of asset stripping, while ensuring sustainability across the football pyramid and halting club attempts to join break away competitions. Despite this, for clubs close to administration, the powers granted to the regulator may have come too late, Morecambe being the latest casualty (14). 

Closer to home, there is another example of this risk - Sheffield Wednesday, founded in 1867 and an inaugural Premier League team from 1992. I currently live round the back of the stadium, attend matches and have Wednesday-ite family - WAWAW (We’re All Wednesday Aren’t We). Fans would agree that if the regulator existed back in 2015, the current owner Dejphon Chansiri would have been a prime target as a rogue influence when he bought the Owls for a reported £30 million sum. Since then, he has moved around accounts enough to be issued with transfer bans, been unable to pay player wages for over three months - releasing many from their contracts as free agents, established false sponsors and let Hillsborough fall into a state of dilapidation, enough for the Sheffield City Council to take away safety certificates for the north stand. His premiership jeopardises not only league prospects and a brand, as well as an iconic stadium, but the broader heritage of one of England’s oldest clubs (15).

Even if we put Shankly’s comment aside, the need to preserve football heritage is a must. Hillsborough relies on the fortunes of Wednesday as an employer and source of collective expression, even if many of those expressions cannot be repeated here. The team is a central pillar of collective cultural life and memory, for a city embattled by 1980s deindustrialisation and the current cost of living crisis. As part of this decline, records and potential archives are also under threat, from business documents to the contents of trophy cabinets, even if they are not so recent accolades.

Perhaps Wednesday now mirrors Gambell’s (2024) case studies on the need for emergency digitisation and sustainable strategies for threatened cultural heritage, or at least the club should entertain becoming a partner of the Digital Preservation Collection and/or the University of Southampton’s Digital Preservation Service (16). The New York Times / Athletic reported that Chansiri is only contactable by staff through a favoured Thai-based messaging app, through which he micro-manages everything from transfers to purchasing training pitch equipment (17). Therefore, if Sheffield Wednesday becomes an inactive organisation and ‘dead’ archival creator, digitally preserving how the chaotic club functioned would be no simple matter. Preserving the essence of the club’s institutional communications would require a similar effort to Emory University’s archiving of Salman Rushdie’s writing materials to preserve his creative process, now accessible via the Robert W. Woodruff Library (18). Rushdie favoured using the notepad application, with his influences, thoughts and research notes all indexed on ‘notes’ (19). Perhaps the Chansiri archive, with flurries of increasingly bullish online messages, would be similarly disparate? Each message to well-meaning club employees an indication of how Wednesday was mismanaged and football heritage further threatened.

1. R. Morgan, Sky Sports, Oct. 18, 2018, ‘Special One: Remembering Jose Mourinho’s first-ever Chelsea press conference’, https://www.skysports.com/football/news/15116/11522231/special-one-remembering-jose-mourinhos-first-ever-chelsea-press-conference

2. Sky Sports Retro, ‘Football Heritage Manchester United’s Champions League’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrNFDs5tUi4, accessed July 24, 2025.

3. Img Flip, Football Heritage Meme Generator, https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/452020961/Football-Heritage, accessed July 24, 2025.

4. FutureLearn, ‘English Football: a Social History’, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/football-lcfc, accessed July 24, 2025.

5. Spotify, Tifo Football Podcast, https://open.spotify.com/show/06QIGhqK31Qw1UvfHzRIDA

6. Tifo Football, ‘The Entire History of Football’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-30p6S6JZf8, accessed July 24, 2025; JJ Bull, https://www.youtube.com/@fitbathatba, accessed July 24, 2025.

7. EA Sports, 25 Icons, https://www.ea.com/en/games/ea-sports-fc/fc-25/features/fc-25-icons, accessed July 24, 2025.

8. J. D'Urso, More Than a Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power, London, 2025.

9. NLS, ‘National Library partners with Malik Al Naser to launch fitba research club’, June 19, 2023, https://media.nls.uk/news/test

10. RLUK, Inclusive Collections, Inclusive Libraries, ‘Fitba Research Club’, June 5, 2025, https://www.rluk.ac.uk/event/icil-fitba/

11.  Sky Sports, ‘Marcus Rashford receives ‘at least 70 racial slurs’ online’, May 27, 2021, https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11667/12317978/marcus-rashford-receives-at-least-70-racial-slurs-online-after-man-utds-europa-league-final-defeat ; A. Brotherton, BBC Sport, July 22, 2025, ‘England players and subs stand in support of Carter’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c98wxd39p02o.

12. L. Smith, Uses of Heritage, London, 2006.

13. The Athletic Football Podcast, ‘What is the independent football regulator?’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPc-sXsefsQ, last accessed July 24, 2025 ; L. McKenna, BBC Sport, July 21, 2025, ‘Historic’ football regulator bill becomes law’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c628yqmv8glo.

14. J. Freeman, BBC Sport, July 23, 2025, ‘What’s going on at crisis club Morecambe?’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cq53nvp2pqeo

15. P. Buckingham, July 2, 2025, ‘How Sheffield Wednesday descended into chaos’, https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6465422/2025/07/02/sheffield-wednesday-dejphon-chansiri-ownership/

16. S. Gambell, 2022, A sustainable approach to threatened digital cultural heritage, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, https://theses.gla.ac.uk/83273/; Digital Preservation Coalition, https://www.dpconline.org/, last accessed July 24, 2025; Digital Preservation Southampton, https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/institutes-centres/digital-preservation-southampton, last accessed July 24, 2025.

17. P. Buckingham, July 2, 2025, ‘How Sheffield Wednesday descended into chaos’, https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6465422/2025/07/02/sheffield-wednesday-dejphon-chansiri-ownership/

18. Emory University, ‘Salman Rushdie’, https://news.emory.edu/tags/topic/salman_rushdie/index.html, accessed July 24, 2024.

19. S. Goodman, 2023, ‘Archival Rushdie’, in Salman Rushdie in Context, Florian Stadtler (ed.), Cambridge, pp. 39 - 51, 10.1017/9781009082624.005