Revolt into Style
Revolt into Style
This section contains four articles on the social history of European football. Aiming to suggest that the English way of playing football was more varied and complicated than some critics appear to think, Anthony Mason examines how and why English methods and style have changed over time. Outlining the social history of Viennese football between 1890-1930, Michael John studies the process during which this exclusively middle-class sport with Anglo-Saxon characteristics transforms into a kind of cosmopolitan urban popular culture. As a continuation of John’s work, Matthias Marschik concentrates on the period after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. He argues that football played a key-role during the Anschluss as an arena of both symbolic resistance and political manipulations. In the last article, Miklós Hadas studies the permanent tactical revolution in the Hungarian national football team’s play between 1902-1956. Exploring the issue in a relational context, he demonstrates that the success of the ‘Golden Team’ in the fifties might be interpreted as a result of a long-term historical interplay between social dispositional factors and professional skills accumulated mainly through Austrian-Hungarian derbies.