Migration in Austrian Football after 1945

The Austrian Football Federation (ÖFB) celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2004. The history of migration and football in this country - professional players, coaches or team managers who came to work in Austria as well as migrants or `second generation` youth who chose football as a leisure sport or started a career in professional or semi-professional league football - may even be longer. Strikingly, there are very few historically or contemporary oriented scholarly works on this topic. In this respect we see the need for basic work. A pilot-study for professional football will be conducted in our project. Its main goals are a first systematic historical look at foreign players and migrant participation in professional Austrian football after 1945. Football - which includes audience-based sports as well as active practice - may be understood as a historic and current field where broader issues of integration and segregation in society are symbolically negotiated. In this respect, we want to highlight football`s own role in initiating social trends that can affect other social fields. Football serves as a site where social change is not just `mirrored` or condensed but is actually performed: The importance of sport-discourse for broader political debates can be seen in those discussions over representation that were carried out from the 1990s onwards everywhere throughout European football as a result of deregulated player-markets that led to strongly increased ethnic and cultural diversity on the field. In our project, the following research questions and working-steps will be conducted: - Linking/comparing general theories and phases of migration ino Austria with the case of football - Building (and analyzing) a reliable data-basis of foreign players after 1945 - Biographic accounts of selected player`s migration- and career-paths and a survey among current professional players - Analyzing historic and current (media-)discourse on representation and identity in Austrian football, respectively the participation of foreign players

The Austrian Football Federation (ÖFB) celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2004. The history of migration and football in this country - professional players, coaches or team managers who came to work in Austria as well as migrants or `second generation` youth who chose football as a leisure sport or started a career in professional or semi-professional league football - may even be longer. Strikingly, there are very few historically or contemporary oriented scholarly works on this topic. In this respect we see the need for basic work. A pilot-study for professional football will be conducted in our project. Its main goals are a first systematic historical look at foreign players and migrant participation in professional Austrian football after 1945. Football - which includes audience-based sports as well as active practice - may be understood as a historic and current field where broader issues of integration and segregation in society are symbolically negotiated. In this respect, we want to highlight football`s own role in initiating social trends that can affect other social fields. Football serves as a site where social change is not just `mirrored` or condensed but is actually performed: The importance of sport-discourse for broader political debates can be seen in those discussions over representation that were carried out from the 1990s onwards everywhere throughout European football as a result of deregulated player-markets that led to strongly increased ethnic and cultural diversity on the field. In our project, the following research questions and working-steps will be conducted: Linking/comparing general theories and phases of migration ino Austria with the case of football Building (and analyzing) a reliable data-basis of foreign players after 1945 Biographic accounts of selected player`s migration- and career-paths and a survey among current professional players Analyzing historic and current (media-)discourse on representation and identity in Austrian football, respectively the participation of foreign players