Politics on the Football Field: An Overview of the Relationship between Ideology and Sport in Serbia

Abstract

This paper focuses on the historical context of the interrelation of sports and ideology in Serbia. Firstly, it focuses on the period between the end of WWII and the end of the 1980s, as well as on the part that sports played in the communist and socialist ideology in Yugoslavia. Secondly, it demonstrates the ways in which football fans assumed the role of the carriers of nationalistic ideology in the political occurrences of the final decade of the twentieth century. The third segment of the paper brings into focus the activities of football fans in the new millennium when, after the wars of the 1990s, Serbia, at least nominally, became a state that internalizes “European values”, and ensured its position of an EU‐acceding country. The central argument of the paper refers to the historically conditioned positioning of football fans that, as a group, still hold the role of an important political actor. They simultaneously act as subjects of the neo-liberal politics of the European periphery and keepers of the “national spirit”, which can be let out of the bottle again, if and when needed.