We're Not Playing for Fun! Organized Workers' Soccer, Utopia (and Sobriety) between the World Wars - and the Message for Today

Gabriel Kuhn is an Austrian writer and researcher who works for the Central Organization of Swedish Workers - and sat for an in-person interview (he has been on before when we talked about his wonderful book Soccer vs the State in 2023.) In this episode, we time travel to "red Vienna"  in the 1920s, to talk about how antifascism, organized workers' sports, the professionalization of soccer and sobriety intersected then, and what promise they can hold for the present. Our baseline is the life of Viennese Social Democratic leader Julius Deutsch, an edited collection of whose writings Gabriel has published with a comprehensive introduction by himself. 

British historian Richard Crockett recently wrote the seminal Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created The Modern World. He argues that the Vienna before everyone fled, first from the Austrian fascists and then from the Nazis, the “Red” Vienna, governed by the Social Democrats, was a kind of a laboratory for the modern world. From psychoanalysis to Reaganomics, from Hollywood Westerns to fitted kitchens - this city, Crockett says, made the modern world. That is also the time period, in which a separate workers football association and a workers football league saw the light of day in Austria, an alternative to the rapidly professionalizing other Austrian league, and Austrian football association. 

Working class organizers and politicians saw not just the recreational value of soccer, and watching soccer. They also saw its social, organizational, ethical and prophetic value. First, another football became possible - to make clear that another world was possible, too. 

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

Gabriel’s website, with more on the Julius Deutsch book and other books here

PM Press, book website for the book

 Gabriel Kuhn interview on Julius Deutsch in Jacobin Magazine

TAPoF Episode 44, on Hakoah Vienna, Austria’s first professional champion in 1925

Richard Crockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World

Matthias Marschik, “Wir Spielen nicht zum Vergnügen:” Arbeiterfussball

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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/